“In the course of the summer President Roosevelt announced a program of social insurance which he said would be one of the tasks of the new Congress. Naturally that made it futile for any State to go ahead with a pension program, and I said that the EPIC [End Poverty in California] movement would wait and see what Congress did before taking up this subject. Again a chorus from the hostile newspapers: ‘Sinclair drops his pension plans.’ …. How easy for me, when the proposal first came before the public, to say yes, of course, I favored it; pay the old people pensions, pay them anything they want — two hundred a month, or two thousand a month. They have worked hard all their lives, the dear, good old people, and why should they not have comfort and security in their old age?

The newspapers [would] challenge me to say where I was going to get the money [for Sinclair’s pension plan], and when I answered they did not publish what I said. Impossible for any editor of a commercial newspaper to understand the difference between a profit system in a state of collapse, driving the State and everyone in it to bankruptcy, and a system of production for use in process of growth, providing security and plenty for all. I used to say to our audiences: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it!'"