Cancel Culture Targets Of Mice and Men—Again

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America’s cancel-culture movement has caught up with the school district of Newfane, the rural community in upstate New York where a student named Madison Woodruff complained recently about having to read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the 1937 novella-play in which the writer explored racism, sexism, and ageism in rural California 100 years ago. A February 2, 2021 report in the Lockport Union Sun & Journal gives the 16-year-old’s reason for objecting to a book that might make her “uncomfortable”: “My main concern is that kids are feeling uncomfortable, and I feel uncomfortable, and I feel if you’re reading a book in school, where school is supposed to be a safe place, you can’t make kids feel uncomfortable because of a book we’re reading.” Citing the December 2020 decision by school district officials in Mendota Heights, Minnesota to remove Of Mice and Men (“the second most frequently banned book in the public school curriculum in the 1990s”), following complaints by parents and staff at Henry Sibley High School, the report quotes Newfane’s high school principal statement in response to Woodruff: “literature is a way to ‘confront’ bigotry.”

Like Shakespeare, John Steinbeck Can Create Discomfort

nick-taylorAlso quoted in the article is Nick Taylor, director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies and professor of English at San Jose State University, who defended Steinbeck’s right to be candid and the reader’s right to be uncomfortable. “She’s absolutely justified in having these feelings,” said Taylor: “I think Steinbeck would’ve said she was completely justified, though he would’ve added, ‘And that’s entirely my point.” Two days after the report appeared, the paper published a letter from a former student who credited her Newfane English teacher with introducing her to another comfort-challenging author: “I always felt safe in school no matter what our assignment was. I had a brilliant English teacher and when I was Madison’s age he introduced us to Shakespeare, who wrote comedies, tragedies, sonnets and poems, and historical works. Shakespeare is the most-recognized playwright in the world. His works could make you feel uncomfortable if you chose to interpret them that way.”

Lead photo: Lon Cheney and Burgess Meredith as George and Lenny in Lewis Milestone’s 1939 film version of John Steinbeck’s 1939 classic. Photo of Nick Taylor courtesy Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

Supreme Court “Declines to Get Involved” in John Steinbeck Family Dispute

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According to a report from the Associated Press, “The Supreme Court is leaving in place a decision awarding the late John Steinbeck’s stepdaughter $5 million in a family dispute over abandoned plans for movies of some of Steinbeck’s best-known works.” On October 5 “the high court said it would not take up the dispute involving the Nobel Prize-winning author’s stepdaughter Waverly Kaffaga, his late son Thomas Steinbeck and his daughter-in-law Gail Steinbeck.”

This outcome was predicted by observers following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a vigorous advocate for extending creative copyright protections beyond existing limits. For readers unfamiliar with the background of the story, here is the full text of the AP report:

The author of “The Grapes of Wrath” died in 1968 and legal wrangling among his heirs has continued for decades. When he died, Steinbeck left the vast majority of his estate to Kaffaga’s mother Elaine, his third wife. Each of his two sons got $50,000. Legal wrangling ensued and has continued despite agreements between the parties over royalties and control of Steinbeck’s works. In the case the Supreme Court declined to get involved in, Kaffaga alleged that Thomas Steinbeck and his wife had continued to claim various rights in Steinbeck works despite losses in court. That, she said, led multiple Hollywood producers to abandon negotiations with her to develop screenplays for remakes of “The Grapes of Wrath” and “East of Eden.” A jury in Los Angeles awarded her a total of $13 million and an appeals court upheld the verdict in 2019 but struck down $8 million in punitive damages.

Photograph courtesy of the New York Times.

How Will Justice Ginsburg’s Death Affect Adaptations of Works by John Steinbeck?

