=John Steinbeck: The Party Organizer.= Appearing in 1936, Steinbeck’s _In Dubious Battle_ sociologically described the violent course and tragic end of a Communist-organized strike of apple pickers in California’s Torgas Valley. Shortly after he applies for membership in the Party, young Jim Nolan is taken down into the valley by McLeod, a hard-shelled, veteran Communist organizer. The underpaid pickers, living in squalor, follow Mac when he helps precipitate the strike. As the apprentice, Jim follows each move carefully, learning both theory and practice from Mac, who wants violence and a prolonged strike in order to gain wide attention and pave the way for organizing subsequent picking operations. Adept and devoted, Jim learns quickly despite a gunshot wound and increasing hunger. He even assumes temporary leadership over Mac when the latter’s vitality momentarily sags. At the book’s end, with the strike failing, Jim falls into a trap and his face is blown off by a shotgun blast. Mac carries his body to the strikers’ camp platform. The book’s last line is Mac’s funeral oration for Jim: “Comrades! He didn’t want nothing for himself.” The novel may be considered a social and political study; the picture that emerges is one of economic oppression, embattled workers, and hard but devoted organizers. =Sinclair Lewis: Native Fascism.= Sinclair Lewis’s fifteenth book also appeared in 1936, and its title is an indication of the jolt it was meant to give to American complacency. _It Can’t Happen Here_ is the story of the American republic transformed into a Fascist corporate state through a military coup d’état made possible by an electorate which was attracted by share-the-wealth schemes, anti-minority agitation, and primitive emotionalism. The methods of the Nazis and Fascists are applied to eradicate the democratic system and even the boundaries of states. The country is divided into eight provinces, concentration camps devour the dissenters and the suspect, and all of American life is harshly regimented. Lewis’s hero is “bourgeois intellectual” Doremus Jessup. After he has lost his newspaper, his daughter, and his son-in-law, he becomes a member of the New Underground. When revolution wins back only half the country, he enters the other half as a secret agent. This novel has most of the faults and virtues of Lewis’s other books: character merging into caricature, complete lack of subtlety, and embarrassingly awkward dialogue; but with this there is accurate social criticism, a genuine if crude vitality, and--particularly in this novel--a very earnest concern for American traditions. Lewis’s point is made clear as Jessup reflects that the tyranny of the dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogue wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.