Character Clues
Character Analysis
Social Status
Okay, just in case you missed it, the battle in this work happens between the haves and have-nots, so recognition of social status is important as you read this work. Some cues are pretty subtle: Dakin and his wife have expensive dental work; Lisa and her father are dispossessed landholders. Others are not so subtle: the workers are dirty, malnourished, generally destitute; Bolter wears a brand new suit and arrives in a big car.
Yet other characters land firmly in the center of this spectrum and are perhaps the hardest hit: Al and his father, middle-class guys who lose all of their possessions; the checkers at the orchard, who aren't landholders and yet have pretty okay jobs. These middle-of-the-road fellas are the ones to watch, since they represent a great percentage of American workers.
Speech & Dialogue
Doc Burton wonders if Mac is playing everyone around him because he's so good at imitating speech. Mac tells him to take a walk: he just naturally picks up on these things, he says. It's also a good talent to have if your job is to win people over.
Doc's observation and Mac's response to it show an awareness of the importance of speech in this work, which is so intensely focused on issues of social justice. It doesn't take careful observation to count the number of apostrophes that pop up when men like London start talkin'.
This particular linguistic trick means that we've found someone on the bottom of the social scale. Basically, if verbs start endin' in –in', the person who's speaking is in the working class. If you pay attention to the speech of Doc Burton and Bolter, on the other hand, you'll find a lengthening out of words, a substitution of "have" for the more colloquial "got," and a more theoretical train of thought.
Occupation
Occupation tells us something immediately about class, politics, and which characters have a high probability of landing in jail. While the workers as a whole are an oppressed segment of society in this work, there are further ranks within the camp.
The leaders—London, Burke, and Dakin—have positions of relative importance among the men. The agitators (Mac, Jim, Sam) offer higher levels of experience and managerial expertise. The run-of-the-mill workers are the "group-men," the arms and legs and hands of the movement.
The minions of the Growers' Association offer us a dazzling array of worker bees. Everyone from Bolter (executive) to the superintendent (corporate shill) to the checkers (working stiff, college degree) and the newly deputized cops (vigilantes with a badge) makes an appearance.
While they all ultimately have the same employer, each of these guys is surely looking out for number one. How is the situation different for the lowly workers? Well, for the present, it isn't. But that is what Mac and Jim are trying to change by uniting the workers in solidarity, and by teaching them to look at the bigger picture.