NOTES AND QUESTIONS ON JOHN STEINBECK, IN DUBIOUS BATTLE, AND
ROBIN KELLEY, “WE ARE NOT WHAT WE SEEM”

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In Dubious Battle was one of the first successes for the novelist John Steinbeck, who eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature. Here are a few questions to think about as you read the book.

1. What motivates the organizers and other radicals? Ideology? Personal ambition? Grievances? Psychological problems?

2. How do the fruit pickers respond to Mac and Jim's efforts? What factors account for the successes and failures they encounter?

3. What were the barriers to victory that Mac and Jim faced? Did the strike fail because of external forces (e.g. repression and poverty) or internal difficulties in organizing a militant strike?

4. Consider the roles that some of the characters play. Which of them seem most sympathetic? Do you think that Steinbeck identifies with any of them? Do you identify with any of them?

5. What do you think of Doc's theories about "group men"? What implications might they have for radical organizing?

6. How would a novel written about agricultural workers in California today differ from In Dubious Battle? How might farm workers and labor organizers today react to this novel?

7. What does the title mean? Where does it come from?

8. Steinbeck claimed that what interested him about the strike was "man's eternal, bitter warfare with himself."  But we're approaching this as an historical document from and about a specific time period, the 1930s.  In what ways is this distinctly a Depression-era story?  In what ways is it "eternal"?

“We Are Not What We Seem": Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South

Robin D. G. Kelley

The Journal of American History, Vol. 80, No. 1. (June 1993), pp. 75-112. If you’re on campus or properly logged in from off campus, this link should get you to the article. If you’re off-campus, try this one. You’ll have to login with your duckid and password.

This article, by one of the most important African American historians in recent years, looks at the varied and sometimes surprising ways that Black workers in the South in the 1930s and 1940s resisted segregation and fought for racial equality. Here are some questions for your consideration about this article

1. What attracted poor rural African Americans in Alabama to the Communist Party in the 1930s?

2. How did they reconcile their radicalism with their Christian beliefs?

3. Did the Communist Party manipulate (or attempt to manipulate) African Americans?  What did Communists accomplish in their efforts in the Deep South?

4. Around 1935, the Communist Party started de-emphasizing its revolutionary rhetoric in favor a "Popular Front," a reform-oriented coalition with other left-wing reform groups.  Kelley suggests that this switch in the "party line" harmed its work with African Americans in the South.  Why?

5. After the midterm, we’ll be reading and discussing a different interpretation of the origins of the civil rights movement, Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street. When you read that, think back to this article and consider whether Kelley’s interpretation and McGuire’s are complementary or contradictory.

History 351
Winter 2012