In Dubious Battle (2 page)

When
In Dubious Battle
was published in 1936, Steinbeck was surprised that this novel, which he had thought most readers would find objectionably grim and controversial, reached the best-seller lists. It also received surprisingly few hostile reviews from critics on either the political right or left. The most conspicuous exception to this favorable consensus was Mary McCarthy’s denunciation of the novel as “academic, wooden, inert” and of Steinbeck as “certainly no philosopher, sociologist, or strike technician.” She was then a recent Vassar graduate writing for
The Nation
and would not publish the first of her own chicly cynical satires until 1942; but her attitude started a feud that lasted the rest of Steinbeck’s life.

Despite the unforeseen success of the novel, Steinbeck remained annoyed that the interest in it was mostly political, as indeed he had predicted. Readers’ attention focused upon what the author considered “mere outcroppings"—like local strikes—rather than what he considered the underlying problems of human greed and inhumane behavior toward other humans as a result of lack of understanding. The situation in California, however, where entrenched interests looked upon themselves as defending the last frontier in “the land of opportunity,” seemed to a worried world to be verging on class warfare.

Steinbeck does not appear to have taken much interest in Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial campaign, nor was he particularly
familiar with the reformer’s many fictional exposés of corruption in American industry. Sinclair’s lurid but often pedestrianly written naturalism was probably the kind of “realism” that Steinbeck often objected to in letters to his friends during the 1930s, when he continued to speak of his own predilection for fantasy and the “metaphysical.” Steinbeck sought to probe beneath the superficialities of partisan contentiousness, but readers were moved by his emotionally powerful rendering of violent episodes in the world around them. Two such episodes evoked in the novel would still have been fresh in readers’ minds when it appeared.

The older and most fanatical characters in the novel, like old Joy, are surviving “Wobblies,” members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (or IWW), organized in 1905 when the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor seemed insufficiently concerned about unskilled manual laborers. Despite the IWW’s insistence that it was not a syndicalist organization advocating violent overthrow of governments, it was widely suspected of seeking to bring industry and government under workingmen’s control by revolutionary means if necessary. It grew rapidly in ten years and became a much-feared force, especially in the Pacific Northwest lumber country; but the union quickly lost support when it militantly opposed American participation in World War I. It was almost destroyed by a wide-scale persecution beginning in 1922, when it became a special target of President Harding’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, and his campaign against a “red conspiracy.” Though widely outlawed, the IWW was still in operation throughout the 1930s; and parents, especially in rural western communities like the one in which Steinbeck grew up at the height of its activities, still
evoked threats of “Wobblies” as bogeymen to control unruly children.

Of more immediate and even more frightening concern was the strike that had closed down the port of San Francisco in 1934. Organized by Harry Bridges, an Australian labor leader, it began on May 9 as a walkout by rank-and-file members of the International Longshoremen’s Association who were dissatisfied with their officers’ suspected collusion with employers. Other labor organizations joined in, threatening a general strike that might paralyze the city. On July 3 the police were ordered to try to infiltrate and secure the docks, in civic authorities’ anticipation that the national holiday the following day would create a lull that might lead to a gradual disintegration of the strike. On July 5—Bloody Thursday—however, the confrontation resumed with new vehemence. The police killed two protesters and wounded some seventy others at the scene.

The governor called out the National Guard the next day and appealed to the federal government to send in troops to protect property. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was on vacation at the time, bound for Hawaii on a U.S. Navy vessel; Secretary of State Cordell Hull had been left in charge in Washington. Hull panicked and decided to appeal to the president for an executive order to use federal troops. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, mindful of President Hoover’s order to General Douglas MacArthur in 1932 to fire on the war veteran bonus marchers in Washington, objected that this would be the worst possible course to follow. Through Roosevelt’s personal secretary, Perkins managed to get a message to the president, who agreed with her that the federal government should not become involved. After the events of
Bloody Thursday, enthusiasm for the strike among groups that had been supporting the longshoremen waned, and the strike gradually disintegrated when the shippers, under local pressure, eventually agreed to the principal concessions that the union demanded.

The San Francisco strike is particularly important in understanding the communal tensions depicted in Steinbeck’s novel. The day the strike had begun in May, General Hugh Johnson, the director of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, was the highest-ranking federal official in the city. He delivered an impassioned speech to a large audience at the University of California in Berkeley, in which he was widely interpreted as indicating that the federal government would in certain instances tolerate vigilante action. He denounced a general strike as a “threat to the community” and went on to say that if the government refused to intervene, the people had the right to take matters into their own hands. Steinbeck despaired that such action would mean the loss of responsible control over confrontations and a reversion to barbarism. In the novel he has Mac, the strike organizer, denounce vigilantes as “the dirtiest guys in any town.… They’re the same ones that lynch Negroes.… They like to hurt people, and they always give it a nice name, patriotism or protecting the constitution” (p. 172). The grim hopelessness of this scenario leads to the crucial question of just what his intentions were in wanting to serve as “a recording consciousness… simply putting down the thing.”

This seemingly apocalyptic pronouncement of the triumph of violence appears at odds with what he wrote to a friend who had praised the novel: “I still think that most ‘realistic’ writing is farther from the real than most honest fantasy. The Battle with its tricks to make a semblance of reality wasn’t very close.”
At first “fantasy” seems to have been used here only to stress Steinbeck’s mixing incidents from strikes at different times and in different places and changing California’s geography in order to prevent his novel from being identified with any particular strike. More careful consideration of his other statements about the novel, however, suggests that his intention was to imagine a possibility rather than reflect a reality, moving already toward the cautionary mode that he would adopt in
The Grapes of Wrath.

