"The Hard Core That Could Not Be Defeated"

The Moon Is Down: Essential Reading for the Resistance in America 2025

By ten-forty-five it was all over. The town was occupied, the defenders defeated, and the war finished. The invader had prepared for this campaign as carefully as he had for larger ones. On this Sunday morning the postman and the policeman had gone fishing in the boat of Mr. Corell, the popular storekeeper. He had lent them his trim sailboat for the day. The postman and the policeman were several miles at sea when they saw the small, dark transport, loaded with soldiers, go quietly past them. As officials of the town, this was definitely their business, and these two put about, but of course the battalion was in possession by the time they could make port. The policeman and the postman could not even get into their offices in the Town Hall, and when they insisted on their rights they were taken prisoners of war and locked up in the town jail.[i]

This is the opening paragraph of John Steinbeck’s 1941 novel, The Moon is Down. I wanted to be sure you all know about this novel as it is very appropriate reading for living in 2025 America. In this short paragraph, we witness the blitzkrieg occupation of a small village in a fictitious Scandinavian country.

However, this post will not be a literary analysis of the novel as I want you to read it. Instead, I want to tell you why to read it: how Steinbeck was inspired by those living under Nazi and Fascist suppression during World War II—and how his novel became a work of resistance to the occupation of the Nazis and Fascists. Links to a free online copy and the movie are at the bottom of the post.

The story of the novel’s inception and its afterlife in occupied Europe can inspire us 2025 Americans to “be the hard core that could not be defeated.”

Back in the good ol’ days of the 1940s, when the United States stood for democracy under the US Constitution and was fighting fascism during World War II alongside its Allies, a well-known American writer stepped forward to create pro-democracy propaganda: John Steinbeck. By the time of World War II, Steinbeck was one of America’s esteemed novelists, having already penned Tortilla Flat (1925) and Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), for which he would receive the 1940 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Steinbeck frequently wrote his literary works with the view towards adapting them to the stage or film. He became involved with film adaptations of his works, including a 1939 cinematic version of Of Mice and Men.

In Spring of 1940, Steinbeck was in Mexico writing another screenplay, The Forgotten Village. The Nazis had become very active in Latin America, and Steinbeck picked up on their use of propaganda. He was worried that the Nazis were winning the war of propaganda.

On his return to the States, he met with President Roosevelt to discuss the problem. There are no notes of that meeting, but the meeting probably led to Steinbeck’s involvement with two new organizations in the United States that were being developed to garner intelligence and information: the two precursors of the CIA, the Office of Coordinator of Information (COI) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He began to work with them to develop his version of American propaganda: a novella, imbued with his deep understanding of the psychology of humans under occupation.

By September of 1941, he had learned about “the psychological effects of enemy occupation upon the populace of conquered nations.” He had met with people who had escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe. They told him of the resistance movement. While each country seemed to have differences in how they dealt with occupation due to their nationalities, they all had commonalities: the secret Nazi parties, the spies, the turncoats, the collaborators, the overall domineering Nazi harshness and cruelty.

Because he recognized these commonalities of fascist occupation, he also saw how what was happening in Europe could happen in America. He originally set the story in America:

“I wrote my fictional account about a medium-sized American town with its countryside of a kind I knew well. There would be collaborators certainly. Don’t forget the Bund meetings in our cities, the pro-German broadcasts before the war and the kind of man who loves any success: “Mussolini made the trains run on time.” “Hitler saved Germany from communism.” It was not beyond reason that our town would have its cowards, its citizens who sold out for profit. But under this, I did and do believe, would be the hard core that could not be defeated. And so I wrote my account basing its fiction on facts extracted from towns already under the Nazi heel.”[ii]

However, the American agencies would not accept the story being set in America, fearing that it would demoralize the country rather than bolster it. They could not imagine the Nazis and fascists taking over America—not even in a fictional piece of literature.

So, Steinbeck created a fictional country: “cold and stern like Norway, cunning and implacable like Denmark, reasonable like France.”[iii]

His title of the work, The Moon is Down, is taken from Act 2, line 2 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Banquo, co-commander of Duncan’s army alongside Macbeth, queries of his son, Fleance, as to the time. They do not know yet that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are planning to kill the king of Scotland, Duncan, but they are uneasy because they have heard the witches’ prophecies, and all does not seem well:

BANQUO: How goes the night, boy?

