[...] Steinbeck turned out 120,000 words in five months, beginning early in September 1934, only weeks after the notorious Bloody Thursday (mentioned several times in the text), July 5, 1934, when San Francisco police made international headlines by shooting two people and wounding many others in an effort to break up a longshoremen’s strike. The eyes of the world were on the turbulent scene in California for another reason: social-protest novelist Upton Sinclair was conducting a strident campaign for the state’s governorship based on his EPIC (End Poverty in California) share-the-wealth plan.

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.

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.

Yet Steinbeck is not “merely the recording consciousness” that he sought to be. Although he avoids authorial intrusions like some interchapters of The Grapes of Wrath, there are limits to the objective comprehensiveness of the narrative. We do not get to see all contenders from all points of view. The growers are represented on the scene only by the unctuous Mr. Bolter, who attempts to carry an olive branch into the enemy camp in Chapter 13. Bolter’s spiel suggests that there are factions and disagreements among the growers, as there are shown to be in the community; but readers learn of these only in his biased presentation. In order to maintain the point of view that shapes the novel, Steinbeck necessarily narrows his focus and avoids panoramic views of the battleground and battlers.

This process of maturing usually takes years, but Jim Nolan is on a crash course. He has made a late start, characteristic of much American youth; and he must respond quickly to the urgent pressures upon him. When we meet him in his twilit room, he is confused and dejected, without any sense of purpose; eight days later he has developed self-confidence and discovered the latent cunning that enables him to make a bid to take command of a deteriorating situation. He has made remarkable progress, proving himself an apt and resourceful student who quickly develops leadership abilities. Steinbeck is especially concerned to create a figure who is gifted and quick-witted, but whose innate qualities have been scorned by an apathetic, self-seeking society, resentful of upstarts.

Steinbeck certainly did not share Jim Nolan’s aspirations to become a labor organizer by committing himself to some abstract cause beyond himself, but he did seek to influence readers’ attitudes through his fiction. He shunned commitments because ultimately he believed in himself and his talent, although it was many years before he could display this self-confidence publicly. Ironically, his fiction declined in public esteem when he began to cast his alter egos in the role of savior, as in The Wayward Bus.

The power of his early works lies in his ability to infuse his characters with dreams resembling his own in intensity, although he avoided the familiar portrayal of a young writer’s struggle for success. Through his portrayal of Jim Nolan’s self-discovery of his leadership capabilities in In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck is making a case for the recognition of his own talent. Although he had become a nationally known success before the novel was published, he had written it when he considered himself a failure, when he could conceive of Jim Nolan’s faceless doom as possibly his own. Small wonder at the violence of his outrage over the interference of a New York “parlor pink” who threatened to jeopardize his career just when it seemed to be taking off.

Nilson touched the desk here and there with his fingertips. “Even the people you’re trying to help will hate you most of the time. Do you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, why do you want to join, then?”

Jim’s grey eyes half closed in perplexity. At last he said, “In the jail there were some Party men. They talked to me. Everything’s been a mess, all my life. Their lives weren’t messes. They were working toward something. I want to work toward something. I feel dead. I thought I might get alive again.”

Jim jumped up and stood in front of the bench and whipped the leaf skeleton across his palm. “I’m getting to this: In that cell were five men all raised in about the same condition. Some of them worse, even. And while there was anger in them, it wasn’t the same kind of anger. They didn’t hate a boss or a butcher. They hated the whole system of bosses, but that was a different thing. It wasn’t the same kind of anger. And there was something else, Mac. The hopelessness wasn’t in them. They were quiet, and they were working; but in the back of every mind there was conviction that sooner or later they would win their way out of the system they hated. I tell you, there was a kind of peacefulness about those men.”

Lean-face burst out angrily. “Know what they’re payin’, fella? Fifteen cents, fifteen lousy cents!"

“Well, what do you want?” Mac demanded. “Jesus Christ, man! You ain’t got the nerve to say you want to eat? You can eat an apple while you’re workin’. All them nice apples!” His tone grew hard. “S’pose we don’t pick them apples?”

Lean-face cried, “We got to pick ’em. Spent every Goddamn cent gettin’ here.”

Mac repeated softly, “All them nice apples. If we don’t pick ’em, they’ll rot.”

“If we don’t pick ’em, somebody else will.”

“S’pose we didn’t let nobody else pick?” Mac said.

The men about the fire grew tense. “You mean—strike?” Lean-face asked.

Mac laughed. “I don’t mean nothin’.”

“Sure they liked it. Men always like to work together. There’s a hunger in men to work together. Do you know that ten men can lift nearly twelve times as big a load as one man can? It only takes a little spark to get them going. Most of the time they’re suspicious, because every time someone gets ’em working in a group the profit of their work is taken away from them; but wait till they get working for themselves. Tonight the work concerned them, it was their job; and see how well they did it.”

Jim said, “You didn’t need all that cloth. Why did you tell London to burn it?”

“Look, Jim. Don’t you see? Every man who gave part of his clothes felt that the work was his own. They all feel responsible for that baby. It’s theirs, because something from them went to it. To give back the cloth would cut them out. There’s no better way to make men part of a movement than to have them give something to it. I bet they all feel fine right now.”

A truck went by, carrying off the filled boxes. The old man continued, “I was in the north woods when the Wobblies was raising hell. I’m a top-faller, a damn good one. Maybe you noticed how I take to a tree at my age. Well, I had hopes then. ’Course the Wobblies done some good, used to be there was no crappers but a hole in the ground, and no place to take a bath. The meat used to spoil. Well, them Wobblies made ’em put in toilets and showers; but, hell, it all went to pieces.” His hand went up automatically for more apples. “I joined unions,” he said. “We’d elect a president and first thing we knowed, he’d be kissing the ass of the superintendent, and then he’d sell us out. We’d pay dues, and the treasurer’d run out on us. I don’ know. Maybe you young squirts can figure something out. We done what we could.”