The Grapes of Wrath... Lewd, Foul, and Obscene?

It was an uneasy time in America, late summer 1939. The Roosevelt Recession — in which industrial production had tumbled by 40 percent, unemployment had jumped by four million, and stock prices had plunged by nearly 50 percent — was barely more than a year past. The jobless rate hovered above 17 percent; personal income and total economic output were no higher than they had been a decade before; and the unemployed streamed in to California’s heartland, taxing public services of all kinds.

The exodus had been underway for nearly a decade, with as many as four hundred thousand folks from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and other states flocking to California in search of a better life. “Uncle Sam Has His Own Refugee Problem,” declared the Providence Journal that spring. “Lured to the West, They Find Misery, Squalor, Disease.” Collier’s magazine printed: “An army is marching into California . . . made up of penniless unemployed, desperately seeking Utopia. ‘Here we are,’ say the invaders, ‘what’re you going to do about us?’ And nobody knows the answer.”

The population of Kern County, CA, had swelled by more than 60 percent in five years. Health officers had cleaned up the squatter camps that once plagued the area, but many migrants still lived in slums of ramshackle houses with inadequate sewage and drainage. Litter-strewn dirt roads turned to mud after a hard winter rain. Migrants were branded “drunks, chiselers, exploiters and social leeches.” A Bakersfield movie theater posted a sign: “Negroes and Okies Upstairs.” A more sympathetic view was that the migrants’ deprivation was the fault of California’s agribusinesses. The state’s giant landowners had made a travesty of the Jeffersonian ideal of 160 acres, assembling dominions that ballooned to one thousand times or more that size. With it came a caste system in which relatively few got rich while many remained mired in the worst sort of poverty: Chinese in the 1870s, Japanese two decades later, Hindustanis early in the new century, Mexicans and Filipinos during and after World War I — wave after wave of low-priced labor. Among the leviathan landholders were those who took care of their workers, some patronizingly, others with a genuine measure of respect. But many big farmers regarded their hands as expendable—“beasts of the field.” With the Okies and Arkies now faring so terribly, social critics were pointing their fingers at California’s agricultural elite.

The most articulate and powerful of the finger-pointers was author John Steinbeck, whose book The Grapes of Wrath leapt onto the best-seller list after its April publication. Darryl Zanuck was already busy with the film version of the story, starring Henry Fonda; Woody Guthrie would soon record his ode to Steinbeck’s protagonist, Tom Joad: Wherever little children are hungry and cry/Wherever people ain’t free./Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights,/That’s where I’m gonna be, Ma./That’s where I’m a gonna be. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had called her reading of The Grapes of Wrath “an unforgettable experience.” And in the coming months, the president would tell the nation that he, too, had read of the Joads’ journey from the bone-dry plains of Oklahoma to the bountiful lands of California, where they and others toiled away for a pittance and found themselves wishing “them big farmers wouldn’ plague us so.” By 1940, Good Samaritans held fundraising “Grapes of Wrath” parties. Sponsored by the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America, five Broadway actors toured the West and Southwest, calling themselves “The Grapes of Wrath Players.” Meanwhile, pundits of all stripes referenced the Joads in articles and speeches, as if they were real: “Meet the Joad Family,” “The Joad Family in Kern County,” “What’s Being Done About the Joads?”

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On Monday, August 21, 1939, the Kern County Board of Supervisors inside Room 213 of the Bakersfield courthouse gaveled their meeting into session at 10:15 a.m and began the tedious business of approving the previous week’s minutes. After that came a motion from Supervisor Charles Wimmer, seconded by Supervisor C.W. Harty, to authorize a series of payments to those who had fortified the Kern River levee: $4.50 to Baker Machine Company for welding; $66.19 to Fred L. Gribble for miscellaneous expenses; $7.31 to Pioneer Mercantile Company for materials. “Ayes?” A small chorus of “ayes” filled the room. “Noes?” Silence. Next up: more payments to vendors, followed by the formal filing of a county insurance policy. And so it went on through 46 agenda items — all of them equally humdrum, all of them unanimously accepted without debate—until, suddenly, without any fanfare, Supervisor Stanley Abel introduced his resolution:

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WHEREAS, John Steinbeck’s work of fiction, The Grapes of Wrath, has offended our citizenry by falsely implying that many of our fine people are a low, ignorant, profane and blasphemous type living in a vicious and filthy manner, and

WHEREAS, Steinbeck presents our public officials . . . and ordinary citizens as inhumane vigilantes, breathing class hatred and divested of sympathy or human decency . . . toward a great, and to us unwelcome, economic problem brought about by an astounding influx of refugees dusted or tractored or foreclosed out of our sister states, and

WHEREAS, The Grapes of Wrath is filled with profanity, lewd, foul and obscene language unfit for use in American homes, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, that we, the BOARD OF SUPERVISORS, in defense of our free enterprise and of people who have been unduly wronged, request that . . . use and possession and circulation of the novel, Grapes of Wrath, be banned from our library and schools.

