Ah, the dance of censorship. When blind ignorance sashays coyly up to baseless fear, bats its eyelashes and the wretched pair then conspire to stifle ideas seeking expression.
It's a historic constant, whether by local cranks or infamous dictators. When it comes to books, some very impressive titles have been among the prey: almost any work of Shakespeare, "Tom Sawyer," "All Quiet on the Western Front," "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," the "Harry Potter" series, "Canterbury Tales," and, in ultimate irony, "Fahrenheit 451," Ray Bradbury's tale of a dysfunctional American society with censorship as its bedrock.
In "Obscene in the Extreme," author Rick Wartzman explores one county board's reaction to the publication of John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" in 1939. In this case, it's not just a random collection of local poobahs: It's the Kern County Board of Supervisors in California, the very setting of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
Standing alone, the board's decision to ban the book from the county's schools and libraries (and later, to publicly burn it), led by a member tied to the Ku Klux Klan, is but one blip in a long line of censorship battles.
But with a novelist's skill and a journalist's acumen, Wartzman uses the incident as a springboard to explore the context of those turbulent times, the personalities and motivations of those involved and the notion of censorship as a political weapon.
America in 1939 was not a happy place. A stressed economy widened the chasm between the political left and right; unemployment soared as production and stock prices plunged. Imagine.
Steinbeck's searing chronicle of the Joad family's dispossession in Oklahoma and migration to California, and subsequent brutalization of their dreams, tore at the nation's heartstrings. But the bestseller also offended some, none more so than in Kern County, where Steinbeck had spent years doing research on the massive internal refugee flight.
Ostensibly, the board's vote for the ban was due to language in the book. But it's clear that the members were annoyed at their portrayal as villains who exploited the migrants.
