Upton Sinclair's surprise victory in the California Democratic primary of 1934 frightened the California business establishment -- and the California press lords -- as did nothing before or after. A longtime socialist, Sinclair was the author of dozens of muckraking books, the best known being The Jungle, an expose of the meat-packing industry. But it was one of his numerous pamphlets, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty, that thrust him into the political spotlight. In the midst of the Depression, his EPIC (End Poverty in California) plan drew a huge grass-roots following. Sinclair advocated having idle factories turned into cooperatives and manned by the unemployed; public ownership of utilities; special taxes on large land holdings; and -- the clincher that brought Standard Oil of California, banks, insurance companies, realtors, and the major movie studios into the fray -- a state income tax on corporations.

The campaign that followed has been described by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as "the first all-out public relations blitzkrieg in American politics." Realizing that too much depended on the outcome of the election to entrust it to the state's feeble Republican party, business and industry leaders banded together and hired outside help.

In northern California, it was Clem Whitaker's new firm, Campaigns, Inc. (later Whitaker & Baxter). Whitaker believed a defensive campaign wasn't worth waging. Therefore he almost totally ignored his own candidate and concentrated on attacking Sinclair, making the most of an embellished Sinclair statement: "I expect half of the unemployed in the U.S. to flock to California if I am elected."

In southern California, an ad agency, Lord & Thomas (later Foote, Cone & Belding), was, for the first time, given charge of a major political campaign, that of Sinclair's chief opponent, the lackluster Republican governor, Frank F. Merriam. Among Lord & Thomas's pioneering firsts were soliciting out-of-state financing; directing a sophisticated direct mail campaign, targeting such groups as doctors, Catholics, and Stanford alumni; and the airing of a series of anti-Sinclair radio soap operas. (Lord & Thomas had some experience in this area, having created the immensely popular Amos 'n Andy.) The firm also used more conventional techniques. As Don Belding later admitted, "We hired the scum of the streets to carry [EPIC] placards through the cities." Led by Louis B. Mayer, the motion picture studios for the first time set out to destroy a political candidate, visually. March-of-Time-like shorts -- California Election News and The Inquiring Cameraman -- produced by MGM's Irving Thalberg, played between features at local cinemas. As Mitchell notes, "An almost palpable stink drifted from the screen whenever a Sinclairite appeared." Most in fact were movie extras; some of the scenes of the "bums' rush" to California appeared to be out-takes from feature films.

But even more important was the role of the press.

California's most powerful publisher, in terms of circulation, was William Randolph Hearst. Even if they had been able to ignore their philosophical differences, there was no question of Hearst supporting Sinclair, not after the candidate stated that one of the reasons he was running for governor was because he was sick of watching "our richest newspaper publisher keeping his movie mistress in a private city of palaces and cathedrals, furnished with shiploads of junk imported from Europe, and surrounded by vast acres reserved for the use of zebras and giraffes." Yet the Hearst papers were relatively fair to Sinclair, reserving most of their vitriol for the editorial pages.

(One notable exception was an unattributed bums/boxcar photo that appeared in the Los Angeles Examiner. Sharp-eyed movie fans recognized it as a scene from the movie Wild Boys of the Road. The still print had been provided by the MGM publicity department.)

"Fairness" hardly characterized the efforts of Hearst's leading competitors. Kyle Palmer, the political editor of the Los Angeles Times, raised funds and wrote speeches for Governor Merriam while directing the paper's coverage of the campaign. Chester Rowell, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, drafted Merriam's platform, while Earl "Squire" Behrens, the paper's political editor for four decades, would later admit that he had personally developed and "used as straight news items, anti-Sinclair statements from leading Democrats."

The Los Angeles Times didn't keep its political bias a secret. Every day the paper carried, on its front page, a box of "Sinclairisms." Sinclair on the sanctity of marriage: "I have had such a belief . . . I have it no longer." On religion: "a mighty fortress of graft." On bankers: "legalized counterfeiters." On the American Legion: "riot department of the plutocracy" and conductors of "drunken orgies." Nearly all of the quotes were out of context; some of the most inflammatory were actually dialogue from characters in Sinclair novels. As the candidate himself told a journalist, if he lost it wouldn't mean that socialism had failed, only that he had written too many books.

Sinclair lacked the support of a single daily newspaper. Nor did he obtain much help from the many small but influential weeklies, some 700 in all, since Clem Whitaker, himself a former journalist, had established a "cozy relationship" with their publishers. According to Mitchell: "Besides his Campaigns, Inc. operation, Clem ran an advertising company in Sacramento and he had discovered that one operation benefited the other: it was amazing how much free coverage for his candidate he could secure simply by placing a few dollars' worth of advertising in each of the weeklies. . . . In a depression every few dollars mattered." Lest there be any doubt of his purpose, he insisted on paying for the ads in advance.

Late in the campaign, The New York Times sent Turner Catledge out to report on the strange goings-on in California. Scanning the Los Angeles Times, he saw stories on Governor Merriam's every appearance, but no mention of EPIC rallies or speaking engagements by candidate Sinclair. At dinner that night he queried the paper's political editor, Kyle Palmer. "Turner, forget it," Palmer replied. "We don't go in for that kind of crap that you have back in New York -- of being obliged to print both sides. We're going to beat this son-of-a-bitch Sinclair any way we can. We're going to kill him."

Beat him they did, though only by 200,000 votes, Merriam receiving 1.1 million, Sinclair 900,000. But kill him they didn't, although the EPIC movement itself, divided by factionalism and ironically even some Red-baiting, was assimilated into the newly resurgent Democratic party. Earlier, Sinclair had told one EPIC crowd that if they elected Merriam they would still have poverty and "I'll again be a writer. I won't need to think about what Pasadena thinks of me. I can go back to that blessed state of not being recognized on the streets." His first effort, of course, was a pamphlet entitled I, Candidate for Governor of California, and How I Got Licked. Returning to fiction, he wrote the highly popular Lanny Budd novels, one of which won him a 1943 Pulitzer Prize; remarried at eighty-three; and died, in 1968, an ninety. No one has ever been able to determine exactly how many books and pamphlets he published.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the campaign of 1934 was the last hurrah for the California press lords, the beginning of the end of their dominance of the electoral process. (Kyle Palmer, Earl "Squire" Behrens, and their successors would play kingmakers for another two decades, giving us, among others, Richard Milhous Nixon.) But the seeds were planted -- professional full-service campaign management, attack ads, the creative use of film, radio, and direct mail -- that would, as author Mitchell notes, forever change the way candidates ran for office.

THE CAMPAIGN OF THE CENTURY: UPTON SINCLAIR'S RACE FOR GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA AND THE BIRTH OF MEDIA POLITICS BY GREG MITCHELL RANDOM HOUSE. 665 PP. $ 27.50

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