Upton Sinclair in The Great Depression
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was an author and socialist political activist. His best known work is The Jungle, a 1906 muckraking assault on the unsanitary and inhumane conditions in the meatpacking industry.
In 1934, Sinclair ran for governor of California on a utopian platform called End Poverty in California (EPIC), which called for unemployed citizens to work in state-sponsored collective factories and farms to produce goods for their own use.Surprisingly, Sinclair won the Democratic primary on this radical platform before losing the general election to Republican Frank Merriam.