Rick Wartzman Discusses "Obscene In The Extreme - The Burning And Banning Of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes Of Wrath'"

Friday night, I decided it was time to purchase a New Zealand guidebook, so I stopped by Arthur's workplace, The Avid Reader, at 16th & Broadway, in Sacramento. It turned out The Avid Reader that very night was hosting a talk by Rick Wartzman regarding his new book, "Obscene In The Extreme", which discusses strenuous efforts in 1939, particularly in Kern County, California, epicenter of corporate agriculture's violent response to farm labor agitation, to ban John Steinbeck's new and controversial book, "The Grapes Of Wrath".

As the U.S. currently seems to be descending into an glitzier version of the 1930's, the subject of labor unrest is increasingly apropos.

Rick Wartzman is the co-author of another book about Central Valley agricultural history, "The King Of California", a book I already have in my library (but still haven't read).

Wartzman investigates the book-banning efforts afoot in 1939, but I got the impression those efforts were haphazard at best - America was hardly as efficient as fascist Germany. Wartzman's real interest, however, was not the book-banning efforts per se, but in probing the papers, and thus entering the minds, of several prominent farmers who spearheaded the book-banning efforts. It is easy to feel sympathy for the luckless Okies migrating west from the Dust Bowl to try and find a new life in the California fields. It is harder, but not impossible, to sympathize with the major growers, who viewed the Okies with suspicion and openly fought labor agitation. How did these Masters-of-the Universe think? What did they fear? Why did they do what they did? And how did they ultimately succeed in making the Okies just as conservative as they were, if not more so?

At the end of the talk, I asked an eccentric question. There is a scene towards the end of "The Grapes Of Wrath" where Tom Joad's brother-in-law declares his intent to study radio repair through a correspondence course. The hopelessness permeating the book towards the end is so thick that, to me, John Steinbeck is expressing a real skepticism about the value of education - a surprising attitude from a writer.

Wartzman replied that it was an interesting question, but he was sure Steinbeck had nothing against people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, and that he didn't read the passage the same way I did. Guess I'll have to read this passage again, to see if I was reading more into the passage than Steinbeck put there - perhaps my own skepticism about the value of education!

Wartzman signed the book and I went to the counter to purchase it. All this time, Arthur had quietly been going about various quotidian tasks required to run a bookstore - opening boxes and placing new magazines on the shelves, taking note which magazines were already depleted, placing orders for new books, and serving customers. Invigorated by the talk, I was tempted to encourage Arthur to rebel against his management - unionize, strike, get the wage he deserved: "Si se puede!" - but Arthur looked so absorbed by his work that I decided it might be a little too disruptive to rebel at the instant, so I quietly made my purchase and left.