A Political Companion to John Steinbeck

Chapter 12. Patriotic Ironies: John Steinbeck's Wartime Service to His Country

Patriotic Ironies: John Steinbeck’s Wartime Service to His Country 293 IRONIES ABOUND IN THE story of Steinbeck’s service to his country during World War II. Although his biographers generally acknowledge that Steinbeck was not, beyond his novels and journalism, particularly politically active until the war, others’ perceptions of his political leanings created considerable barriers for his attempts to serve his country. While many of his countrymen and peers sought deferments, cushy assignments, or other ways to escape military service, Steinbeck paradoxically had to fight his government in order to serve his nation. During the 1930s Steinbeck published a number of novels that sympathetically portrayed laborers, particularly migrant workers, while simultaneously criticizing a capitalist economy that ignored the plight of the common man, such as the Okie in The Grapes of Wrath or the migrant worker in In Dubious Battle. Despite such criticisms of his country, we argue, throughout his life Steinbeck acted like a bedrock American patriot. His was a complex kind of patriotism, not easily pigeonholed, as it contained a critical streak and existed alongside a more universal and ecological view of humankind than is traditionally associated with the potentially parochial characterization of patriotism. After his country was attacked, he became concerned with the evils that fascism posed not only to his country but also to the world. In this his patriotism converged with his larger cosmopolitan perspective.1 In addition, Steinbeck, anticipating later environmental thinkers, adopted an ecological view of humankind, a view that saw human communities or groups as part of a symbiotic whole, operating similarly to a tide pool. In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, published in 1941, he insists CHAPTER 12 Mimi R. Gladstein and James H. Meredith 294 Mimi R. Gladstein and James H. Meredith on the interconnectedness of the most minute and the largest components of the universe. His observation about the tide pool and the stars leads him to the conclusion that “ecology has a synonym which is ALL.”2 Unlike many of his literary contemporaries, Steinbeck was too young to participate in World War I, or what Dos Passos called the “Big Show.” The writers who were adults during the Great War were, in one way or another, deeply affected by it. F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the few writers who actually served in the U.S. military, did not see combat, his most significant regret in a life that was full of them. Hemingway was hit by a mortar while serving with the Red Cross Ambulance Service on the Italian Front and for the rest of his life his limp reminded all, especially his friend Fitzgerald, that he had seen action at the front. Although William Faulkner’s “war wounds” occurred during a drunken escapade on Armistice Day, this did not stop him from returning home with a jaunty cane and a feigned limp. By contrast, e.e. cummings’s experience of being held in a detention camp provided material for one of his first major works, The Enormous Room. While the list of who’s who in modernism and the military is extensive, the closest Steinbeck came to military service in the Great War was as a cadet in an early version of what would later become high school ROTC. He participated in marching drills and target practice and helped local farmers whose laborers had gone to war.3 Although he missed the Big Show, Steinbeck would not miss the next opportunity to serve his country. This he did with some distinction during World War II. At the outbreak of the Second World War John Steinbeck was middleaged and famous, the latter due to the publication of The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. The hysteria and acclaim that followed that novel’s success did not blind Steinbeck to the world outside. While preparing for a trip to the Sea of Cortez—a momentary escape from his new status as a popular writer—Steinbeck was mindful of an impending political storm. In a letter to his friend Carlton Sheffield Steinbeck writes, “The world is sick now. There are things in the tide pool easier to understand than Stalinist, Hitlerite, Democrat, capitalist confusion and voodoo.” Though he says that he wishes to “escape the general picture,” he acknowledges “the waves of nerves from Europe.”4 Mexico did not prove to be an “escape.” What he saw there prompted Steinbeck to write to Joseph Hamilton, an uncle working in Washington, “The Germans have absolutely outclassed the...