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Banned
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by loquitur
Let me see if I get what you're saying: corruption is a system distortion mechanism. Conspiracy theory holds that systems are captives of powerful conspirators, which is also a system distortion. Therefore if you accept that some degree of corruption is normal, you must accept conspiracy theories.
You can't really mean that.
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loquitur, do you see the pattern here, the same propaganda, over and over? Do you understand how the left has been distorted, demonized, and subdued at gunpoint, again and again, to the point of it's near extinction in the US, today? Are we really, in our entirety, the better for it?
Do you see that islamofascism is the "red baiting du jour"? Are the interests of the majority today, in any way in common with the modern equivalents of the studio owners or the Willaim Randolph Hearsts? Who are the actual subversives? Can the majority properly be categorized as subversive?
Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...+Sinclair&st=p
NEW YORK TIMES
November 4, 1934, Page X5
FILMS AND POLITICS
Hollywood Masses the Full Power of Her Resources to Fight Sinclair
From a staff Correspondent, HOLLYWOOD.
The full force of the motion picture industry, overwhelming in this fabulous city; has been thrown into the crusade to keep Upton Sinclair out of the Governor's chair at Sacramento.
Under a plan of campaign accredited generally to Louis B. Mayer Studios, the tirty-odd thousand people employed directly or indirectly in making pictures, as well as the talents and skill of the final multi-partisan assault upon the smiling Socialist who captured the Democratic nomination in the August primaries.
The higher salaried employees of each of the seven major studios have either been assessed or "requested" a day's salary for the campaign fund of Governor Frank F. Merriam, whose Republican candidacy has now become the standard for the "stop Sinclair" forces. All Movie workers, high and low, have been called or circularized and either told or "advised" how to vote in the interest of maintenance of their jobs. Merriam literature, buttons and emblems have been distributed through all the lots.
The city of Los Angeles has turned into a huge movie set where many newsreel pictures are made every day, depicting the feelings of the people against Mr. Sinclair. Equipment from one of the major studios, as well as some of it's second rate players, may be seen at various street intersections or out in the residential neighborhood, "shooting" the melodrama and unconscious comedy of the campaign. Their product area can be seen in leading motion-picture houses in practically every city or town of the state.
In one of the "melodrama" recently filmed and shown here in Los Angeles an interviewer approaches a demure old lady, sitting on her front porch and rocking away in her rocking chair.
"For who are you voting, Mother?" asked the interviewer. "I am voting for Governor Merriam," the old lady answers in a faltering voice. "Why Mother?" "Because I want to save my little home. It is all I have left in this world."
In another recent newsreel there is shown a shaggy man with bristling Russian whiskers and a menacing look in his eye.
"For whom are you voting?" asks the interviewer. "Vy, I am foting for Seenclair," "Why are you voting for Mr. Sinclair?" "Vell his system worked vell in Russia, vy can’t it vork here?"
All these "releases" are presented as newsreels
Another "newsreel" has been made of Oscar Rankin, a colored prizefighter and preacher who is quite a favorite with his race in Los Angeles county. Asked why he was voting for Governor Merriam, he answered that he likes to preach and play piano and he wants to keep a church to preach in and a piano to play.
Merriam supporter always are depicted as the more worthwhile element of the community, as popular favorites or as substantial businessmen. Sinclair supporters are invariably pictured as the riff-raff. Low paid "bit" players are said to take the leading roles in most of these "newsreels," particularly were dialogue is required. People conversant with movie personnel claim to have recognized in them certain aspirants to stardom.
But even cleverness has faltered at times in the ruthlessness of the anti-Sinclair campaign. A leading newspaper in Los Angeles is reported to have called upon one of the studios for a "still" picture of bums entering the State in response to Sinclair’s invitation to the unemployed of the whole country. The picture was quickly furnished and published. The publicity department of another studio immediately recognized the photograph as a scene from a recent cinema. The recognition was made simple because the leading juvenile star on the feature was sitting atop of the boxcar.
The studio managers have stopped at nothing to insure a full vote of their employees for Merriam. They have told them not to put too much stock in the writing genius of the man. "Out of forty-seven books he has written, not one has ever been filmed," an official is said to have told some of his employees the other day.
