'Obscene in the Extreme' by Rick Wartzman

The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"

Rick Wartzman

PublicAffairs : 336 pp., $26.95

HISTORY IS made of small moments. The big ones matter, too, of course -- the wars, the famines, the epidemics that define eras. But the events that fall outside those tethering moments can tell us just as much, if not more, about a time and a place, as Rick Wartzman makes abundantly clear in his new work exploring a single local political issue facing the Kern County Board of Supervisors in 1939.

The issue was "that damnable book," John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," which Kern County's political and business elite believed had held them and, by extension, California's entire Central Valley up to national scorn and mockery.

Steinbeck's book was an indictment. Propelled by an undercurrent of social realism, he novelized the inexorable flow of misery from Oklahoma and other Dust Bowl states to a promised land that had, in fact, run out of promises. Homeless families were living under bridges as farm owners played their hunger into profits, using the surplus labor to ratchet wages down a few more pennies.

In these current times of bubbles and bursts, foreclosed-upon homes and entire industries (newspapers among them) confronting their own mortality, it's good to have a fresh history such as this to remind us of what has gone on before, and to assure that the times will indeed change -- eventually.

Wartzman, a former Los Angeles Times editor and columnist (full disclosure: I never met or worked with him), spent four years chasing this history, a journey that began with the story of a photograph he stumbled across while researching "The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire" (written with Mark Arax).

The photo was of W.B. "Bill" Camp, a legend in Central Valley agriculture, and another man as they watched one of Camp's farmworkers toss a burning copy of "The Grapes of Wrath" into a small trash can on a Bakersfield sidewalk. Wartzman builds out from that image to tell the story of Gretchen Knief, the county librarian, and the decision by her bosses -- the Kern County Board of Supervisors -- to ban "The Grapes of Wrath." But it becomes clear early on that Wartzman isn't going to spend a lot of time on Knief. This, ultimately, is a book about a specific time in a specific swath of California, and it embraces a wide and sometimes confusing array of characters. As a result, the side stories are the most fascinating, such as the ersatz proxy war during a 1938 cotton worker strike between federal New Dealers and state officials.