The Great Depression; Interview with Morton Newman. Part 2

INTERVIEWER:

OK, I want you to tell me again about being in a meeting, and the whole concept that it was part of a movement as much as a part of an election.

MORTON NEWMAN:

In a public EPIC meeting, there was a great deal of excitement, because they would have brief speeches reporting from various parts of Los Angeles County, for example, what was happening in the various clubs, and of course, there was sort of a competition among clubs to do more than anybody else, so they would vie with each other on the number of new members, on the number of literature, on the number, and pieces of literature very often meant sales of literature, because the EPIC Campaign was based on the idea that it would be self-sufficient and not end with a heavy indebtedness or anything of that kind. And further, the feeling that you paid a penny, three cents, ten cents for a piece of campaign material, you valued it more than if it were simply handed to you and in some cases immediately thrown away.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, let's just get back to that for a second, was that unusual, to have to pay for literature?

MORTON NEWMAN:

Oh, it was not only unusual, it had never been heard of before, as far as I know, and of course there was, not been heard of in California, it was very unusual, 'cause usually there'd be more money behind a candidate. Even good candidates would raise funds to provide some sort of printed material, but in this case, printed material, it came at a, at the cost that the printer had been paid.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, let me just ask you another question on this, did people feel because they were also paying for it, in this way, that, they, you know, that Upton Sinclair wasn't beholden to any special interests?

MORTON NEWMAN:

That's part of it. In other words, it was financed by the people who were interested in the campaign, and it wasn't depending upon Wall Street money, it wasn't depending on San Francisco money, it was depending upon the nickels, dimes, and pennies of large numbers of people in California.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, great. OK, so tell me, let's get back into the meeting. OK.

MORTON NEWMAN:

Yes. So you would have exciting reports, you would have some bit of news, that some organization had just endorsed the campaign, or that some particular public figure had come out in support of it, and then of course there'd be certain derisive things. When the Los Angeles Times would mention, the auditorium would fill with boos and hisses and that sort of thing, so it was a very exciting situation, and everyone involved in it seemed to view that it was something important that was going on.

INTERVIEWER:

So, you had told me before that one of things that was interesting about the campaign was that there were also identifiable villains and heroes, and so was that like something, when the audience, when you were saying they booed, would people, when you were there, you hear the expressions of emotion on one side or the other?

MORTON NEWMAN:

Oh, that's very true. That, for example, if you mentioned Wall Street, if you mentioned Rockefeller, if you mentioned even Henry Ford, these were viewed as part of the establishment that was responsible for unemployment and responsible for the misery, so that people were very free with venting their feelings, and you could get an immediate response from the audience simply by a catalogue of names. They were really divided into black and white, good and bad, and there was almost nothing in between.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, great. Just another thing I'm curious about on meetings, you say that there would be a lot of people, thousands of people inside and thousands of people outside, did Sinclair just have so much support that you couldn't fit, that you couldn't find auditoriums big enough, or what was [unintelligible]?

MORTON NEWMAN:

Well that was, that was part of it, that, and of course this doesn't take into consideration the meetings that were held in the basement of churches, in trade union halls. There were a lot of community cooperatives at that time that, in some cases, had places where they could meet, storefronts, and that sort of thing. These would be meetings of twenty-five to a hundred-and-fifty people, but the really big meetings in Los Angeles were at the Shrine, and that was the largest auditorium available. It could be filled, and people who were in favor were excited by the fact that it could be filled, and the people who were opposed were frightened by the fact that it could be filled, because it was common knowledge that the opposition would have great difficulty in matching it. In fact, they never tried to match it, in terms of popular meetings.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, and did people also pay to get into the meetings?

MORTON NEWMAN:

I don't remember. I don't, probably, but I don't remember.

INTERVIEWER:

OK. Tell me a little bit about, you told me a story about bumper stickers, and how bumper stickers were used in campaigns-

MORTON NEWMAN:

Oh, in the EPIC Campaign, and in most campaigns in California, I think that we were using windshield stickers rather than bumper stickers, and-

INTERVIEWER:

OK, I want you to start again and not tell me, just say 'we were using windshield stickers'.

MORTON NEWMAN:

All right. Well, in the EPIC Campaign, windshield stickers were the favored way of letting an automobile get involved in the political campaign.

INTERVIEWER:

All right, stop, OK, could you just start that again?

