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WIKI

End Poverty in California (EPIC) was a political campaign started in 1934 by socialist writer Upton Sinclair (best known as author of The Jungle). The movement formed the basis for Sinclair’s campaign for Governor of California in 1934. The plan called for a massive public works program, sweeping tax reform, and guaranteed pensions. It gained major popular support, with thousands joining End Poverty Leagues across the state. EPIC never came to fruition due to Sinclair’s defeat in the 1934 election, but is seen as an influence on New Deal programs enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Sinclair laid out his vision for EPIC in his 1933 book I, Governor of California, and How I ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. Specifically, the plan called for state seizure of idle factories and farm land where the owner had failed to pay property taxes. The government would then hire the unemployed to work on the farms and at the factories. The farms would then operate as self-sufficient, worker-run co-ops. EPIC also called for the implementation of California’s first state income tax. The tax was to be progressive, with the wealthiest being taxed at 30%. The plan would also have increased inheritance taxes and instituted a 4% tax on stock transfers. EPIC also included government-provided pensions for the old, disabled, and widowed. To implement EPIC, Sinclair called for the creation of three new government agencies: the California Authority for Land (CAL), the California Authority for Production (CAP), and the California Authority for Money (CAM). CAL was to implement the plan for seizure and cultivation of unused farm lands. CAP was to do the same for idle factories. CAM meanwhile was to be used to finance CAL and CAP by issuing scrip to workers and issues bonds for the purchase of lands, factories, and machinery.

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.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_Poverty_in_California

WIKI

Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and five-time candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. Through his presidential candidacies as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States.

In 1894, Debs became involved in the Pullman Strike, which grew out of a compensation dispute started by the workers who constructed the rail cars made by the Pullman Palace Car Company. The Pullman Company, citing falling revenue after the economic Panic of 1893, had cut the wages of its employees by twenty-eight percent.

The federal government intervened, obtaining an injunction against the strike on the grounds that the strikers had obstructed the US Mail, carried on Pullman cars, by refusing to show up for work.

At the time of his arrest for mail obstruction, Debs was not yet a socialist. While serving his six-month term in the jail at Woodstock, Illinois, Debs and his ARU comrades received a steady stream of letters, books and pamphlets in the mail from socialists around the country. Debs recalled several years later:

I began to read and think and dissect the anatomy of the system in which workingmen, however organized, could be shattered and battered and splintered at a single stroke. The writings of [Edward] Bellamy and [Robert] Blatchford early appealed to me. The Cooperative Commonwealth of [Laurence] Gronlund also impressed me, but the writings of [Karl] Kautsky were so clear and conclusive that I readily grasped, not merely his argument, but also caught the spirit of his socialist utterance – and I thank him and all who helped me out of darkness into light.

In his 1926 obituary in Time, it was said that Berger left him a copy of Das Kapital and “prisoner Debs read it slowly, eagerly, ravenously”. Debs emerged from jail at the end of his sentence a changed man. He spent the final three decades of his life proselytizing for the socialist cause.

The Social Democracy of America (SDA), founded in June 1897 by Eugene V. Debs from the remnants of his American Railway Union, was deeply divided between those who favored a tactic of launching a series of colonies to build socialism by practical example and others who favored establishment of a European-style socialist political party with a view to capture of the government apparatus through the ballot box.

Debs was the Socialist Party of America candidate for president in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 (the final time from prison). Though he received increasing numbers of popular votes in each subsequent election, he never won any votes in the Electoral College.

Though Debs won no state’s electoral votes, in Florida, he came in second behind Wilson and ahead of President William Howard Taft and former President Teddy Roosevelt.

Debs’s speeches against the Wilson administration and the war earned the enmity of President Woodrow Wilson, who later called Debs a “traitor to his country”. On June 16, 1918, Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio, urging resistance to the military draft. He was arrested on June 30 and charged with ten counts of sedition.

Debs was sentenced on September 18, 1918, to ten years in prison and was also disenfranchised for life. Debs presented what has been called his best-remembered statement at his sentencing hearing:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Debs appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court. In its ruling on Debs v. United States, the court examined several statements Debs had made regarding World War I and socialism. While Debs had carefully worded his speeches in an attempt to comply with the Espionage Act of 1917, the Court found he had the intention and effect of obstructing the draft and military recruitment. Among other things, the Court cited Debs’s praise for those imprisoned for obstructing the draft. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated in his opinion that little attention was needed since Debs’s case was essentially the same as that of Schenck v. United States, in which the court had upheld a similar conviction.

Debs went to prison on April 13, 1919. In protest of his jailing, Charles Ruthenberg led a parade of unionists, socialists, anarchists, and communists on May 1 (May Day) in Cleveland, Ohio. The event quickly broke into the violent May Day riots of 1919.

Debs ran for president in the 1920 election while imprisoned in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He received 914,191 votes (3.4 percent), a slightly smaller percentage than he had won in 1912, when he received 6 percent, the highest number of votes for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in the United States. During his time in prison, Debs wrote a series of columns deeply critical of the prison system.

On December 23, 1921, President Harding commuted Debs’s sentence to time served, effective Christmas Day. He did not issue a pardon. A White House statement summarized the administration’s view of Debs’s case:

There is no question of his guilt. ... He was by no means, however, as rabid and outspoken in his expressions as many others, and but for his prominence and the resulting far-reaching effect of his words, very probably might not have received the sentence he did. He is an old man, not strong physically. He is a man of much personal charm and impressive personality, which qualifications make him a dangerous man calculated to mislead the unthinking and affording excuse for those with criminal intent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs

Although he received some success as a third-party candidate, Debs was largely dismissive of the electoral process as he distrusted the political bargains that Victor Berger and other “sewer socialists” had made in winning local offices. He put much more value on organizing workers into unions, favoring unions that brought together all workers in a given industry over those organized by the craft skills workers practiced.