Authors: John Steinbeck
The three started up. “Where?”
“Over the other side. Been lyin’ there all day, he says.”
“How’d you find him?” Mac demanded.
“I heard ’im yell. He says come and tell you.”
“Show us the way. Come on now, hurry up.”
The boy turned and plunged out. Mac shouted, “London, bring the lantern.” Mac and Jim ran side by side. The night was almost complete. Ahead, they saw the flying figure of the boy. Across the open space they tore. The boy reached the line of trees and plunged among them. They could hear him running ahead of them. They dashed into the dark shadow of the trees.
Suddenly Mac reached for Jim. “Jim! Drop, for Christ’ sake!” There was a roar, and two big holes of light. Mac had sprawled full length. He heard several sets of running footsteps. He looked toward Jim, but the flashes still burned on his retinas. Gradually he made Jim out. He was on his knees, his head down. “You sure got down quick, Jim.”
Jim did not move. Mac scrambled over to him, on his knees. “Did you get hit, Jim?” The figure kneeled, and the face was against the ground. “Oh, Christ!” Mac put out his hand to lift the head. He cried out, and jerked his hand away, and wiped it on his trousers, for there was no face. He looked slowly around, over his shoulder.
The lantern bounced along toward him, lighting London’s running legs. “Where are you?” London shouted.
Mac didn’t answer. He sat back on his heels, sat very
quietly. He looked at the figure, kneeling in the position of Moslem prayer.
London saw them at last. He came close, and stopped 5 and the lantern made a circle of light. “Oh,” he said. He lowered the lantern and peered down. “Shot-gun?”
Mac nodded and stared at his sticky hand.
London looked at Mac, and shivered at his frozen face. Mac stood up, stiffly. He leaned over and picked Jim up and slung him over his shoulder, like a sack; and the dripping head hung down behind. He set off, stiff-legged, toward the camp. London walked beside him, carrying the lantern.
The clearing was full of curious men. They clustered around, until they saw the burden. And then they recoiled. Mac marched through them as though he did not see them. Across the clearing, past the stoves he marched, and the crowd followed silently behind him. He came to the platform. He deposited the figure under the hand-rail and leaped to the stand. He dragged Jim across the boards and leaned him against the corner post, and steadied him when he slipped sideways.
London handed the lantern up, and Mac set it carefully on the floor, beside the body, so that its light fell on the head. He stood up and faced the crowd. His hands gripped the rail. His eyes were wide and white. In front he could see the massed men, eyes shining in the lamplight. Behind the front row, the men were lumped and dark. Mac shivered. He moved his jaws to speak, and seemed to break the frozen jaws loose. His voice was high and monotonous. “This guy didn’t want nothing for himself—” he began. His knuckles were white, where he grasped the rail. “Comrades! He didn’t want nothing for himself——”
page 13
[more select than the Union League Club] Various Union Leagues were founded during the Civil War in major Northern communities by Republican Party businessmen to support and influence President Lincoln’s administration. Afterward they continued as partisan organizations seeking to control local politics. Prospective members were minutely screened to keep the clubs restricted to those with proper financial, social, and political credentials. Ethnic minorities and women were excluded until the 1960s, when discriminatory bylaws were challenged under national civil rights acts.
16
[He made lists…] Plato’s
Republic
and Edward Bellamy’s novel
Looking Backward
describe imaginary ideally organized and governed states that take their generic title from Sir Thomas More’s
Utopia
; Edward Gibbon, Thomas Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle, and William Hickling Prescott followed the example of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus in writing long accounts of major epochs in their own and other countries’ political histories; Spinoza, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer expounded systematic philosophies of human thought processes;
Das Kapital
is Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism that provided the basis for the planning of twentieth-century communist states.
23
[They walked through the business center of the city] The city is never named because Steinbeck wished to generalize the action rather than emphasize particular sites; but its geography is based upon that of San Jose, California, the home town of Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol. At that time it was a city of around 50,000 inhabitants, where the headquarters of the Communist Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union was located until its liquidation
in 1934. The street described resembles First Street; but there is no Lincoln Square (p. 7) in San Jose and California elected no Senator Morgan. These names were probably chosen for symbolic irony, as the square resembles San Jose’s St. James Park, where two kidnappers were lynched in 1933 with the governor’s approval. This event provided the starting point for Steinbeck’s short story "The Vigilante," in
The Long Valley.
27
[Here’s a copy of
New Masses.] New Masses
was the official organ of the Communist Party in the United States, founded in 1926 as a weekly. After a brief suspension in 1933, it reemerged in January 1934 and appeared weekly until 1949, when it was merged into a quarterly,
Masses and Mainstream.
