In Dubious Battle Read Free

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 ofBloody 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