made pictures of Tehuana maidens with great starched ruffles over their
heads, and bare feet that gripped the rough hillsides like hands, and
baskets made of gourds painted with roses. He went to Oaxaca and made
pictures of masonry tumbling into ruins during an earthquake. He went to
Chichén Itzá and made pictures of Mayan temples with plumed serpents and
stone-faced men and their living descendants, unchanged in three
thousand years. He climbed Popocatepetl and made pictures of Indian
villages lost in forgotten valleys. Miles and miles of film were
exposed, and packing cases full of negatives in tin cans came back to
Hollywood.
Meanwhile, my wife and I found ourselves turned into company promoters,
addressing persuasive letters, many pages long, to friends of Soviet
Russia, devotees of Mexican art, and playboys of the film colony--anyone
who might be tempted by a masterpiece of camerawork and montage. We
interviewed lawyers and bankers, and signed trust agreements and
certificates of participating interest. We visited Mexican consuls and
United States customs inspectors, and arranged for censorship
exhibitions. We mailed bank drafts, took out insurance policies,
telephoned brokers, and performed a host of other duties far out of our
line.
And Eisenstein went to the Hacienda Tetlapayac and made endless miles of
film of a maguey plantation, with peons wearing gorgeous striped
serapes, singing work hymns at dawn by old monastery walls, driven to
revolt by cruel taskmasters, and hunted to their death by wild-riding
vaqueros. He went to Mérida and “shot” señoritas with high-piled
headdresses and embroidered mantillas. He made the life story of a
bullfighter--his training and technique, his footwork and capework, his
intrigue with ladies of fashion, and his escape from vengeful husbands,
fiercer than any bull from Piedras Negras. The most marvelous material:
pictures of golden sunlight and black shadows; dream scenes of primitive
splendor; gorgeous pageants, like old tapestries come to life;
compositions in which the very clouds in the sky were trained to
perform.
But, oh, the tens of miles of film and the tens of thousands of dollars!
The months and months--until at last Craig began to cry out in protest
and to demand an end. Mexico is a land of difficulties and dangers, and
Hunter Kimbrough was managing the expedition; her affection for him
multiplied the troubles in her mind. “Bring them home!” became her cry,
day and night.
And, meanwhile, Eisenstein was in Chapala, shooting white pelicans, gray
pumas, and Nayaritan damsels paddling dugouts in mangrove swamps. He was
in Cholula, shooting Catholic churches with carven skulls, and images
of Jesus with real hair and teeth. He was in Guadalupe, photographing
miraculous healings, and penitents carrying crosses made of spiny
cactus, crawling by hundreds up rocky hillsides on bare knees.
“Bring them home!” demanded Craig; and she and her husband came to a
deadlock over the issue. The husband was infatuated, she declared; he
was as complete a madman as a Soviet director. They argued for days and
nights; meanwhile, Eisenstein tore off the roof of a Tehuantepec mansion
to photograph a dance inside, gave a bullfight to keep an actor from
going to Spain, and made arrangements to hire the whole Mexican Army.
Again Craig clamored, “Bring them home!” And again husband and wife took
up the issue; this time the husband was seized by a deadly chill and had
to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and he lay on his back for
two weeks.
The raising of money went on, and freight trains groaned under the loads
of raw film going into Mexico, and exposed film coming out. Eisenstein
shot the standing mummies of Michoacàn, the flower festivals of
Xochimilco, and the “dead peoples’ day” celebrations of Amecameca, and
ordered the Mexican Army to march out into the desert to fight a battle
with a background of organ cactuses thirty feet high. It was the
beginning of the fifteenth month of this Sisyphean labor when Craig
assembled the cohorts of her relatives and lawyers, and closed in for
the final grapple with her infatuated spouse. “Bring them home!” she
commanded; and for eight days and nights the debate continued. To avoid
going to the hospital, the husband went to the beach for three days;
then he came back, and there were more days and nights of conferences
with the assembled cohorts. At times such as this, husbands and wives
discover whether they really love each other!
