Synopses & Reviews
In 1934, voters hoping to turn the tide of the Great Depression backed an unlikely candidate for governor of California: Upton Sinclair, muckraking author of The Jungle and lifelong socialist. Amazingly, Sinclair swept the Democratic primary, leading a mass movement called EPIC (End Poverty in California). Alarmed, Sinclair’s opponents launched an unprecedented public relations blitzkrieg to discredit him. The result was nothing less than a revolution in American politics, and with it, the era of the “spin doctor” and the “attack ad” on the screen was born. Hollywood took its first all-out plunge into politics. In a riveting, blow-by-blow narrative featuring the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, Irving Thalberg, H. L. Mencken, William Randolph Hearst, Will Rogers, and Katharine Hepburn, Greg Mitchell brings to life the outrageous campaign that forever transformed the electoral process.
Review
Winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award
Basis for one episode in the award-winning PBS documentary The Great Depression
“Sizzling, rambunctiously useful.” —Los Angeles Times
“Fascinating….a lively, anecdote-filled history.” —The New York Times Book Review
“To read The Campaign of the Century is to understand how the business of electing officials
began to get so colossally out of hand.” —Newsweek
“America witnessed a transforming experience, as Greg Mitchell makes clear
in his vivid chronicle.” —Wall Street Journal
“There are lessons to be learned herein. Politicians learned them long ago, to the general detriment. Perhaps now Mitchell can help the rest of us learn them.” —Washington Post Book World
“A splendid history.” —San Jose Mercury News
“Mitchell gives us an important book” on “the Founding Fathers of modern politics.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Greg Mitchell is the author of Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, Why Obama Won, So Wrong for So Long and, with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America and Who Owns Death, among other books. He is the former editor of Editor & Publisher magazine and now writes the popular Media Fix blog for The Nation.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Upton Sinclair Chronology
Part I: The Muckraker and the President
Part II: Hollywood to the Rescue
Part III: “Armageddon”
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Sources
Index
Permissions and Acknowledgments
About the Author