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Seconded by Harty, it was promptly put to a vote and passed, four to one. The lone dissenter was Ralph Lavin, the most liberal member of the board. With no fuss made, it was almost as if nothing extraordinary had happened, as if these five men — an erstwhile building contractor, bank teller, grocer, newspaper publisher, and pharmacist — hadn’t just censored the most popular book in the country. Were they being cavalier? Or had Abel caught them so off guard, they never had time to react, to think?

Around 3:00 p.m., Gretchen Knief, the head librarian at the Kern County Library, was taken aback when the secretary of the Board of Supervisors handed her a copy of the resolution ordering that The Grapes of Wrath be removed from her own library system. “We had not had a single complaint on the book from any patron,” she said later. “No one had even suggested that we restrict circulation” of Steinbeck’s work. Knief shot upstairs. There, she found Stanley Abel still lingering in chambers. As Knief pressed him on who was behind the resolution, Abel explained after some hesitation that he had asked Emory Gay Hoffman, head of the Kern County Chamber of Commerce, to craft the ban.

Abel argued that the inevitable publicity might encourage the federal government to chip in more relief for the migrants; Washington had been cutting back aid for several years. Abel also fretted about some of the language that Steinbeck had used, but Knief knew that although he “stressed the immorality of the book, the true reason for the ban was economic.” It was difficult to argue with Knief ’s appraisal. The Grapes of Wrath had jeopardized the valley’s entire wage structure by emboldening organized labor. Tourist travel along Highway 99 had also fallen off since Steinbeck had sullied Kern’s reputation. And how long could the county’s limited finances continue to support the seemingly endless tide of down-and-out souls?

On some level, Knief could understand the Board’s frustration. Five years earlier, before anybody had heard of the Joads, Abel and his fellow supervisors had reached out to the migrants congregating in tattered tents and tin shacks outside Bakersfield. In 1934 Federal Emergency Relief Administration worker Lorena Hickok reported, “The Kern County Board of Supervisors, one of the best I’ve seen, has tried to do something about these colonies.” Most notably, Kern continued to be the only California county providing free medical care to migrants, that year footing the bill for three-quarters of all migrant babies delivered at the general hospital. But now, Steinbeck had poisoned everything, painting a “mental image of Kern County as a land of squalor, starvation and despair.”

Still, censorship? Wasn’t that how the Nazis behaved? Wasn’t that a tactic of Fascists?

Knief wrote a letter and sent it to Abel and the three other board members who had backed the ban. Casting aside any sense of propriety or fear she may have felt, Knief let her passion pour onto the page:

If that book is banned today, what will be banned tomorrow? And what group will want a book banned the day after that? It’s such a vicious and dangerous thing to begin and may in the end lead to exactly the same thing we see in Europe today. Besides, banning books is so utterly hopeless and futile. Ideas don’t die because a book is forbidden reading. If Steinbeck has written the truth, that truth will survive.

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It is easy to be cynical about Stanley Abel and Emory Gay Hoffman and the others who contended that The Grapes of Wrath was lewd and full of lies. Their damnation of Steinbeck and self-reverential declarations of do-gooding, their propensity to see a Red conspiracy lurking anywhere, could seem like an attempt to shift the spotlight off of themselves so they could continue subjugating their workers and tamping down their wages. But Abel and the others firmly believed that society was in danger of disintegrating and were honestly afraid that the fabric of American life could unravel. This does not excuse their cruelty or callousness or calumny, but the world in August 1939 was was a very different place. Central California, in particular, was a tinderbox and The Grapes of Wrath a match.

In hindsight, it’s clear that the United States never really came close to embracing Communism or Socialism, but in that moment, in the crucible of the Depression, it wasn’t so certain that some form of Marxism wouldn’t catch on here — and in a big way. Exactly five years before the outcry over The Grapes of Wrath, in August 1934, Upton Sinclair jolted the nation and the world by winning California’s Democratic primary for governor. Sinclair —author of The Jungle and other muckraking works — had laid out his vision in a pamphlet titled I, Governor of California And How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. “This is not just a pamphlet. This is the beginning of a Crusade . . . to capture the Democratic primaries and use an old party for a new job.” Sinclair pledged to turn around California’s sagging fortunes by putting private factories under government supervision and allowing the workers to own what they had manufactured. Farmers were asked to then bring their crops to the city, where they’d be “made available to the factory workers in exchange for the products of theirlabor.” All of this trade would be conducted with special state-issued scrip and supervised by a new government entity known as the California Authority for Money. To close the state’s budget gap, Uppie, as he was called, made no secret of where he’d aim: “We are going to have to tax the great corporations of our state.” Sinclair called his platform EPIC — for End Poverty in California — and with it won more votes than his half-dozen Democratic rivals put together. Jerry Voorhis, who would go on to become a Democratic congressman from California, believed Sinclair’s triumph to be “the nearest thing to a mass movement toward Socialism that I have heard of in America.” Normal party loyalties were cast aside. “I am by a strange twist of fate appealing with equal force to Democrats and Republicans to join in the common cause of rescuing our state from the most freakish onslaught that has ever been made upon our long established and revered American institutions of government,” said California’s GOP chairman, Earl Warren. “The battle is between two conflicting philosophies . . . one that is proud of our flag, our governmental institutions and our honored history, the other that glorifies the Red Flag of Russia and hopes to establish on American soil a despotism based upon class hatred and tyranny.” Uppie’s EPIC landslide win set off alarms from the White House to Hollywood to the newspaper baronies of William Randolph Hearst and Harry Chandler. “This old Sinclair has throwed such a scare into these rich folks,” Will Rogers told his radio audience, “they won’t stop shiverin’ till this thing is over.”