Craig was with me in the dream of a picture--until she decided that
Eisenstein meant to grind her husband up in a pulp machine and spin him
out into celluloid film. She thought that thirty-five miles of film was
enough for any picture. And then she stood and looked at her husband,
and her hands trembled and her lips quivered; she had licked him in that
last desperate duel, and she wondered if in his heart he could ever
forgive her. He did.
V
The real reason for Eisenstein’s delaying tactics was that he did not
want to go back to his beloved Soviet Union. He had been trying to get a
contract to make a picture in India, one in Japan, one in the Argentine.
His relations with Craig’s brother had reached a point where he cursed
Hunter; and Hunter, a Mississippian, got a gun and told him the next
time he cursed he would be shot. So, I sent a cablegram to Stalin,
asking him to order Eisenstein to return home; in reply I received a
cablegram signed by Stalin informing me that they no longer had any use
for Eisenstein and considered him a renegade.
The history of that cablegram is amusing. Craig regarded it as she would
a rattlesnake in her home. Anyone who saw it, including the F.B.I.,
would assume that I was a cryptocommunist. The evil document must be
locked up in a secret treasure box that contained such things as the
letters from Jefferson Davis and his daughter, Winnie. I was not even
allowed to know where that box was hidden.
But I had told one or two friends about the cablegram. Way back in the
early Greenwich Village days I had known Robert Minor, art editor of
_The Masses_. I had played tennis with him at Croton; and much later, in
the days when I was writing the Lanny Budd books, he provided me with a
story of what it was like to be arrested by the French police--a story
that makes a delightful ending for the first Lanny Budd book, _World’s
End_. Now, a friend in New York mentioned the cablegram to Bob, and
reported Bob’s comment, “Tell Upton if he has a cablegram from Stalin he
is the only man in America who can say it.”
In the end, we made a contract with Amtorg, the Russian trade agency in
New York, which handled the whole Eisenstein matter. We agreed to ship
the film to them with precise specifications that the boxes should not
be opened in New York but should be forwarded immediately to Moscow
where Eisenstein would cut the film, and the cut film would be shipped
to us. So Eisenstein received orders that he could not fail to obey, and
Hunter did not have to shoot him.
The director and his two associates left Mexico City in our Buick car
and drove to New York; but instead of going at once to Moscow, as the
agreement specified, Eisenstein stayed in New York, and about a week
later we received letters from persons in New York to whom he had been
showing the film.
That settled the matter for us. We put it into the hands of our lawyer,
with instructions to repossess the film, repack it, and ship it to
Hollywood--which was done. We made an agreement with Sol Lesser to cut
it, and that was done. And in the spring of 1934 _Thunder Over Mexico_
was scheduled to open at the Rialto Theater in New York.
In the eyes of the communists, of course, we had committed a major
crime. We had deprived the great Russian master of his greatest art
work, and we had done it out of blind greed. All over the world the
communist propagandists took up that theme, and we could not answer
without damaging the property of our investors.
The situation was still more odd because my friends, the socialists,
were also involved. I was just on the point of announcing my EPIC
campaign for the governorship of California. I had sent a copy of my
program to Norman Thomas, and he lit into it in the New York _Call_,
denouncing EPIC as a “tin-can economy,” and me as “a renegade to the
socialist movement.” The Socialist Party, which had placed a large order
for seats for the opening night of Eisenstein’s film, canceled the
order. So, we were getting it from all sides. On opening night there was
a minor riot; communists yelled protests, and some of them shook their
fists in my face in the lobby of the theater.
I had one comfort, however. Among the investors in the picture was Otto
H. Kahn, New York banker and art patron; he had put in ten thousand
dollars at my request, without ever having met me. I invited him to
dinner with my wife and me at the Algonquin Hotel on the evening of the
opening. He came up to me in the lobby and took both my hands in his and
said, “I am telling all my friends that if they want to invest money and
want to be sure of having it carefully handled and promptly accounted
for, they should entrust it to the socialist, Mr. Upton Sinclair.”
