End Poverty in California

End Poverty in California (EPIC) was a political campaign started in 1934 by socialist writer Upton Sinclair (best known as author of The Jungle).

[1] Specifically, the plan called for state seizure of idle factories and farm land where the owner had failed to pay property taxes.

A weekly newspaper, the EPIC News, appeared in support of the plan, and reached a circulation of nearly a million by the time of the gubernatorial primary election in August 1934.

The studio heads reacted by threatening to move film operations to Florida and deducting money from employee paychecks to finance the campaign of Sinclair's Republican opponent for governor, Frank Merriam.

Two of California's most influential figures in print media, William Randolph Hearst and Harry Chandler, also used their papers to support Merriam's campaign and attack Sinclair.

In addition, two dozen candidates running on the EPIC platform were elected to the state legislature, including Culbert Olson, who became governor four years later.

It "recalled a mayor, kicked out a district attorney, replaced the governor with one of our choice" between 1934 and 1938, according to Robert A. Heinlein, who by then was deputy publisher of the EPIC News.

[2] In late 1934, Harry Hopkins, a senior adviser to Roosevelt who went on to oversee many New Deal programs, proposed an "End Poverty in America" campaign that The New York Times wrote “differs from Sinclair's plan in detail, but not in principle.”[4] In 2022, universal basic income advocate and former Mayor of Stockton Michael Tubbs created "End Poverty in California" (EPIC), a nonprofit antipoverty organization with the same name and acronym that was inspired by Sinclair's campaign.