Although Steinbeck talked several times about “levels” of interest in his writing, he was more explicit than usual about his intentions in
In Dubious Battle,
explaining in a letter to a friend, “It has three layers. Surface story, group-psychological structure, and philosophical conclusion arrived at, not through statement, but only through structure.” He guessed that only the first would be perceived. In
John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America,
Louis Owens provides a convenient summary of customary interpretations of Steinbeck’s statement:

The surface story is that of the strike and its ramifications, the group-psychological structure is found in the novel’s study of the phalanx… the philosophical conclusions arrived at through structure [regard] man’s need for commitment that reverberate [s] through all of Steinbeck’s fiction both before and after.

The novelist’s achievement is not so clearcut as this summary suggests, although Owens provides a useful plan for viewing the novel from its most universal level to its most specific. The “philosophical conclusions” usually provide the directing force behind Steinbeck’s fiction; and the increasing emphasis on them is a principal reason why later works like
The Moon
Is Down
and
Burning Bright
lack the emotionally compelling storytelling of
In Dubious Battle
and
The Grapes of Wrath:
more attention is paid to dwelling on statement than contriving communicative structure.

Some critics, like Clifford Lewis, find that even in
In Dubious Battle,
Steinbeck failed to eliminate statement, though it is hard to agree that “Doc Burton’s psychological and philosophical theories nearly destroy the novel": Steinbeck was right in thinking that most readers would not linger over them but would be drawn into the whirlpool created by the downward spiraling of the steadily accelerating narrative. Steinbeck’s shaping of Burton’s comments to the strike organizer Mac, especially in Chapter 8, however, shows how the author was able to avoid a commitment to any reductivist Utopian scheme at a time when such causes were attracting many desperate converts:

Well, you say I don’t believe in the cause. That’s like not believing in the moon. There’ve been communes before, and there will be again. But you people have an idea that if you can
establish
the thing, the job’ll be done. Nothing stops, Mac. If you were able to put an idea into effect tomorrow, it would start changing right away. Establish a commune, and the same gradual flux will continue (p. 149).

Burton’s conclusion hits a reader with greater force than ever after the events of 1989 and 1990, when, half a century after the novel’s publication, previously inconceivable changes in the political structure of Europe exemplify the inescapable change he outlines. If anything weakens the novel, it is not Burton’s conventional theories of socio-political evolution but
rather Steinbeck’s own dedication at the time he was writing to the “phalanx” theories that are expounded in his second “layer” not just by Doc, but London, Jim Nolan, and even old Joy. These are most succinctly summed up again by Doc in Chapter 8: “I want to watch these group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn’t himself at all: he’s a cell in an organism that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body are like you” (pps. 150–51).

Steinbeck had always been, as he wrote to a friend in 1933, “prone to the metaphysical.” After he met Joseph Campbell, the distinguished student of mythology, Steinbeck became obsessed with the theory of what he first called “phalanxes” in a letter to George Albee in 1933. He had, however, already explained the concept without using the term in a letter to his college friend Carleton Sheffield, stressing that the human race has “qualities which the individual lacks entirely,” using a questionable analogy to atoll-building coral “insects,” which retain their individual identities in an external communal construct like people living in an apartment building. Steinbeck argued that “the phalanx has emotions of which the unit man is incapable,” so that once he becomes part of “a moving phalanx, his nature changes, his habits, and his desires.”

The problem with applying this theory to the development of the strike in
In Dubious Battle
is that even after the organizers’ oratory has impressed the disgruntled migrant workers with the need for concerted action, the agitators must continually devise further means for maintaining the group’s commitment and preventing defections. New structures transcending individuals fail to establish themselves without constant rhetorical reinforcement, suggesting that mob action is the creation of the manipulators rather than the participants.
No sense of amalgamation into the group supplants individual responses. Both the strikers and the growers’ troops are motivated by self-interest.

Joining the group does not alter the individual’s tendencies. It only provides a cover for an individual’s behaving in a manner that he would not have the nerve to initiate, a cover for relaxing his inhibitions.

Steinbeck most lucidly presents the feelings of a member of a lynch mob in a short story dating from the same period as
In Dubious Battle,
originally titled “The Lonesome Vigilante.” (It appears in
The Long Valley
as simply “The Vigilante,” and it is based on an actual event that occurred in San Jose, the home town of Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol.) After participating in a fatal lynching, a character named Mike is charged by his “thin, petulant wife” with having been with another woman. “By God, she was right,” he thinks to himself. “That’s exactly how I do feel.” Violence compensates for sexual frustration.

Steinbeck had picked up the phalanx theory from lectures he’d heard at Stanford on the writings of William Emerson Ritter, a professor of marine biology at the University of California at Berkeley. He evidently pursued Ritter’s writings, for the concept of the “phalanx” utilized in
In Dubious Battle
is developed principally in “The Organismal Conception: Its Place in Science and Its Bearing on Philosophy,” co-authored by Edna W. Barby (
California Publications in Biology,
1931). Steinbeck’s attraction to these ideas appears to have been in some measure based upon his inability to accept violence as a conscious manifestation of an individual’s behavior. He clung to the theory that the human race is basically educable, and Ritter’s speculations provided him with a means of rationalizing
behavior that he could not deal with as another’s deliberate choice.

Since Steinbeck’s choices were not objectively intellectual but compassionate (as critics have begun to recognize, his writings derive from a basically romantic temperament), he ran into perplexing problems when he had Doc Burton follow up his pronouncements about man’s hating himself with some observations about split personalities. The dynamic characters in this novel, however—and in most of his work through
The Moon Is Down
—are not the troubled products of splits in their own psyches but of their differences from others, often exacerbated by social prejudices.