Of course, _Thunder Over Mexico_ wasn’t a very good picture. It couldn’t
be because it was only a travelogue and had no form. Sol Lesser, an
experienced producer, did his best and dealt with us fairly. The
investors got about half their money back, and Sol’s friendship was the
best thing that we got out of the whole experience.
When the film had run its course, we turned it over to the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, and occasionally I see mention of its being
shown here and there. As for Eisenstein, he went back to Russia; I have
no report on his meeting with Stalin. But all the world knows that for
many years he was put to teaching his art instead of practicing it, and
that when he made another picture it was a glorification of the most
cruel of all the tsars.
_14_
_EPIC_
I
I come now to one of the great adventures of my life: the EPIC campaign.
There had come one of those periods in American history known as a
“slump,” or, more elegantly, a “depression.” The cause of this calamity
is obvious--the mass of the people do not get sufficient money to
purchase what modern machinery is able to produce. You cannot find this
statement in any capitalist newspaper, but it is plain to the mind of
any wide-awake child. The warehouses are packed with goods, and nobody
is buying them; this goes on until those who still have money have
bought and used up the goods; so then we have another boom and then
another bust. This has gone on all through our history and will go on as
long as the necessities of our lives are produced on speculation and
held for private profit.
Now we had a bad slump, and Franklin Roosevelt was casting about for
ways to end it. In the state of California, which had a population of
seven million at the time, there were a million out of work,
public-relief funds were exhausted, and people were starving. The
proprietor of a small hotel down at the beach asked me to come and meet
some of his friends, and I went. His proposal was that I should resign
from the Socialist Party and join the Democratic Party, and let them put
me up as a candidate for governor at the coming November election. They
had no doubt that if I would offer a practical program I would capture
the Democratic nomination at the primaries, which came in the spring. I
told them that I had retired from politics and promised my wife to be a
writer. But they argued and pleaded, pointing out the terrible
conditions all around them; I promised to think it over and at least
suggest a program for them.
To me the remedy was obvious. The factories were idle, and the workers
had no money. Let them be put to work on the state’s credit and produce
goods for their own use, and set up a system of exchange by which the
goods could be distributed. “Production for Use” was the slogan, and I
told my new friends about it. They agreed to every one of my suggestions
but one--that they should get somebody else to put forward the program
and run for governor.
I talked it over with my dear wife, who as usual was horrified; but the
more I thought about it, the more interested I became, and finally I
thought that at least I could change my registration and become a
Democrat--quietly. It was a foolish idea, but I went ahead; and, of
course, some reporter spotted my name and published the news. Then, of
course, Craig found out and I got a mighty dressing down.
A great many people got after me, and the result was I agreed to run for
the nomination at the primaries. I didn’t think I could possibly win,
and I was astonished by the tidal wave that came roaring in and gathered
me up. I had no peace from then on; I carried the Democratic primary
with 436,000 votes, a majority over the total cast for the half dozen
other candidates.
So I had to go through with it, and Craig, according to her nature, had
to back me. She would hate it for every minute of the whole campaign and
afterward; but once I had committed myself, I was honor-bound, and
quitting would be cowardice. There are no cowards in Mississippi.
II
Some months earlier I had made the acquaintance of a young man of some
wealth who had established a Bellamy Society and had printed an edition
of Bellamy’s charming _Parable of the Water Tank_. Now I went to him and
served notice that he had to be my campaign manager. I don’t know what
_his_ wife thought of that, but I know that he dropped everything and
gave his heart, his mind, and a lot of his money to that tremendous
political fight. Richard S. Otto was his name, and the name of the
movement was EPIC--End Poverty in California. It was a wonderful title,
and went all over the world.
We had moved from our Long Beach cottage back to Pasadena, and now we
had to move from Pasadena because so many people had got our address and
gave us no peace. We bought on mortgage a home in Beverly Hills, where
we fondly thought we could hide. I had an elderly woman secretary, and
was using her little front room as an office. Now Dick Otto moved the
EPIC movement into that little front room, and presently the elderly
secretary had to find a new home and leave the whole cottage to EPIC.
