Power Collides to Destroy Progressive Causes

Sometimes it feels like the rabbit whole of horror that we get glimpses of everyday are getting worse and worse.

For those who spend their time fighting to make the world a better place it sometimes seems like the powerful and winning more and more every day.

That is why I think it’s important to remember that the plutocracy never gives up power without a fight.

Some of the same collusions that are plaguing us now have been fought in the past.

Where Dirty Political Campaigns Joined Mass Media.

…I just recently came across the story about Upton Sinclair's 1934 run for California governor...

Sinclair, the muckraking novelist whose Oil! became the basis for There Will Be Blood, was a socialist running as the Democratic nominee against a Republican party hack. With a program called EPIC (End Poverty in California), Sinclair drew more voters in the primary than Republican Frank Merriam, despite the fact that California was a heavily GOP state.

This disturbed the establishment, which in those days was headed by movie moguls who then, as now, had greater loyalty to money-making than to liberal ideology.

The execs prefigured the threats made by pro sports team owners by threatening to move their studios to Miami if Sinclair were elected, and the Los Angeles Times denounced the "maggot-like horde of Reds" who supported Sinclair. But their most effective measures were mobilizing their marketing and story-telling resources in a disinformation campaign.

To smear Sinclair, experts made innovative use of film, radio, direct mail, opinion polls, phony leaflets and false advertising. The political effort that produced the strongest impact was the manipulation of the movies. For the first time, Hollywood put all its professional and financial resources into action against a Democratic candidate. Led by Louis B. Mayer, a rabid Republican who headed M-G-M, studio executives raised enormous sums of money, intimidated their employees and produced propaganda films.

[...]

The pro-Sinclair forces were pitted against Mr. Mayer's protege, Irving Thalberg, who produced a propaganda film showing bums arriving in California to take away everybody's jobs and cause trouble. Fake leaflets were printed stating that the Communists endorsed Sinclair and branding him a dynamiter of churches and all Christian institutions. Radio scripts warned against the dangers of Sinclairism, saying it would mean higher taxes. A radio melodrama intimated that "Governor" Sinclair would confiscate everybody's swimming pools.

…There's much more history of the Sinclair campaign and the opposition's tactics here and in a 1992 book by Greg Mitchell.

But then, I guess you could just watch the news.

It’s an old fight that we see over and over. The corporate media is not in the business of reporting the news, they are in the business of protecting their owners interests and sell information. They have no interest in actually telling you what is going on so that you might want to change that system.

It was true in the early 1900’s as it is today.

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