The Land of Plenty by Robert Cantwell

First published: 1934

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The early 1930’s

Locale: A small mill town in western Washington State

Principal Characters:

• Hagen, an electrician and natural leader of the night shift at the veneer factory
• Johnny, his son, recently hired at the plant
• Carl Belcher, the night foreman
• MacMahon, the manager of the plant
• Winters, another experienced worker
• Walt Connor, a contemporary of Johnny’s
• Ellen, and
• Marie Turner, sisters working at the plant
• Rose MacMahon, the manager’s daughter

The Novel

The Land of Plenty is divided into two parts and covers a few tense days in a strike at a veneer plant in western Washington. While little time passes in the novel, Robert Cantwell manages to convey fully both the socioeconomic forces and the psychological tensions in this workplace. Part 1, “Power and Light,” covers less than an hour, but it is a gripping depiction of the confused actions in that brief time. The first chapter opens, “Suddenly the lights went out.” A failure at the power house away from the plant is the cause, but the factory is now in darkness, both literally and figuratively. Carl, the night foreman, who should be in charge, is paralyzed by the darkness and by his unfamiliarity with the plant. Meanwhile, a hoist man has been hurt when the power shut down and a huge log crushed him, and part of the drama of part 1 comes from the reader’s knowledge that this worker lies injured somewhere in the darkness.

While Carl is wandering around in the dark, Hagen, the real leader of the night shift, is advising other workers what to do, trying to send messages to Carl, and working to save life and property. Yet the tensions between management and workers are terrible, and every action is preceded by a calculation of how it will affect job security. These tensions make the decisions of part 1 doubly difficult: whether to “pull the fires” in the furnaces, for example, or to break into the locked factory office to call the power house.

As the characters wander in the dark, Cantwell slowly reveals their situations. The date is July 3, the day before a national holiday, but there is hardly a festive mood. It is early in the Depression of the 1930’s, and the economic troubles of the country are apparent in the Northwest as well. Fifty men have been fired since Carl arrived, and there have been two paycuts. These economic woes have been compounded by personal problems. Ed Winters, the halfbreed who is Johnny’s crew boss, has a wife dying of cancer in the hospital; Marie Turner, on the line this night, is still sick from the abortion she had a few days before.

In the one chapter of part 1 that leaves the darkness of the factory, Cantwell depicts the tensions in Rose MacMahon’s house as her parents fight over money. The only thing that saves the situation is the power failure, and Rose is enlisted to drive her father to the plant to see what is wrong. Once he is there, the action of the novel, in the last four chapters, accelerates. Winters hits Carl and grabs his flashlight to help save the hoist man. He then commandeers Rose’s car and drives it over the tideflats to use the headlights to illuminate the rescue scene. Carl, meanwhile, wandering in the plant, falls through the floor and runs into MacMahon in the mud below the factory; the two managers argue economics as they struggle in the muck.

The hoist man is finally freed and sent to the hospital, but in his frustration at the whole situation, Carl fires Winters and then Hagen. The workers convince MacMahon to rescind the firings and now realize their power; in the last lines of part 1, Cantwell writes, “They were proud; they were excited. . . . They had their first sure knowledge of their strength.” Part 2, “The Education of a Worker,” develops the consequences of this dark night. It is the Fourth of July, the hoist man has died, and different characters meet and talk about what will happen. When they arrive for work the next day, Johnny and his father discover that management has laid off twenty workers, including Hagen and Winters, and the night shift walks out, calls out the day shift, and the strike begins. Yet the strikers soon realize that they are facing not only the owners but also the combined forces of management, the police, and the press.

A picket line is set up, and everything moves smoothly until a rainstorm hits and the strikers break for the shelter of the factory. Once inside, they mingle with the scabs who have taken over their jobs, and the police have trouble maintaining order. One of the strikers cuts the power, the police shoot a scab by mistake, and the strikers take over the plant. The die has been cast, and the forces in this tragedy are now arrayed against each other in the driving rain. Digby, the plant’s owner, shows up at MacMahon’s house to direct the actions against the strikers. More strikers sneak into the factory; in the last dramatic moments, fights break out in the rain, Ellen Turner is clubbed by the police, and Hagen is shot. Johnny escapes across the tideflats, and the novel ends as he sits in the brush with two other workers, “listening and waiting for the darkness to come like a friend and set them free.”