It wasn’t long before Dick had to hunt up a bigger place; he moved three
or four times and at the end leased a whole office building. People came
from all over the state, and brought funds when they had any; if they
had none, they offered their time, often when they had nothing to eat.
The movement spread like wildfire--quite literally that. The old-men
politicians were astonished, and the newspapers, which had kept silent
as long as they dared, had to come out and fight it in the open.
* * * * *
As for me, it meant dropping everything else, and turning myself into a
phonograph to be set up on a platform to repeat the same speech in every
city and town of California. At first I traveled by myself and had many
adventures, some of them amusing, others less so. I had an old car,
which had a habit of breaking down, and I would telephone to the speech
place to come and get me. Once I was late and was driving fast, and I
heard a siren behind me; of course, I stopped and told my troubles to
the police officer. He looked at my driver’s license before he said
anything; then, “Okay, Governor, I’ll take you.” So I rode with a police
escort blazing a mighty blast and clearing traffic off one of the main
highways of central California. The phonograph arrived, and the speech
was made!
I am joking about its being the same speech, because as a matter of fact
something kept turning up and had to be dealt with. Our enemies
continually thought up new charges, and I had to answer them. I would
try to get them to come and debate with me, but I cannot recall one that
ever accepted. That doesn’t mean that I was a great orator, it simply
means that I had the facts on my side, and the facts kept on growing
more and more terrifying. The Republican opposition had no program--it
never does, because there is no way to defend idle factories and workers
locked out to starve. We have the same situation now, as I write, in
1962; but we don’t quite let them starve, we give them a stingy
“relief”--and they can thank EPIC for that, though they do not know it.
III
Self-help co-operatives had sprung up all over the state, and of course
that was “production for use,” and those people automatically became
EPIC’S.
Our opponents would not debate; however, there were challenges from the
audience, and now and then I would invite the man up to the platform and
let him ask his question and present his case. That was fair play, and
pleased the audience. There were always communists, and several times
they showered down leaflets from the gallery. They called EPIC “one more
rotten egg from the blue buzzard’s nest.” (The “blue buzzard” was the
communists’ name for the New Deal’s “blue eagle.”) When the shower fell,
I would ask someone in the audience to bring me a leaflet, and I would
read the text and give my answer. It was a simple one: We wanted to
achieve our purpose by the American method of majority consent. We might
not win, but if we cast a big vote we would force the Roosevelt
administration to take relief measures, and we would have made all
America familiar with the idea of production for use; both these things
we most certainly did.
That campaign went on from May to November, and the news of it went all
over the United States and even further. We had troubles, of
course--arguments and almost rows at headquarters. I would be called in
to settle them, but all I told anybody was to do what Dick Otto said.
That brave fellow stood everything that came, including threats to kill
him. There was only one thing he needed, he said, and that was my
support. More important yet, he had Craig’s. She never went near the
headquarters, but when I was on the road, she spoke for me--over the
telephone.
Sometimes she went to meetings that were not too far away. She always
sat back toward the rear and was seldom recognized. At the outset of the
campaign, at a meeting in a church, she observed that everybody sat
still, and it occurred to her to applaud something I had said; instantly
the audience woke up, and the applause became continuous. That was a
trick she did not forget.
We had an eight-page weekly paper called the _EPIC News_, and I had to
write an editorial for it every week, and answer our enemies and keep
our organizers and workers all over the state alive to the situation.
Sometimes Craig wrote for that.
A big advertising concern had been hired to defeat EPIC. They made a
careful study of everything I had written, and they took passages out of
context and even cut sentences off in the middle to make them mean the
opposite of what I had written. They had had an especially happy time
with _The Profits of Religion_. I received many letters from agitated
old ladies and gentlemen on the subject of my blasphemy. “Do you believe
in God?” asked one; and then the next question, “Define God.” I have
always answered my letters, and the answer to question one was “Yes,”
and the answer to question two was “The Infinite cannot be defined.”
There wasn’t the least trouble in finding quotations from both the Old
and New Testaments that sounded like EPIC, and it wasn’t necessary to
garble them.