MORTON NEWMAN:

The—

INTERVIEWER:

Could you just tell me why, instead of describing that one, could you just tell me why bumper, how bumper stickers were used? How the window stickers, the window—

MORTON NEWMAN:

Well, window stickers were used to indicate support for any given candidate, and the EPIC Campaign provided a share of stickers for the windshields of automobiles. This was before automobile windshields were declared not suitable for stickers. Actually, the opposition, the Merriam people and the campaign, they had their stickers for windshields, and people would count, in a parking lot, \"I saw twenty-five Sinclair stickers,\" \"I saw fifteen Merriam stickers,\" or whatever the ratio would be. On the Methodist Church parking lot where my family attended, the cars were segregated by the drivers into the part of the parking lot where the Sinclair cars went, and the part of the parking lot where the Merriam cars went. There was quite a, quite, quite obvious what, where people stood, and I think there was a higher percentage of cars that carried such stickers than you find in campaigns now. There was a tremendous popular upswelling of participation.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, you were telling me-

INTERVIEWER:

OK.

MORTON NEWMAN:

In the excitement of the campaign, people were displaying on their automobile windshields the candidate of their choice. In this print shop where I worked part-time, and on a very iffy sort of basis, the delivery truck for the print shop had a 'Merriam for Governor' sticker on the windshield. And when I had to make deliveries in that vehicle, I would cover the Merriam sticker with a Sinclair sticker, and I would rationalize this as doing a favor to the company, because I knew that in some of the working-class areas where I had to make deliveries, feelings ran very high, and that sometimes strange things would happen to windshields that had Merriam stickers. They might even have a rock thrown through them, and this would be a very strong expression of political disapproval. Not wanting to have my company car spoiled in this way, I felt that I was doing them a favor by putting a Sinclair sticker, which I would always retrieve before parking the car. That was what was going on in those days.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, can you tell me some examples of, you know, there's a big campaign against Sinclair. How did it manifest, how did you experience it?

MORTON NEWMAN:

The main campaign against Sinclair in the Los Angeles area, seemed to be carried on in two ways: one, the Los Angeles Times had a daily box or a daily anti-Sinclair story, beginning on the front page, and at the same time, when you'd go to a motion-picture theater, the newsreel you would see would very often have, somewhere, in that newsreel, an anti-Sinclair segment, which we later found out, and you've probably talked to some of the people who knew what was going on, but these newsreels were simply manufactured out of whole cloth, and people who were portrayed as 'bums', they called them, hobos-

INTERVIEWER:

I'm going to ask you again about the L.A. Times and the newsreels, but let's go to the L.A. Times first. Tell me about seeing these boxes in the L.A. Times and how you reacted to it, whether you paid any attention to it or not, or did it make you angry, what...?

MORTON NEWMAN:

The L.A. Times could be depended upon, at that period, to have a daily anti-Sinclair story, usually a box on the front page. Very often it took the form of a quote from some book that Upton Sinclair might have written twenty years previously, a quotation that was completely out of context, but nevertheless might be viewed as a damaging quotation. The Los Angeles Times was known as the anti-union, really anti-labor paper of Los Angeles, but it was, at the same time, had a certain credibility and a certain respectability. One of my grandparents took the L.A. Times, another of my grandparents wouldn't have the L.A. Times in their front door, so there was always a mixed feeling. First of all, many cases I could immediately detect the error in the story or immediately see how it was taken out of context; in some cases it was something so obscure that you would wonder just exactly what it was all about.

INTERVIEWER:

Tell me, tell me now again, when you read it, did you feel upset, did you dismiss, did you-?

MORTON NEWMAN:

No, no, you couldn't dismiss it, because the L.A. Times was sort of the paper of record of Los Angeles and had sizeable circulation, it was read by professional people and all. It couldn't be ignored, in fact, and it made us very angry, but we always read them, or as often as we could, because we wanted to be prepared to, you know, to show how untrue they were or how far from the mark they were.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, I'm going to ask you actually to say-

MORTON NEWMAN:

Picking up the L.A. Times, looking for the anti-Sinclair story was always an easy thing to do, because the story was always prominently displayed on the front page. The reaction on my part was fury at it, and annoyance, and, you know, the usual feeling that the press was misusing its influence. And at the same time, sometime, sort of amusement by it, because if anyone really read the book that was cited or the excerpt that it was taken from, they would know in many cases that Sinclair was, the character in the Sinclair novel might actually be talking against that very point of view. In other words, it didn't represent Sinclair's point of view, it represented a character in a novel that he may have written ten or fifteen years before. But the fact that it was paraded before the people in a way to try to discredit him was very annoying, and made us furious. And we would trade invectives against the L.A. Times any time that we got together with another supporter of Sinclair and say, did you see the _Times_ today, can you imagine how they dredged up that story, or what did they think they were doing, because it was so outrageous. But nevertheless, the _Times_ spun them out, and there they were, day after day.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, now, when you, you read them, and then you would be able to, when you would talk to people on the street trying to tell them about EPIC, you'd have to explain to them...?