At another studio an official called in his scenario writers to give them a bit of "advice" on how to vote. "After all," he is reputed to have told his writers, "What does Sinclair know about anything? He’s just a writer."
Stories of this kind can be picked up at every studio provided the teller, who invariably is a "Merriam" man, can be assured he not be quoted and provided, too, that he can relate it out of any possible hearing of his associates.
A fun-making film news writer for an Eastern newspaper strolled into the commissary on the Metro Goldwyn-Mayer lot a few days ago and began distributing Sinclair literature, which he had purchased downtown just to see what would happen. When the high-powered Metro men publicity men, to whom he handed the leaflets, saw what they were, they crumpled them up and dopped them as if they were hot. They did not know whether to cram them into their pockets or what to do with them. They pleaded in all seriousness for the news writer not to play such a prank, which might be disaterous to their jobs.
<h2>
These stories sound fantastic, but they are no more than the very nature of the class war, which is called the Sinclair campaign .It is humorless, grim affair, made comical by its very lack of humor.</h2>
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The background can be read here:
Quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934_We...ngshore_Strike
Background
Longshoremen on the west coast ports had either been unorganized or represented by company unions since the years immediately after World War I, when the shipping companies and stevedoring firms had imposed the open shop after a series of failed strikes. Longshoremen in San Francisco, then the major port on the coast, were required to go through a hiring hall operated by a company union, known as the "blue book" system for the color of the membership book.
The Industrial Workers of the World had attempted to organize longshoremen, sailors and fishermen in the 1920s through their Maritime Workers Union. Their largest strike, in San Pedro, California in 1923, bottled up shipping in that harbor, but was crushed by a combination of injunctions, mass arrests and vigilantism by the American Legion. While the IWW was a spent force after that strike, syndicalist thinking remained popular on the docks. Longshoremen and sailors on the west coast also had contacts with an Australian syndicalist movement that called itself the "One Big Union" formed after the defeat of a general strike there in 1917.
The Communist Party had also been active in the area in the late 1920s, seeking to organize all categories of maritime workers into a single union, the Maritime Workers Industrial Union (MWIU), as part of the drive during the Third Period to create revolutionary unions. The MWIU never made much headway on the west coast, but it did attract a number of former IWW members and foreign-born militants, such as Harry Bridges, an Australian-born sailor who became a longshoreman after coming to the United States.
Those militants published a newspaper, "The Waterfront Worker", that focused on longshoremen's most pressing demands: more men on each gang, lighter loads and an independent union. While a number of the individuals in this group were Communist Party members, the group as a whole was independent of the party: although it criticized the International Seamen’s Union (ISU) as weak and the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), which had its base on the East Coast, as corrupt, it did not embrace the MWIU, but called instead for creation of small knots of activists at each port to serve as the first step in a slow, careful movement to unionize the industry.
Events soon made the MWIU wholly irrelevant. Just as the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act had led to a spontaneous explosion in union membership among coal miners in 1933, thousands of longshoremen now joined the fledgling ILA locals that reappeared on the west coast. The MWIU faded away as party activists followed the mass of west coast longshoremen into the ILA.
These newly emboldened workers first went after the "blue book" union, refusing to pay dues to it and tearing up their membership books. The militants who had published "The Waterfront Worker", now known as the "Albion Hall group" after their usual meeting place, continued organizing dock committees that soon began launching slowdowns and other types of job actions in order to win better working conditions. While the official leadership of the ILA remained in the hands of conservatives sent to the west coast by President Ryan of the ILA, the Albion Hall group started in March, 1934 to press demands for a coastwide contract, a union-run hiring hall and an industrywide waterfront federation. When the conservative ILA leadership negotiated a weak "gentlemen's agreement" with the employers that had been brokered by the mediation board created by the Roosevelt Administration, Bridges led the membership in rejecting it.
The sticking point in the strike was recognition: the union demanded a closed shop, a coastwide contract and a union hiring hall. The employers offered to arbitrate the dispute, but insisted that the union agree to an open shop as a condition of any agreement to arbitrate. The longshoremen rejected the proposal to arbitrate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_F._Merriam#_note-4
[edit] The Big Strike....