IV
When we carried the primaries, we were the Democratic Party of
California, and under the law we had a convention in Sacramento--the
state capital. I remember that Mrs. Gartz came with us to that
convention. Craig had been too busy to manage her now, and another lady
as large and stout as Mrs. Gartz had gotten hold of her. This lady had
herself nominated as EPIC candidate from her assembly district; also she
had a son and was frantically beseeching me to make him state
commissioner of education. She owned a half-dozen houses in California
and rented them, and had the wonderful idea that all homes should be
exempt from taxation. Poor Mrs. Gartz never knew what was being done to
her, and at the convention I had to tell those two large ladies to go
back to their seats and let me alone. The upshot was that Mrs. Gartz’s
daughter took her for a trip around the world until the EPIC nightmare
was over.
Halfway through the campaign I wrote a little dramatic skit called
_Depression Island_. I imagined three men cast away on a small island,
with nothing to eat but coconuts. One was a businessman, and in the
process of trading he got all the coconuts and trees into his
possession. Then he became the capitalist and compelled the other two to
work for him on a scanty diet of coconuts. When the capitalist had
accumulated enough coconuts for all his possible needs, he told the
other two that there were “hard times.” He was sorry about it, but there
was nothing he could do; coconuts were overproduced, and the other two
fellows were out of jobs.
But the other two didn’t starve gracefully. They organized themselves
into a union and also a government, and passed laws providing for public
ownership of the coconut trees. The little drama carefully covered every
point in the national situation, and nobody in that EPIC audience could
fail to get the idea.
A group of our EPIC supporters in Hollywood undertook to put on the show
in the largest auditorium available. I went to see Charlie Chaplin, who
said he would come and speak at the affair--something he had never been
known to do previously. I remember trying to persuade several rich
people to put up rent for the auditorium. I forget who did, but there
was a huge crowd, and nobody failed to learn the geography
lesson--location of Depression Island on the map.
V
In the month of October, not long before election day, I made a trip to
New York and Washington. I stopped off at Detroit and visited Father
Coughlin, a political priest who had tremendous influence at that time.
I told him our program, and he said he endorsed every bit of it. I asked
him to say so publicly, and he said he would; but he didn’t. He publicly
condemned some of the very things he had approved, and he denied that
he had given his approval.
In New York, of course, there were swarms of reporters. EPIC had gone
all over the country by that time. I had an appointment with President
Roosevelt at Hyde Park. It was five o’clock one afternoon, and some
friends drove me up there. The two hours I spent in the big study of
that home were among the great moments of my life. That wonderfully keen
man sat and listened while I set forth every step of the program, and he
checked them off one after the other and called them right. Then he gave
me the pleasure of hearing his opinion of some of his enemies. At the
end he told me that he was coming out in favor of production for use. I
said, “If you do, Mr. President, it will elect me.”
“Well,” he said, “I am going to do it”; and that was that. But he did
not do it.
I went to Washington to interview some of Roosevelt’s cabinet members
and get their support if I could. Harry Hopkins promised us everything
in his power if we got elected. Harold Ickes did the same--the whole
United States Treasury, no less. Also, I spent an evening with Justice
Louis Brandeis--but he couldn’t promise me the whole Supreme Court.
I addressed a luncheon of the National Press Club, and that was an
interesting adventure. There were, I should guess, a couple hundred
correspondents of newspapers all over the country, and indeed all over
the world. I talked to them for half an hour or so, and then they plied
me with questions for an hour or two more. I was told afterwards that
they were astonished by my mastery of the subject and my readiness in
facing every problem. They failed to realize the half year of training I
had received in California. I can say there wasn’t a single question
they asked me that I hadn’t answered a score of times at home. I not
only knew the answers, but I knew what the audience response would be.
I had all the facts on my side--and, likewise, all the fun. I can say
that EPIC changed the political color of California; it scared the
reactionaries out of their wits, and never in twenty-eight years have
they dared go back to their old practices. The same thing can also be
said of civil liberties; they have never dared to break a strike as
they did at San Pedro Harbor before our civil-liberties campaign in the
early twenties.
Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labor and the pains are vain!