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.