Many novelists during the 1930s committed themselves to documenting both the causes of the Great Depression and the quest for substantial improvement in the lives of that "one-third of the nation" who most suffered its grim effects. John Steinbeck's (1902-68) In Dubious Battle (1936) lacks the dramatic sweep of his The Grapes of Wrath (1939) but avoids that novel's misplaced epic pretensions. Instead, Steinbeck focuses here on three men: Mac, a communist; Jim, his younger protege; and Doc Burton, an apolitical figure who nevertheless sympathizes with the apple pickers Mac and Jim are trying to organize against "the capitalist sonsobitches." Although Mac's rigid, doctrinaire politics ultimately prove ineffective, he does manage to stiffen Jim's gentle, rather passive humanity. As Jim prepares to make his first speech to the workers, he is murdered by a shotgun blast to his face. Burton has, by the time Jim dies, already left the scene of this "dubious battle" (a reference to the struggle in Milton's Paradise Lost between Satan and the heavenly forces), a hint--which is all Steinbeck provides--that the struggle will continue, but without a predictable outcome.

Josephine Herbst's (1897-1969) Rope of Gold (1939) is the final novel in a trilogy about the Trexler family of Iowa (where Herbst was born) and its descendants. The first novel, Pity Is Not Enough (1933), explores their involvement in social, economic, and political events from 1868-96, including late 19th-century railroad frauds, grain monopolies, and Klondike fever. The Executioner Waits (1934) covers 1902-29: profiteering during World War I and the social and economic excesses of the 1920s. Rope of Gold ranges through the 1930s to 1937 and a climactic sit-down strike inside an auto factory in Detroit. Like the first two novels, it exposes and assails the weaknesses of capitalism. In Rope of Gold, one of the Trexler descendants, Victoria Chance (whose life in many ways parallels Herbst's), becomes the center of the novel. She and her husband, Jonathan, drift slowly but inevitably apart, their once deep love shriveling beneath family pressures, poverty, miscarriage, affairs, and failed reconciliations. A handsome, articulate writer, Jonathan identifies with social protest earlier than his wife and even gains prominence in the Communist Party. But the party exploits him as a "front," useful merely as a fund-raiser. While Jonathan wallows in self-pity, Victoria compensates with action and commitment. She develops her skills as a reporter and thrusts herself into situations where those skills are tested (especially when she investigates corruption in corporate sugar dealings in dictator Fulgencio Batista's Cuba). The society in which the couple dwell certainly contributes to the destruction of their love, but Herbst makes clear that it is Victoria, the woman, who commands the ability to discover and fulfill her emotional and intellectual potential.

Herbst's portraiture extends beyond these two. Jonathan's father is a tight-fisted reactionary, unwilling to offer financial help so long as Jonathan continues writing instead of going into business. One of Victoria's sisters, Nancy, is wed to Clifford Radford, a decent, simple fellow helpless in the web of economic depression, reduced at last to earning a substandard wage as an orderly in an asylum--where he must live, apart from his family. Another sister, Margaret, despises her gross, bigoted, union-busting husband, Ed Thompson, the most stereotypic of Herbst's characters. Newly returned from Europe, Lester Tolman, a writer and friend of Victoria and Jonathan, has seen the terrors of Nazism and is intellectually attracted to radicalism, but he finds it difficult to give up the pleasures offered by his mistress, a beautiful but faithless actress. When at last he does and joins Victoria in Cuba to develop their story of international corruption in the sugar industry, he becomes so convinced that Cuban and American business interests will prevail over justice that he abandons their assignment and gets drunk.

Few of Herbst's characters are willing to make Victoria's radical political commitment. One who does is a character she never meets and about whom she knows nothing. Steve Carson grows up as the surviving child of Walt Carson, a socialist Nebraskan homesteader whose wife and four other children die when a cyclone destroys their new home. Walt marries Steve's schoolteacher and moves his new family to a farm in South Dakota, where the family prospers until World War I, when land becomes more valuable than produce. Banks and real estate interests force farmers off land they own but can no longer afford to work. The farmers picket, a strike breaker is killed, and Steve is arrested as a scapegoat, though he goes free for lack of evidence.

Ten years later, fired with memories of betrayal by the "bloated Capitalists," frustrated by years of drought, hail, frost, and grasshoppers, and enraged by the corruption and cruelty of banks and insurance companies, Steve Carson enlists in the workers' movement. He despises the technology at his factory because it takes production out of the hands of labor; he despises his father-in-law for keeping him on a farm and paying him too little to live on. When his best friend is murdered by a gang of "town guys" and "Legion fellows," Steve begs his wife to let him go, determined to stand beside the worker rather than lie beside his wife. He reappears in the final chapter of the novel, writing a love letter to his wife as he squats inside a Detroit auto plant where he and his fellow workers are staging a sit-down strike to protest the company's demands of increased speed on the assembly line. The last man to swing over the fence and join the workers inside shouts to the crowd--National Guardsmen and workers' wives--"Brothers and sisters, we're only fighting for our human rights, better to die like men than live like dogs on the speedup."

Steve Carson is a lovable character but also a stereotypic one--the idealized proletarian whose vision presages ultimate victory. Compared with Victoria, Steve lacks complexity. But whatever the weaknesses in his characterization, Herbst offers in Rope of Gold an intricate portrait of life during the Great Depression and in the trilogy as a whole a valuable portrait of the events that led to that catastrophe.

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