Elections used to be exciting

The current election for the nation’s president has had some highs and some lows. As I write this, they are still fighting over the result in the courts, which is why many are heralding this as one of the more exciting elections.

It’s certainly not because of the candidates. For that, we can look to California’s past.

In 1934, we were in the bottom of the Great Depression. Paint everything gray. Unemployment was rampant, banks went belly up, families lost their savings. There were soup kitchens, people were hungry, and there was a general sense of hopelessness. It was a time of great social unrest with labor strife in the fields and on the waterfront, a period that gave birth to various ideas of how to cure this great national disaster.

In California, there were the followers of Francis Townsend, a retired physician who sold real estate in Long Beach. The Townsend Plan was for all old people to be paid $50 a month in scrip that had to be spent during the next 30 days. The details were a little fuzzy but included a stamp tax. Shades of the Boston Tea Party. The state also had the Allen brothers with their program of $30 every Thursday.

California had been strongly Republican since the days of Gov. Hiram Johnson, but there was a division between the so-called progressive branch -- followers of Teddy Roosevelt -- and the conservative branch -- followers of William McKinley and William Howard Taft. The progressives outnumbered the conservatives and elected San Francisco Mayor “Sunny Jim” Rolph as governor. As a sop to the conservatives, they chose the drab, colorless but staunchly conservative Frank Merriam as lieutenant governor.

To the dismay of the progressives, Gov. Rolph died in office, and Merriam completed the term. When it was up, the conservatives nominated him to run for the next term. The progressives couldn’t stomach more of Merriam, so they nominated a young Los Angeles lawyer, Raymond Haight, but both candidates were basically mainstream.

Not so with the Democrats. Their candidate reflected much more of the turmoil of the time. To the horror of conservative Democrats, Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination in the primaries. A registered socialist, he was the author of books revealing the sordid underbelly of the capitalistic system.

He ran on a ticket he called End Poverty in California, or EPIC, which combined several rather startling concepts aimed at quick and ready answers to society’s ills, most notably “technocracy,” which was socialism with a quirk. The quirk was that this socialistic society was to be run by engineers. Why not? Engineers could build dams and bridges. Why not let them build a better world? The logic was inescapable.

Sinclair also espoused the utopian society, which combined pure socialism with some rather quirky mystic rites, somewhat comparable to those of the Ku Klux Klan.

It was a vicious election. Poor Sinclair had his ardent supporters, but his somewhat goofy ideas scared the hell out of a lot people. The press, with a leg up from the movie studios, did a number on him, but it was still going to be close. No one, pundit or non-pundit, tried to outguess the result until the last vote was counted.

When it was, Gov. Merriam won with more than 1 million votes, but Sinclair was right behind him with more than 900,000. Raymond Haight trailed with 300,000.

It didn’t end up in the courts, but it was an exciting election.

* ROBERT GARDNER was a Corona del Mar resident and a former judge. This column originally ran in December 2000.

20051106h9rclnkf(LA)