The Characters

Each of the twenty-three chapters in The Land of Plenty is titled with a character’s name. Six chapters are Johnny Hagen’s, five revolve around Walt Connor, three Carl Belcher, two each for Hagen and Winters, and one each for Marie, Ellen, and “The Light Man” who is trying to collect money from Hagen on his electricity bill. In this way, Cantwell is able to describe both action and motivation from different perspectives; in fact, in what is a daring move, the first chapter of The Land of Plenty is narrated from the consciousness of Carl Belcher, who of course becomes one of the leading villains in the story. Cantwell’s method works well; instead of feeling that the odds have been stacked in this class war, readers view Depression situations from the perspectives of all the different characters, strikers and managers alike.

While the major action in the novel is carried by the more experienced characters such as Hagen, Winters, and Carl, the title of part 2—“The Education of a Worker”— shows that the novel is really about the next generation, Johnny and Walt, and these two characters have nearly half the chapters in the book, all but four in part 2. The parallels between the two young men are clear, for both have had to forgo plans for college to return to work. Yet while Johnny learns over the course of the novel that “the workingman hasn’t got a chance,” Walt goes over to management. It is his education as well as Johnny’s, however, for he learns in the end just how corrupt the owners are.

The focus in the novel is not exclusively on character, for Cantwell uses character to drive the dramatic action, and part of his attention is on the conditions of these people. Given this stress, it is amazing how full-drawn many of the characters are. Only a few characters—such as the owner Digby, who blames imaginary communists for the strike and urges managers to bribe city officials—come across as two-dimensional. In short, there is a psychological accuracy to the novel that matches the socioeconomic truths Cantwell is revealing. This is a strike novel, but it works because readers care about all the characters and how they are trapped, both in the world of the veneer factory and in the Depression.

The novel is also successful because its style is clean and not overloaded with literary devices. Even the symbolism of the novel is underplayed: The story begins and remains much in darkness, which clearly represents the condition of all the characters as well as the failure of capitalism itself. Similarly, the setting is a door factory, and yet there are few exits or escapes for any of the characters. The managers fall through holes in the floor and wander lost in the muck; the strikers must run free of the factory to save themselves.

Critical Context

The Land of Plenty was one of the best proletarian novels that was produced during the Depression, especially in the first half of the 1930’s, as writers responded to worsening socioeconomic conditions and described these conditions for the poor and unemployed. The leftward literary movement, which would culminate in novels like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), also saw dozens of novels such as Cantwell’s and plays such as Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1936), social realist works that depicted working conditions from the perspective of the laboring classes and envisioned workers finding the strength to overcome the forces of capitalism that exploited them.

Cantwell produced one earlier novel, Laugh and Lie Down (1931), and wrote a number of short stories, but, like many 1930’s writers, he drifted away from his early social realism and actually ended his career in the 1960’s as one of the first editors of Sports Illustrated. Still, his novel stands as a landmark in an important literary movement in America, sparked by Marxist literary criticism but truly fueled by the conditions under which people in the Depression were forced to live. In 1932, when one out of every four workers was unemployed, even the blindest of American writers recognized emerging social realist subjects. Robert Cantwell was one of dozens of writers who responded to these Depression conditions and produced lasting literary works. More than half a century later, it is hard to name a novel that describes working conditions and strikes with the accuracy and drama of The Land of Plenty.

Bibliography

Conroy, Jack. “Robert Cantwell’s Land of Plenty.” In Proletarian Writers of the Thirties, edited by Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. A proletarian novelist himself (The Disinherited, 1933), Conroy gives a positive reading of Cantwell’s novel thirty-five years later.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996. Denning only deals with The Land of Plenty in passing, but his study is the best account of the radical literary culture of the 1930’s.

Moore, Harry T. Preface to the The Land of Plenty, by Robert Cantwell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. Moore’s preface to this reissue of The Land of Plenty gives the broad biographical background to Cantwell’s novel.

Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956. This early study is still the best overview of the proletarian novel of the 1930’s. Includes an excellent four-page analysis of The Land of Plenty.