ABFFE Book of the Month: Obscene in the Extreme: the Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath by Rick Wartzman
 

The ABFFE Book of the Month for September is Obscene in the Extreme: the Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath by Rick Wartzman (Public Affairs), 978-1586483319.  Wartzman describes the uproar that occurred in Kern County, California, when The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939.  Much of the novel was set in Kern County, and local officials attempted to ban the book for misrepresenting their community and for language and situations they considered indecent.  The censors were opposed by the local librarian and ACLU. 

Rick Wartzman is the director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University and an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation.  He is the co-author of The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire.


Interview with Rick Wartzman

ABFFE: Why did you decide to write this book?

Rick Wartzman: I had stumbled upon a photograph of the burning of The Grapes of Wrath while researching my last book, The King of California, and the image had stayed with me. After all, it’s quite something to see one of the greatest works of literature of the 20^th century being tossed into a fire.

Then one day, while I was chatting with a friend from Bakersfield, that photo came up in the course of the conversation. My friend asked if I also knew about the librarian who had fought the censorship. I said I didn’t. “She was very brave,” my friend told me.

I was intrigued, and so I started to dig. And as I dug, I realized that this was not only a compelling narrative, but there was a much bigger story to tell: The burning and banning of The Grapes of Wrath was a wonderful window into the class politics of 1930s America.
 

ABFFE: Why did the Kern County Board of Supervisors ban it?

Rick Wartzman: The Kern County Board of Supervisors banned The Grapes of Wrath in August 1939 from schools and libraries for several reasons.  First, it attacked the book for its “profanity, lewd, foul and obscene language.” The title of my book, in fact, comes from a statement by one of the giant farm operators in the area—an ally of the Board of Supervisors, who helped lead a public burning of The Grapes of Wrath. He described Steinbeck’s novel as “obscene in the extreme sense of the word.”

But the board also didn’t like the way that Steinbeck had rendered the community. As Steinbeck saw it, the big growers around the town of Bakersfield—where the Joads had settled in the book—were brutally exploiting their migrant laborers, often with the aid of local law enforcement. Those running the county maintained that this portrait was unfair and untrue.

ABFFE: What surprised you most during your research?

Rick Wartzman: It wasn’t until I began reading a lot about the politics of the 1930s, especially in California, that I appreciated just how radical Steinbeck’s novel was in the context of the times. He writes passionately and persuasively in The Grapes of Wrath about the prospect of insurrection in America: “When a majority of the people are hungry and cold, they will take by force what they need.”

That may sound crazy now, but if you were part of the power structure in California in 1939, the possibility of armed revolt probably didn’t seem all that farfetched. California had just elected its first Democratic governor of the 20^th century, Culbert Olson—a political protégé of longtime socialist Upton Sinclair. Olson, in turn, had appointed as a state official none other than Carey McWilliams, whose book Factories in the Field (often described as the nonfiction counterpart to The Grapes of Wrath) called for the Soviet-style collectivization of private agriculture. Communist laborer organizers, emboldened by McWilliams’ appointment and Steinbeck’s book, were busy trying to organize the farm hands of the San Joaquin Valley.  As Steinbeck himself said, it felt like there was “a revolution . . . going on.”

ABFFE: Who are your favorite characters in Obscene in the Extreme?

Rick Wartzman: I came to greatly admire [librarian] Gretchen Knief for her bravery, and I have a real fondness for Clell Pruett—even though he’s the one who, under his boss’s direction, burned The Grapes of Wrath.

But my favorite character is Raymond Henderson—the blind ACLU lawyer who battled the book ban. He was an incredibly smart, courageous soul who spent his whole life fighting for the little guy. His letters (which I found at the National Federation of the Blind, where he later served as executive director) are beautifully written and a lot of fun to read. He had a terrific sense of humor and would sometimes conclude his missives with a line that really captures the spirit of those hungry years: “May the pork chops never be wanting.” I love that.

To read about other Book of the Month selections, click here.