The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

by Michael Malice

After vacillating for a while, FDR finally agreed to meet with Sinclair. On September 4, 1934, Sinclair made his way to the president’s upstate New York estate at Hyde Park for a conversation that, by all accounts, was highly amiable. In his typical reptilian fashion, FDR made sure that Sinclair left the meeting with the belief that the president agreed with him and would come out publicly against the very concept of profit. Roosevelt told Sinclair that he intended to give a speech on or around October 25th—right before the election—advocating Sinclair’s preferred “production for use” as against production for profit. “If you will do that, Mr. President,” Sinclair said, “it will elect me.”[cclxxi] FDR of course intended nothing of the kind. It only took him five days before he was throwing Sinclair under the bus, but doing so off-the-record to reporters so that the gubernatorial candidate was none the wiser. Not only calling the scale of Sinclair’s EPIC plan “utterly impossible,” FDR went on to paint Sinclair as a fanatic. “If Sinclair has any sense in him,” the president said, “he will modify at least in practice this perfectly wild-eyed scheme of his and carry it on as a community experiment.”[cclxxii] It was on October 24th, not the 25th, Roosevelt did in fact give a speech. He told a group of bankers that America has “what we call—and accept—as a profit system.” Rather than endorsing Sinclair’s socialist vision, Roosevelt reiterated his view of free enterprise as the b...