Obscene in the Extreme by Rick Wartzman

In August 1939, The Grapes of Wrath was the most popular book in America, and quickly becoming the most beleaguered. The Kansas City library banned it, the San Francisco library relegated it to “closed shelves”, and members of the East St. Louis, Illinois, library board burned three copies. For a time, John Steinbeck’s epic Dust Bowl saga was prohibited from traveling through the U.S. mail.

Then the Kern County (Calif.) Board of Supervisors voted to remove it from Bakersfield’s schools and public libraries. Stanley Abel, active in the local Ku Klux Klan, presented a resolution to his fellow supervisors that said the novel was “filled with profanity, lewd, foul and obscene language and unfit for use in American homes.” He talked of defending free enterprise and “people who have been wronged.” He asked that 20th Century Fox cease production of the film adaptation, starring Henry Fonda. The resolution passed 4-1, apparently with no discussion.

Gretchen Knief, the Bakersfield Public Library’s head librarian, had heard no complaints from patrons, and, in fact, the waiting list for The Grapes of Wrath was at 600 names. She would challenge the supervisors’ decision.

So begins Rick Wartzman’s Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath. The title comes from a comment by powerful Kern County farmer Bill Camp, who said Steinbeck’s book was “obscene in the extreme sense of the word.” Camp would supervise the burning of The Grapes of Wrath a few days later in downtown Bakersfield.

Wartzman recounts a complex time in American history, told in relation to events that occurred over seven days in August 1939 in Kern County. The local rich growers and poorly paid farmworkers had long struggled over the issue of fair wages. (Bakersfield, the county seat, is about 300 miles south of Sacramento.)

“This is a book where the backdrop is arguably more important than the foreground,” says Wartzman, a former journalist who now is director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. “It’s really meant to be a window into this incredible era, into the deep divide between left and right, and the deep divide between capital and labor that was shaking up California and spurred Steinbeck to write The Grapes of Wrath and, in turn, spurred this backlash against the novel,” he says.

The Grapes of Wrath is the story of the Joad family’s migration from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California, which they see as the Promised Land. Once here, though, they face terrible social and economic hardships. Steinbeck wrote the novel after spending time in migrant worker camps, some in Kern County, for a series of articles that ran in the San Francisco News in 1936.

Susan Shillinglaw, a San Jose State University professor and scholar-in-residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, calls The Grapes of Wrath one of the most searing accounts of the Depression ever written. “And I think it’s one of the most important books of the 20th century as a novel of social protest,” she says. “I think it’s one of the most epic portrayals of dispossession, so it’s a book that touches a lot of nerves. It’s so compassionate, that sense of the emotional connection we should have with people who suffer.”

Wartzman read The Grapes of Wrath several times over the years, but not until he immersed himself in 1930s politics while doing research did he come to appreciate the “radical” nature of Steinbeck’s work. “It’s just remarkable,” he says. “Steinbeck didn’t quite call for revolution, but he came really close. And (the novel) was so popular, I think there was a general measure of fear by the establishment that this could set things off, be the match at the tinderbox. It’s a novel that’s still incredibly powerful, not only on the level of censorship, but some of its economic messages are resonating today louder than ever.

“You look at those passages where Steinbeck is talking about how, when people are hungry and in need, they’re going to take what they want by force. Those were upsetting words in the late 1930s. The Russian Revolution was still very fresh in people’s minds and, in fact, for many intellectuals in this country it was still a model for where they wanted to go, and the prospect of some form of socialism was very, very real. It was a scary book.”

One of the most colorful episodes Wartzman recounts took place in November 1934 in Sacramento, when the primary organizers of the 1933 cotton-workers strike in Kern County went on trial. The Sacramento Conspiracy Trial partly grew out of a police raid on Communist Party headquarters in Sacramento in July 1934.

During the trial, Sacramentans heard the rumor that 2,000 Communist sympathizers were coming to show support for the defendants, so local police rallied 500 citizens at the state fairgrounds, deputized them and trained them in the use of tear gas. There would be “red eyes for the Reds,” The Sacramento Bee warned.

Wartzman was inspired to write Obscene in the Extreme after seeing a photograph of Bill Camp watching one of his farmworkers burn The Grapes of Wrath. Camp was a minor character in Wartzman’s 2003 book, The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret Empire, written with Mark Arax.

“It had always stayed with me, as you can imagine an image like that would,” Wartzman says of the photo. And then he heard about Knief, the librarian who stood up to the Kern County supervisors for banning The Grapes of Wrath, and knew he had the meat of his next book.

“She served at the pleasure of the Board of Supervisors. Her job hung in the balance, and it would have been easy for her to have this order come down and groan about it a little bit and go on. But she immediately turned around and wrote an incredibly impassioned letter.”

In asking her bosses to reverse their decision, Knief said, “It’s such a vicious and dangerous thing to begin. Besides, banning books is so utterly hopeless and futile. Ideas don’t die because a book is forbidden reading.”