Spinmeister

A dizzier.

“The importance of this story derives from the fact that the campaign of lying about Upton Sinclair was ordered by the biggest business men in California and paid for with millions of their dollars. It was carried out by the best newspaper brains, the best advertising brains, the best motion picture brains, the best political brains—so on all the way down the line. In putting the facts before the public I am not whining, or seeking sympathy; I am telling the people of California what was done to them by their big business masters; I am telling the people of the other forty-seven States, what they have to expect when their turn comes. For this old dying system has a great deal of vicious life in it yet. It will fight to its last gasp, and this is the way it will fight; all this bitter sneering, these slanders and forgeries, these cruel falsehoods taken up and repeated millions of times over, pounded into the feeble minds of poor people who are overworked and over-driven, and have very little education, and often no power to absorb education. If you take this book rightly you will consider it a textbook of military strategy; a book of maps and other data needed for the planning of forty-nine campaigns of the future: forty-eight of these to take our States out of the hands of organized greed and knavery, and the forty-ninth, the biggest of all, to take our nation out of the same hands.”

Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked (1934).