MORTON NEWMAN:

Very often you would, and of course, in some cases, you would use it as a vehicle for-

INTERVIEWER:

OK, tell me what you're, tell me what you're talking about.

MORTON NEWMAN:

Well, I

, and sometimes, you'd actually take the story, have it with you, and use it as an example of how you couldn't depend upon the L.A. Times, you couldn't depend upon the press generally, because they were filled with misrepresentation and lies and so forth. So that it had a useful sort of character to it, but at the same time, by and large, we were disgusted and very angry about it.

MORTON NEWMAN:

The showing of Upton Sinclair in the primary

of the election campaign

was so magnificent and so far exceeded even our wildest expectations

, because there had been a very strong campaign against Upton Sinclair within the Democratic Party, and

there was the feeling that some of the Democrats who were running against him would come through with a higher vote than they did. So that when it turns out that Sinclair had an amazingly high voter response in the primaries,

it suddenly became apparent to us that this was for real, that here was a chance to elect Sinclair.

All of us became political experts at that point, who'd been active in the primaries, because from our original estimate that it would be a very good educational campaign, suddenly we could see victory in the offing, and felt that by putting the right combination together that we were unstoppable, that Sinclair could be elected, that the EPIC Campaign would succeed.

INTERVIEWER:

So, was the Democratic Party a little bit nervous and did Sinclair feel like he had to go meet with Roosevelt directly?

MORTON NEWMAN:

Well, first of all, Sinclair was much too sophisticated to, he had had a great deal of experience in the political world, and he knew that he was not an acceptable candidate, certainly to the people who had the money to sponsor campaigns or to the traditional Democratic figures. On the other hand, he had, by this time, a sense of mission himself beyond what he had had in the early stages, and

I think that he felt, and we felt, that if he had a chance to talk to FDR in person, that there could be an endorsement from the White House, which would be a tremendously important factor in the finals.

It was for that reason that rather than depending upon, you know, emissaries, Sinclair, in October, himself went to Washington and there was a whole story in itself.

INTERVIEWER:

I want you to start, just at the end, start again, because he actually went in September.

MORTON NEWMAN:

Oh!

INTERVIEWER:

Yeah, it's OK, just tell me-

INTERVIEWER:

-so tell me that he, you know, that he went to see—you don't have to say what date—he went to see Roosevelt, and were you, and what was the result of the meeting?

MORTON NEWMAN:

Well we, the young people that I was associated with in the campaign, we were very optimistic, very naive, and we thought that with his strong arguments and with the fine showing that he had made in the primary-

INTERVIEWER:

I'm going to ask you to start one more time, and instead of saying \"he\", tell me who you're talking about.

MORTON NEWMAN:

We felt that Sinclair, because of his ability to express his ideas, and that Sinclair, because of the splendid showing that he'd made in the primaries, would be able to obtain an endorsement from FDR. We were very excited that he was going to Washington, and we expected momentarily that through the radio or through the newspapers, we would hear that the red carpet had been rolled out for him, and he had the blessings of Roosevelt and of the national Democratic figures. As the days went by, this feeling began to diminish, and we began, because of course because we're being fed stories by the press and through the radio, of the fact that he wasn't having an opportunity to, Sinclair was not having an opportunity to present his case firsthand to the President. Of course, there were rumors floating around that he was completely rebuffed, there were rumors floating around that he was getting a formally correct treatment but that it wasn't going to mean anything. But always there was this great expectation, that at the very last minute, there would be some message that indicated that Roosevelt was supporting Sinclair. We were, of course, waiting for that moment, and we were told before certain speeches from the White House that this would be the speech where there would be some sort of favorable comment-

INTERVIEWER:

Actually, what I'm going to do is take you back to that, to that moment. Sinclair announced that one of his, one of Roosevelt's fireside chats, that that night he would announce, he would give some kind of endorsement to the idea of production for use. So tell me about, you probably knew at that point that, you know, that there was that fireside chat, and people were waiting to hear whether Roosevelt would say something.

MORTON NEWMAN:

First—the fireside chat—