FLEANCE: The moon is down. I have not heard the clock.

BANQUO: And she goes down at twelve.

FLEANCE: I tak ‘t ‘tis later, sir.[iv]

In this early act and scene of the play (that really should not be named), the darkness lay upon the Kingdom of Scotland just as the darkness of the Nazis and Fascists started to fall over Europe.

Published in 1942, the novel came out during some of the bleakest days of World War II. The United States felt threats of invasion on both coasts.

Pearl Harbor had just happened the previous December; the United States was under threat on the West Coast. Hitler appeared to be unstoppable in Europe and encroached on the East Coast. German U-boats patrolled the Atlantic and came to American shores, sinking ships and breaking up the critical shipping lines to England.

The American public recognized the dangers of invasion. The novel appeared to be successful as propaganda to the American public. Steinbeck staged it as a play on Broadway, and a year later, it came out as a movie.

The novel is a very tight read, typical of Steinbeck’s spare-no-adjective style. Taking place in a quiet village, the tale is focused—and effective, complete with the invaders, the Quislings, the occupied, and the strands of hope and courage that would inspire anyone who was reading it in an occupied territory.

Literary critics, however, were not so easy on Steinbeck, and many wrote that it was too “soft” on the Nazis and that it didn’t live up to the quality of work they expected from Steinbeck.

In Europe after the war, it was recognized for its contributions to the Resistance. King Haakon VII gave Steinbeck a medal for it.

Yet unbeknownst to many at the time or shortly after the war, including Steinbeck, the novel had taken on several covert lives of its own, lives that were not discovered until long after the end of the war. Through the translations created by underground resisters across Europe, the novel spread through Nazi and Fascist occupied Europe.

The work was translated into Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and French. Underground operators printed hundreds of thousands copies of it on clandestine presses, and ordinary people took great risks to distribute it. The novel was serialized in Russia. It even found its way to China, where it was also serialized.

The Nazis found out, and they banned it. If one was found with a copy in Italy, it meant a death sentence.

People risked their lives by translating, printing, and circulating copies of The Moon is Down. Why did they take such risks?

Steinbeck had captured what was really going on and how they were experiencing the Nazi oppression.

For more details on how this work was spread and bolstered the Resistance movement in Europe, Russia, and Asia, be sure to read the Introduction to the 1995 edition written by Donald V. Coers. There you will find the individual stories of the men and women who risked their lives to translate and circulate the novel during the time of the war.

In 2025, Steinbeck would not have to look to another country to see a land and its people being taken over by fascism. We have reached a point in the occupation by the Trump regime where we now live in a land that has been taken over by a fascist federal government and its racist sycophants.

· Democracy being stripped from the machinations of government

· Individuals being persecuted for speaking out or because they’re the wrong color

· Quislings who turn against their fellow citizens to pursue their ideology of hate and racism

Importantly, we cannot forget what else Steinbeck wants to convey in this novel:

“It was not beyond reason that our town would have its cowards, its citizens who sold out for profit. But under this, I did and do believe, would be the hard core that could not be defeated.”

In 2025, we are the hard core that will not be defeated.

Let us draw inspiration from a writer who first imagined that the United States was taken over by fascists—and how they fought against it.

I encourage you to read the novel or watch the film and be inspired by the villagers in The Moon is Down. We are all residents of that village now, in America.

Links for Novel and Film:

The 1942 edition of The Moon is Down is available on the Internet Archive (at least as of the date of publication of this post): https://archive.org/details/moonisdownnovel00stei/mode/2up

The 1995 edition with the (very worthwhile) Introduction by Donald V. Coers is available through your favorite bookseller.

The 1943 movie, starring Cedric Hardwicke and Henry Travers, directed by Irving Pichel, is available on YouTube:

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[i] [i]Steinbeck, John. The Moon is Down, Introduction by Donald V. Coers. NY: Penguin Books. 1995, 1.

[ii] Steinbeck, viii-ix.

[iii] Steinbeck, ix.

[iv] Shakespeare. Macbeth. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/macbeth/read/2/1/

Image attributions:

Screenshot from the 1943 movie, The Moon is Down.

Picture of John Steinbeck in 1939, from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck