A Testament for Organizers

There is a collective wisdom and lore passed down among agitators, it turns out. I associated it most with Saul Alinsky, but reading Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle -- probably the greatest literary treatment of the pre-Cold War Heroic Age of the American Communist Party -- one sees that it is in fact of older lineage than that. Indeed, it may be downright ancient. Steinbeck's organizer characters seem to have learned well the lessons of the New Testament, for instance (apart from that whole business about turning the other cheek).

We learn from the Penguin Classics Introduction that Steinbeck made the comparison himself to the original disciples, and it was not necessarily one he intended flatteringly. The two CP organizers at the heart of this novel are certainly wise as serpents, if not always as innocent as doves. One of the pair, Mac, is a kind of social chameleon. Someone accuses him at one point of being a "born actor" who, as soon as he is dropped in the midst of a new group of people, will start to imitate all their speech and ways.

American Dreamers

Saul Bellow's monumental picaresque The Adventures of Augie March is routinely described as "The Great American Novel." It is also, not coincidentally, a great novel of immigration. Augie himself is the child of an immigrant—though he is personally, and famously, "Chicago born." And among his many and varied abortive career paths, he at one point strikes out with an acquaintance of dubious character to try his hand at smuggling immigrants across the Canadian border.

This is in the midst of the Great Depression, when U.S. borders were on effective lock-down, and Augie runs no small legal risk by participating in the scheme. He needs money, however, and to the extent he has views on the people who might be paying for his services, he takes a humane and reasonable attitude: "Hell, why shouldn't they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There's enough to go around of everything including hard luck."