35
[going down to the Torgas Valley] There is no Torgas Valley in California, but the area Steinbeck depicts resembles the Tagus Ranch in Tulare County, site of a peach strike in August 1933 that resembles in a few aspects the strike depicted in the novel. See Benson, pp. 298–302, for an account of sources Steinbeck used in creating a fictional composite from actual events.
38
[start a vigilantes committee] Vigilance committees were organized in San Francisco during the gold rush (1849–50) to curb rampant crime. Such "citizens’ committees" have been revived periodically, especially throughout the American West, during periods of emotional hysteria, like the anti-German campaign after the United States entered World War I.
72
[’Course the Wobblies done some good] "Wobblies" was a derisive name for members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a labor union discussed in the introduction.
150
[the wound is the first battleground] The most direct indication in the dialogue to the significance of the phrase quoted from Milton’s
Paradise Lost
as the novel’s title. Steinbeck originally titled the novel just "Dubious Battle" but insisted on adding the
preposition "In" to stress the process involving struggle rather than simply the event.
183
[It was Christmas on the Island] Steinbeck was much interested in the migrant workers’ songs. One of his last publications was a foreword to Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger’s
Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-hit People
(New York, 1967), in which he writes that "you can learn more about people by listening to their songs than in any other way." The song from which these lines come and other snatches in the novel are not included in this collection. It may never have been published. From the context, the "Island" is probably Alcatraz, then a notorious federal prison in San Francisco Bay.
183
[Bloody Thursday] July 5, 1934, was the day that the San Francisco police killed two pickets and wounded about seventy other people while attempting to break up the dock strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association (see Introduction).
200
[They’ve got this valley organized like Italy] Italy under Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship was often cited as an example of the efficient methods of authoritarian government ("He made the trains run on time").
210
[He didn’t see why food had to be dumped and left to rot when people were starving] Mac’s angry comment foreshadows Steinbeck’s own tirade in Chapter 25 of
The Grapes of Wrath
about "a crime that goes beyond denunciation" and endangers the American future.
259
[You can only build a violent thing with violence] Doc Burton summarizes Mahatma Gandhi’s doctrine of passive resistance, inspired by Henry Thoreau’s essay "Civil Disobethence." One must be careful, however, about taking this speech, like others of the characters, as necessarily representing Steinbeck’s viewpoint. This argument—like many of Burton’s—more closely resembles the
opinions of Steinbeck’s close friend Edward F. Ricketts, with whom he did not always agree.
261
[I could use some salvarsan] Salvar san, earlier known as 606, was the proprietary trademark name for arsphenamine, which in the 1930s was the drug most widely used for the treatment of syphilis and other spirochetal infections.
265
[I feel that way about all the workin’ stiffs in the country] Mac’s speech foreshadows perhaps the most famous one in a Steinbeck novel, in which Tom Joad in Chapter 28 of
The Grapes of Wrath
explains to his mother why he must leave the family and become an inspiration, operating secretly wherever poor people are struggling for justice and dignity.
271
[I guess you’re goin’ to be reportin’ me, maybe] One of the most frequent complaints by those disillusioned with the Communist Party in the 1930s was the way in which members of party cells were required to report others’ deviations from a changing party line that might lead to the offender’s expulsion.
276
[Joey, he wants to be a postman] This is another foreshadowing of
The Grapes of Wrath,
which indicates Steinbeck’s stronger promotion of a "back-to-the-soil" movement in the later novel. Here Joey makes no secret of his ambition to escape the fields and provide a different life for his wife and baby, and he is treated sympathetically; in the later novel, Connie Rivers sneaks off to town to learn to become a radio repairman, abandoning his wife and unborn child.
299
[as foreign as the Hoover administration] Herbert Hoover’s administration (1929–1933) strongly supported the traditional Republican Party policies of high protective tariffs on imported goods and strict isolationism in foreign affairs.
300
[I.L.D.’d come through and break that upstairs shooting of Joy] International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal arm of the Communist Party in the United States, had been organized at a national congress in Chicago in 1925. It was active through the 1930s in defending strikers and minorities, especially blacks. During World War II it concentrated on military charges against black servicemen. In 1946 it merged into the Civil Rights Congress (see Mari Jo Buhle, et al., editors,
Encyclopedia of the American Left,
New York, 1990).
*
Most quotations from John Steinbeck’s letters are derived from more complete texts in Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, editors,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(New York: Viking Press, 1975). Additional material from personal letters may be found in Jackson J. Benson,
The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer
(New York: Viking Press, 1984).
*
Examples of this genre are collected in Granville Hicks, editor,
Proletarian Literature in the United States
(New York, 1936); for an evaluation of the contents, see David G. Pugh, “Reading the Proletarians—Thirty Years Later,” in
The Thirties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama,
edited by Warren French (Deland, Fla., 1967), 89-95.