Ten weeks later, it was. After being subjected to one of the nastiest dirty-tricks campaigns in history, Sinclair lost the general election to Republican Frank Merriam, 1.1 million votes to 880,000. Still, the rich folks weren’t done shivering. Four years later in 1934, a Sinclair ally named Culbert Olson won a seat in the state senate with Sinclair’s endorsement and, once in office, assumed leadership of the legislature’s liberal bloc. Over the next few years, he nearly muscled through a production-for-use bill that contained more than a few shades of the old EPIC plan, left his imprint on tax policy, and stood up to Standard Oil. He kicked off his candidacy for governor in September 1937 by railing against the “privileged interests” that he said controlled the Merriam administration, and cruised to an easy win in the November election.

After his bold start, however, Olson stumbled. He fell ill at the end of his first week in office and didn’t resurface for a month. By February, when he appeared in public again at the International Exposition on Treasure Island, Olson had lost his momentum. The Senate shot down his pick for a position the Board of State Harbor Commissioners. His favorite, Harry Bridges, was a suspected Communist. Through the spring of 1939, Olson also lost a number of budget and tax fights, and his labor agenda, opposed by the state’s big farmers, stalled. His son, Richard, who served as his private secretary and spokesman, made things worse. “Dickie,” as he was called, lodged his foot between his gums no fewer than two months into his father’s tenure by telling the San Francisco Junior Chamber of Commerce: “We all know most of the senators are bought and paid for, bound and delivered.” The comment ignited a ruckus in the Legislature. By August, things got so sour that Olson’s foes tried to orchestrate his recall. The effort failed, but for the big growers of the Central Valley, it had come too late anyway. Olson had already added to his administration’s ranks the one man who was possibly as despicable as Steinbeck himself. His name was Carey McWilliams.

In 1934, McWilliams, an acclaimed biographer, active Los Angeles attorney, and a strident observer of and participant in California’s labor and political scenes, began writing a series of articles warning of the Fascism he saw spreading throughout California: in the office of Governor James Rolph, Merriam’s predecessor, and in the movie business, where Gary Cooper and other stars had taken to donning uniforms and drilling under the banner of the Hollywood Hussars. A year later McWilliams turned his focus to what his favorite target: “farmer Fascism.” He toured from Bakersfield to Salinas, interviewing growers, labor contractors, workers, and union leaders. In six pieces that appeared in Pacific Weekly — a magazine edited by famed Russophile Lincoln Steffens — McWilliams commended “the analytic methods of Marx and Lenin” to best understand “the real social consequences of capitalistic agriculture.” Much of this ultimately found its way into McWilliams’s book Factories in the Field, a critical history of California agriculture. Not surprisingly, many growers took issue with McWilliams’s account.

Factories in the Field appeared just three months after The Grapes of Wrath had been published, greatly heightening the significance of McWilliams’s work. Although some on the right figured that the release of the books had been coordinated, it had not. The fact was, Steinbeck and McWilliams barely knew each other, having corresponded a few times over the years but never having actually met in the flesh. Still, the two tomes played beautifully off each other — a seamless marriage of fiction and nonfiction. Editor John E. Pickett belittled the author of The Grapes of Wrath and its fans. “How they eat it up,” he wrote, “those emotion-hunters, intelligentsia, pinks, reds and cocktail-cuddlers.” Pickett also quoted from Factories in the Field, letting McWilliams’s shocking views speak for themselves, before adding: “Perhaps this is the first time an official of our government, sworn to defend that government, has advocated the destruction of democracy and the substitution of Communism.”

In the 1930s, it was not unheard of for some Americans to talk about the possible violent overthrow of the government, just as had happened in Russia. But even more common was the idea that change would come not by toppling the president or Congress or the military, but by toppling the established social order. For the big farmers of central California — old cowboys and Southern cotton men who fancied themselves rugged individualists — August 1939 was a time when such a prospect seemed terrifyingly real. The migrants were straining local resources and testing the boundaries of what constituted a decent wage and working conditions. Union organizers were swarming the area, making trouble. Culbert Olson was governor, and Carey McWilliams was in a position of authority. And to top it all off, The Grapes of Wrath was flying off the shelves. The novel’s purpose was unmistakable in the growers’ minds — and in Steinbeck’s too. “This is a rough book,” he told his literary agent, “because a revolution is going on.”

Adapted from Obscene in the Extreme by Rick Wartzman, publishing this month from PublicAffairs (www.publicaffairsbooks.com), a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2008.