As Governor, James Rolph had consulted with other West Coast governors such as Julius L. Meier of Oregon and Clarence D. Martin of Washington to bring in the U.S. Department of Labor in order to settle the dispute. After his unexpected death in June, these efforts were suspended. Furthermore, negotiations between the federal government and local ILA organizers failed to yield any agreement.
On July 5, 1934, as more attempts to open the Port of San Francisco were made by employers, hostilities between strikers, their sympathizers, and the police reached their zenith. Later known as "Bloody Thursday", San Francisco Police shot tear gas at strikers and sympathizers on Rincon Hill, followed by a charge on horseback. Later, protestors surrounded a police car and attempted to overturn it, but were met by gunshots in the air, and quickly afterwards, shots into the crowd itself. Later in the day, police raided an ILA union hall, shooting tear gas into the building and into other local hotels.
Soldiers of the California National Guard patrolling the Embarcadero in July 1934Merriam, only Governor for a month, threw the state government into the fray. As reports of growing violence in San Francisco reached Sacramento by the minute, Merriam activated the California Army National Guard, deploying regiments to San Francisco's waterfront. In the weeks before "Bloody Thursday", Merriam had remained updated on the ongoing labor dispute, threatening only to activate the Guard if the situation grew too serious. Behind the public scenes, however, the Acting Governor had confided to fellow Republicans that ordering the Guard into San Francisco would ruin him politically.[2] The events of July 5, however, proved to be a turning point. In addition to the Guard's deployment, federal troops of the U.S. Army were placed on stand-by in the Presidio if the situation grew beyond the Guard's control.
Merriam also ordered the halt of construction on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge until the violence in San Francisco subsided.
Within the day, 1,500 Guardsman armed with fixed bayonets and machine guns patrolled the waterfront, with an additional 5,000 state troops on reserve. Explaining to the United Press the following day, Merriam placed full blame of "Bloody Thursday" on the political Left. "The leaders of the striking longshoremen are not free from Communist and subversive influences...There will be no turning back from the position I have taken in this matter."[3]
Following the funerals of the two men slain on "Bloody Thursday", the San Francisco Labor Council voted for a general strike. For four days from July 16 to July 19, the activity in the city ground to a halt. Mayor Angelo J. Rossi requested more Guardsman in the city, and in meetings with generals, plans were drawn to impose martial law over the entire city. However, with a heavily armed National Guard presence along the waterfront, violence did not break out again. In the meantime, the police, now backed up by National Guardsmen, raided and arrested militant and radical offices of ILA leaders and sympathizers. By July 19, the General Strike Committee and the Labor Council ordered an end to the strike, demanding its picketers to accept arbitration from the federal government. With the strike broken by its less militant leadership, longshoremen grudgingly returned to work.
[edit] 1934 general election
n the aftermath of the Longshore Strike, Merriam was highly praised by the conservative San Francisco press for his perceived victory over the longshore strikers. During the strike, state Republicans nominated the Acting Governor as its party nominee for the general elections that November. Merriam, however, had threatened not to deploy the California National Guard to San Francisco if the party would not nominate him.[4]
Running against Merriam in the 1934 elections was former Socialist Party member Upton Sinclair, who had surprisingly won the nomination of the Democratic Party for Governor. A third-party candidacy from Raymond L. Haight of the Commonwealth Party also challenged Merriam for the governorship.
During the campaign, Sinclair promoted the EPIC project, a socialist work program to ensure universal employment for all Californians, complete with the state control of factories, the opening of farm cooperatives and the creation of a cabinet-level California Authority for Production agency to oversee state employment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_Pov...ornia_movement
The Commonwealth Party's Haight relied on centrists from the Democrats who believed that Sinclair had driven the party too far to the left.
