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.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Introduction
Suggestions for Further Reading
In Dubious Battle
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Notes
Footnotes
Introduction
Page VII
Page XXIII
In Dubious Battle Page 31