The Social Mind

After the commercial failure of his historical romance Cup of Gold and his California novel To a God Unknown, John Steinbeck faced a critical juncture in his career before he found success with his labor trilogy. Then, in the early 1930s, he turned toward new material. Drawing on conversations with Ed Ricketts, Joseph Campbell, and Richard and George Albee, among others, Steinbeck developed his “Argument of Phalanx”—loosely based on the Greek military arrangement of a body of troops that stand or move in close formation—as a social philosophy concerning man’s relations within groups. The problem of men uniting into hordes under a pseudo-Christian cause had previously manifested itself in American texts, ranging from the satire against lynching in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the mob attacking Wing Biddlebaum in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. While Steinbeck sometimes advocated his phalanx argument for dire circumstances, he largely used the theory to suggest that the group is able to achieve momentous social change through sheer power. This concept, especially during the Great Depression, fueled some of Steinbeck’s most powerful novels about workers struggling against the injustices of capitalism or refugees surviving military oppression. Much has been written on the influences behind Steinbeck’s group-man theories, especially as they appear in The Grapes of Wrath.1 Missing from this discourse on the phalanx argument, however, has been the influence of UCLA philosopher John Elof Boodin. Jackson Benson left a trail on Boodin for scholars to follow in his comment that Richard Albee brought to Steinbeck an “enthusiasm for the philosophy of one of his professors, John Elof Boodin, a philosophy The Social Mind