Early in In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck, a woman in a migrant camp goes into labour and there is no doctor. Mac, who has arrived that afternoon and knows nothing about childbirth, announces that he has medical training and delivers the baby by nerve and hot water. It goes well. Afterwards he explains to his young companion exactly why he did it: two hundred men now trust him, and that is worth more than any speech.
Nothing in In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck is more characteristic than that scene, and nothing more reliably divides a room.
What In Dubious Battle Makes of Mac
A reading group will spend most of an evening on one question: is Mac a good man?
The evidence for is substantial. He is brave, funny, entirely without self-pity, and takes risks he could avoid. He treats the pickers as adults. And he is right about almost every tactical judgement he makes, and he has given his life to people who will never know his name.
The evidence against is the same evidence. The childbirth is a recruitment exercise. When an old organiser with crushed hands is shot dead in the street, Mac’s first clear thought is that the funeral will be the best organising tool they have had. He steers a wounded boy toward the cameras. Spotting who the pickers already follow, he attaches himself to that man and operates from behind him, which spares the camp an election it might have got wrong.
Steinbeck does not adjudicate. There is no narrator leaning in to approve or condemn, and the omission is the whole design of In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck. Readers have claimed the novel for the left and the right for ninety years, which is the clearest evidence that the refusal was sincere.
Jim Is What In Dubious Battle Is Really Watching
The strike is the plot of In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck. The subject is a young man being converted.
Jim Nolan begins in a rented room with nothing left: his father beaten to death, his mother dead, his sister vanished, himself just out of jail for being near a demonstration he had no part in. He joins the Party because there is no other structure on offer.
What follows is not idealism but acceleration. Jim becomes useful, then effective, then impatient with Mac’s caution, then frightening. By the final chapters he has stopped seeing individual people at all, and the organiser who trained him is visibly unnerved by what he has produced.
That trajectory is the real argument, and it is bleaker than any statement about capital and labour. A group should track how early Jim stops being persuadable.
The Doctor Says the Quiet Part
Doc Burton attaches himself to the strike to handle sanitation and keep the health inspectors away, and he is not a Party member. He is also the only character permitted to analyse what is happening.
His theory treats a crowd as one creature with appetites of its own. Group-man, he calls it, and when the thing stirs it supplies itself with a justification after the fact. Recapturing the Holy Land. Making the world safe for democracy. Abolishing injustice through communism. The slogans, he suggests, exist to reassure the individual minds inside the mass; the mass itself simply wants to move.
Put that in front of a group and watch it land. It denies the strikers their stated cause and the vigilantes theirs in the same sentence, and it is spoken by the most humane person in the book.
What Will Frustrate a Group
Several things in In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck are genuinely open to complaint:
Jim’s hardening happens too fast to be fully convincing, and serves the argument more than the character.
Burton occasionally stops the novel to lecture, in paragraphs no doctor would say aloud in a tent.
The growers never become people. They act through vigilantes, the press and the county, and remain a weather system.
Women are almost absent. Lisa, who gives birth in the opening movement, is the only one with any presence at all.
Where In Dubious Battle Came From
Steinbeck wrote In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck in 1935, having spent time around the California valleys during a decade of bitter agricultural disputes, and before he had written a word of the books that made his politics famous.
What is startling is the sequence. Tortilla Flat appeared the year before, and treats the same coastal poor as charming incompetents. This novel gives them organisation, strategy and fury. Three years later came The Grapes of Wrath, which takes a side without hesitation. In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck sits exactly between the fondness and the anger, and is better than either at refusing to flatter the reader.
Of Mice and Men, from the following year, is the same workforce reduced to two men and a dream.
The Growers Never Appear
Worth noticing, because it changes the kind of book In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck is: the other side has no faces in it.
The apple growers who cut the picking rate are never shown deciding anything. They act through a vigilante committee that arrives at night, through a newspaper that prints what it is told, and through a county health inspector who can close a camp on a technicality. Nobody in the novel ever meets a grower and argues with him.
That could be read as a failure of nerve or of imagination. It is more useful to read it as accurate. The pickers have no access to the people making the decisions, and the novel refuses to grant the reader an access its characters do not have. Power here is procedural and arrives as a notice, a rumour or a man with a shotgun, and never as a conversation.
The cost is real. With no opposing argument on the page, the strike’s defeat reads as weather rather than as something anybody chose, and a group may feel the book has let the growers off precisely by never putting them in the dock.
Questions for the Table
Mac uses everyone, including himself. Does that make him admirable or dangerous?
If Doc Burton is right about group-man, does the strike mean anything?
Jim has nothing when the novel opens. Is his conversion freely chosen?
The growers are never humanised. Is that a flaw or a point?
Does the novel want the strike to succeed?
What It Leaves Behind
The last scene is among the most ruthless in American fiction and it is over in a page.
Jim is lured into the dark and shot in the face. Mac brings the body back through a silent crowd, hauls it onto the stand, props it against a corner post and steadies it when it slides. A lantern goes down beside the head, placed so that it shows. Then he takes the rail and starts talking. This guy, he says, didn’t want nothing for himself.
The sentence does not finish. In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck stops on a dash, with a man using his dead friend as a lectern and a reader who has spent three hundred pages learning to recognise exactly this technique.
Whether that is monstrous or simply what winning requires is the argument to take into the evening. Steinbeck knew the answer he preferred. He had the discipline not to supply it.