Word: merriams
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Opposition to the Sinclair candidacy was focused on the plump, round-faced and by no means inspiring person of Republican Frank Finley Merriam. A small-bore, Iowa-born politician who was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1930, Frank Merriam of Long Beach became Acting Governor when "Sunny Jim" Rolph died last June. The San Francisco general strike and a shrewd stratagem won him his nomination for the coming election. Prior to the strike, onetime Governor Clement Calhoun Young had been assured Republican support by no less a faction than Herbert Hoover & friends. When big industrialists began to beseech Acting Governor Merriam...
Lacking personal appeal or popularity, Acting Governor Merriam has been a trial to Richard W. Barrett, his northern California campaign manager. Under the direction of this San Francisco attorney, Acting Governor Merriam has been taken to football matches, photographed talking to deaf mutes through an interpreter. And last week at Los Angeles he made his first campaign speech, lifting a phrase from the first citizen of Palo Alto: "Human misery should not be made a laboratory for experimentation by even the most well-meaning of theorists...
...Merriam forces were straining every resource last week to beg, borrow or steal the voting strength of a Progressive candidate named Raymond LeRoy Haight of Los Angeles. He polled 85,000 votes on the Republican ticket, has a clean record, is a sworn foe of corporate interests. Most of his votes would go to Merriam if he withdrew. But Progressive Haight, who is only 38, seemed quite willing to have Acting Governor Merriam defeated and put aside, on the theory that by 1938 the electorate's disgust with Sinclair will give Haight a real chance of election...
...Republicans consolidated their torn ranks slowly after the primary but evidently with more effect than the Democrats did. Beside his own 346,000 primary votes, Acting Governor Merriam could count on most of the 385,000 cast for ex-Governor Young and John R. Quinn, chairman of the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors. That total of 731,000 roughly equaled the Sinclair 446,000 primary vote and George Creel's 288,000, although many a Creel follower would not vote for Sinclair. Primary figures, however, could not possibly tell the story because hundreds of thousands have subsequently registered...
Apart from raising an estimated $1,000,000 and enlisting the solid support of the California Press, the tactics of conservatives have proved largely negative. In self-defense, Acting Governor Merriam espoused, under his breath, the Townsend Plan, a wild-eyed scheme to pay oldsters $200 a month with the understanding that each month's pension be spent in full within 30 days. But nobody took him seriously. Big drive of the "nonpartisan" Stop Sinclair movement took the form of a blizzard of pamphlets proclaiming: "Out Of His Own Mouth Shall He Be Judged." Material was culled from Author...