Merriam's campaign rallied state conservatives into the so-called "Stop Sinclair" movement. Among supporters were MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer and media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. During the campaign, Mayer turned multiple studio lots in Los Angeles into propaganda machines, churning out fake newsreels to be played before feature-length films in the state. One notable newsreel included Soviets arriving in California to vote for Sinclair.[5] Also during the campaign, Merriam frequented football games and public events, and on one occasion, attended a hospital talking to deaf mutes through an interpreter. Many such events were quickly publicized by the conservative newspaper press.[6]
The end result of the 1934 general elections saw Merriam defeating Sinclair with 48 percent of the vote, opposed to Sinclair's 37 percent. Haight garnered 13 percent.[7] After the election, Merriam announced that the result was "[a] rebuke to socialism and communism."[8]
The 1934 general election is generally remembered as one of the most hotly contested elections in California history. It has also been cited by political historians as one of the first modern elections, due to the various uses of popular media and rhetoric to both popularize and demonize candidates.
[edit] Rest of term
beginning his first elected term, Merriam immediately faced an ever-shrinking state budget and growing deficit. In an effort that later angered many powerful conservative backers who had originally supported his 1934 candidacy, as well as challenging his own deep-seated conservativism, Merriam proposed to the Legislature a tax increase of nearly $107 million dollars. The tax reform laws included instituting a state personal income tax modeled after the Federal Income Tax of 1934, which had been created by the Democratic-controlled Congress, and raising sales taxes to three percent. The Legislature agreed, and passed the tax reform law in 1935.[9]
William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers provided one of the bulwarks of the governor's 1934 campaign, complained bitterly over the reformed tax laws. The Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner's editorial shortly after the reform bills' passage read: "[e]xtortionate and confiscatory taxation will mean...devastation of business, paralysis of industry."[10]
Fanning the growing rift between Merriam and conservative Republicans, right-wing author and playwright Charles Gilman Norris penned letters that became widely circulated thanks to Hearst's newspaper empire, complaining of Merriam's reforms. "[T]he minute the proposed State Income Tax becomes law, my wife, Kathleen Norris, and myself will put both our homes—-the one in Palo Alto and our ranch near Saratoga—-up for sale and move out of the State. There is no alternative for us. We pay 52% of our income now to the Federal Government at Washington and under the proposed State Income Tax Law, we shall have to pay an additional 18%, so that out of every dollar we earn from our writings, 70˘ will go out in taxes!"[11]
Hearst supporters challenged Merriam's and the Legislature's 1935 reform laws during a special referendum in 1936 with Proposition 2. The proposition would automatically repeal the tax reforms, and would in the future require the support of two-thirds of the Legislature and approval of voters by statewide referendum before any new income tax could be imposed. The measure, however, was defeated.[12]
While the State Senate was controlled by Republicans, the crucial lower house Assembly, where finance bills originated, was split between conservative and socialist-leaning Democrats. Merriam proceeded with appeasing the closely-divided Legislature by praising the federal Townsend Plan, while complaining to conservatives and other capitalist supporters that he was surrounded by fanatics.[13]
Merriam's official portrait in the California State CapitolBy the 1938 general elections, Merriam had lost much support from the right due to the 1935 tax reform laws and support for Social Security, while he garnered little support or sympathy from the left due to his troubled relationship with labor unions and the quelching of the Longshore Strike. For the elections, the Democratic Party nominated State Senator Culbert Olson, a former EPIC and Upton Sinclair supporter as well as an unabashed supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Republicans, meanwhile, renominated Merriam for a second term of office.
Merriam lost to Senator Olson in an electoral landslide, ending the Republican dynasty over the governorship that had lasted for over forty years....
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loquitur, the cycle plays out repetitively, in California currently it manifests itself via the right wing overthrow of former Gov. Gray Davis in favor of Gov. Terminator.....If you believe that the propaganda sponsored by Hollywood corporate media and William Randolph Hearst drove an election result that defeated Upton Sinclair in the 1934 California governor's race, in favor of Gov Merriam, was beneficial for the majority of the depression era electorate, you may not understand the point of this post.
Upton Sinclair had written the 1906 expose, Jungle, about the meatpacking industry. Gov. Merriam was simply a conservative politcal hack, in service to his corporate masters.
I know you don't see the difference, or the harm. It is criminal, because it is such a distortion, and when it boils over, out come the machine guns, gas, and billy clubs, in the name of civil order.
Is what you defend, if it is always based on lies and bogeymen....reds, communists, al-Qaeda, really worth the defense you reflexively mount? Is the alternative, really worse? How could it be?
Last edited by host; 02-22-2008 at 01:57 AM..
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