The Campaign of the Century

An Earlier Crucial Race, Starring Upton Sinclair, Where Claims of a 'Horde of Invading Migrants' Played Key Role

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books including “The Tunnels” and “The Campaign of the Century” and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up” and “Memorial Day Massacre” (up for an Emmy). You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.

As some of you know—since I’ve mentioned this before here—famous muckraking author and socialist Upton Sinclair nearly was elected governor of California in 1934 as a Democrat, leading the grassroots End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement. My Emmy-nominated PBS film about it, “The First Attack Ads: Hollywood vs. Upton Sinclair,” shown around the USA two years ago, gets a re-airing on Election Eve via the major Los Angeles public TV station KCET/SoCal at 7 p.m. It was online at PBS for a year but that has elapsed, but here, below, are a few links where you can view most of the story. or catch up with it.

It’s particularly relevant now since a (perhaps the) key reason Sinclair lost was because the rival candidate, the press, and the newsreels (produced by MGM’s Irving Thalberg) destroyed him on the phony issue of millions of poor and dangerous migrants flocking to California. You may have seen this as a sub-plot in the recent David Fincher movie, Mank.

My book, The Campaign of the Century, won the Goldsmith Book Prize and was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of the five greatest books ever about an election.

Here’s the link to my appearance on a C-SPAN program with plenty of excerpts from the newsreels.

See my NY Times piece on what Mank gets right, and wrong, about the Sinclair campaign and Hollywood.

At the Daily Beast—who was this guy Sinclair anyway and why was he so important?

And a more detailed account of the radical “EPIC” campaign at my blog. Bill Nye as Sinclair below, in the Fincher flick:

And now a few hot cartoons as Campaign 2024 reaches its peak, with bonus hits on Jeff Bezos and Washington Post.

Barry Blitt:

And this ever more apt classic from awhile back…