Charting the wrath toward 'Grapes'
When John Steinbeck published his masterpiece, it riled people big time, especially small-town folk. Rick Wartzman's "Obscene in the Extreme," subtitled "The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath,' " examines what happened to Steinbeck's book in Kern County, Calif., which is where Steinbeck's fictional Joad family had migrated. Besides discussion, the book spawned "answer" books, was publicly burned, and was banned for two years.
Today, controversy can be largely digital and fleeting. But in 1939, when Steinbeck's book became a bestseller, controversy was far more palpable, longer lasting, literary, even downright verbal. Television didn't exist then. By dramatizing the plight of migrant workers, "The Grapes of Wrath" threw into high relief the low wages paid by the precursors of what has come to be known as agribusiness. It did so poetically and dramatically, in language too salty for many.
What happened to Steinbeck's book in Bakersfield, the Kern County seat, is the subject of this well-researched, readable book. It's a cautionary tale, particularly relevant in light of the vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who once allegedly asked the librarian in her own small town of Wasilla, Alaska, whether censorship was all right. The librarian didn't think it was.
From the get-go, "The Grapes of Wrath" ran afoul of the Associated Farmers, a pro-business lobby that Steinbeck often refers to - disparagingly - in his novel. The group didn't want the migrant workers to unionize. Unions were "communistic," those growers asserted. Answer books were written, with titles such as "Grapes of Gladness" and "Of Human Kindness," and ban proponents successfully linked the book with unionizing efforts. The country was in the Great Depression; America's entry into World War II, which would get the economy going again, was a couple of years away, so books like Steinbeck's didn't work for a ruling class chafing under the egalitarian Roosevelt administration. Also irksome to growers was reformer Upton Sinclair's nearly successful run for governor in the early '30s, the pro-Wobbly writings of Carey McWilliams, and the left-leaning governorship of Culbert Olson. Wartzman weaves these stories into the background, providing crucial context.
The book begins with an August 1939, meeting of the Kern County Board of Supervisors. It started, as such gatherings often do, in a numbingly mundane way, with approval of payments and routine paperwork. Then Supervisor Stanley Abel stunned the board by moving to ban Steinbeck's book from "our library and schools," claiming it spurred class hatred, portrayed county officials and "ordinary citizens" as "inhuman vigilantes" lacking understanding of the "unwelcome economic problem brought about by the astounding influx of refugees" who were "dusted, tractored or foreclosed" from Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas. The motion passed, 4-1, the ban became propaganda fodder for the growers - and deeply alienated county librarian Gretchen Knief.
"If that book is banned today," she wrote the board, "what will be banned tomorrow? And what group will want a book banned the day after that?"
Wartzman deftly ties that ban to attempts to ban Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in the 1850s. "As cheeky as some of these 'anti-Tom' books were, it's important to recognize that, just as with their 1930s counterparts, they were driven primarily by one thing: fear," he writes.
The harsh vernacular, realistic depiction, and overt sexuality of Steinbeck's book didn't flatter anybody (many Okies bridled at Steinbeck's characterizations, Wartzman notes), but the book's honesty still resonates, as do the issues these "Grapes" raised so passionately.
Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer from Cleveland. 