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The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18 raised red flags on issues of personal concern to Americans who admired Justice Ginsburg’s liberal stance on reproductive and voting rights, gun violence, and affordable health care. Less obvious in the welter of pending challenges to current practice before the U.S. Supreme Court is the potential impact of her passing on the impersonal subject of intellectual property and copyright law—an area in which Justice Ginsburg’s support for extending creative-copyright protection sometimes put her at odds with fellow liberals on the court like Stephen Breyer. Describing her as “hawkish when it came to copyright [law],” a September 21 Hollywood Reporter post by Eriq Gardner—“A Supreme Court Without RGB May Impact Hollywood’s Grip on Intellectual Property”—speculates that the replacement of Ginsburg on the court by a less passionate creative-rights advocate may limit “which future copyright cases the Supreme Court decides to take up.” Citing the example of Steinbeck v. Kaffaga, the case “which concerns movie rights to the works of Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck,” the Hollywood Reporter piece suggests that the loss of Justice Ginsburg “likely dampens the prospects of high court review.”

Photo of Justice Ginsburg’s seat draped in black courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

Thomas Dixon Jr. and Trump: A Memorial Day Meditation

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Like most days recently, my reflections this Memorial Day tend to focus on the failure of John Steinbeck’s vision for America and the rise in racism, militarism, and nationalism fostered by Donald Trump. There’s no doubt in my mind that our current president is unburdened by such reflection—or that Steinbeck, a New Deal Democrat, would despise Trump even more than he did Richard Nixon, whose election in 1968 contributed (I suspect) to Steinbeck’s death at 66. My grandparents were senior members of Steinbeck’s generation and remained divided on the subject of Steinbeck’s president, Franklin Roosevelt—grandmothers for, grandfathers against, arguments not infrequent. All four grandparents grew up in the anti-Reconstruction, pro-segregationist North Carolina that produced Thomas Dixon Jr., a silver-voiced, white-maned white supremacist whose 1902 novel The Leopard’s Spots—published the month John Steinbeck was born—gave rise to the 1915 film Birth of a Nation and to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in 20th century America. The rancid controversy surrounding The Leopard’s Spots and its sequel, The Clansman, was much in the air when Steinbeck was a boy in California. Evidence of Dixon’s remarkable life in North Carolina was everywhere when I was growing up in that state. Memorial Day 2020 seems as good time as any to recall the curious career of Thomas Dixon. After all, he helped birth Donald Trump.

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Dixon’s people were Scots-Irish, English, and German, like Steinbeck’s and mine. His home town of Shelby—in southwestern North Carolina, near the South Carolina line—was on the way to Lake Lure, where my favorite aunt and uncle had a summer place that attracted dozens of relatives, sometimes all of us at once. Dixon’s father was a Baptist preacher-farmer who owned slaves and believed in education, and Dixon entered Wake Forest, my undergraduate school, at the age of 15. A better student than Steinbeck or me, he graduated from college with a master’s degree at 19. At Johns Hopkins he befriended a fellow graduate student named Woodrow Wilson before dropping out to test his talent as an actor in New York. Failing that he went home again, to North Carolina, and enrolled at a law school in Greensboro, O’Henry’s town and the place my parents moved to after I was born. Aycock, my junior high school, was named for the North Carolina governor who became one of Dixon’s friends in high places. My high school—Walter Hines Page—was named for the North Carolina editor who befriended the young lawyer when he was elected, age 20, to the state legislature. Later Page became a partner in the New York firm that published The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman. Dixon became a Baptist preacher, platform lecturer, best-selling author, movie producer, and millionaire. In 1913 Woodrow Wilson became president, and in 1915 he endorsed The Birth of a Nation after Dixon arranged for a private screening at the White House. Dixon died in 1946, three months before I was born. The Flaming Sword, his anti-communist, anti-integration, anti-utopian final novel, was published in 1939, a few months after The Grapes of Wrath.

From Comrades and The Clansman to In Dubious Battle

What’s the connection with John Steinbeck? Comrades: A Story of Social Adventure in California, the novel Dixon wrote and published in 1909 as a critique of the pacifistic, collectivist utopianism of Upton Sinclair, another hyperactive Southerner-turned Californian. Set on Catalina Island in 1898-1901, it satirizes American socialism as a watered-down version of international communism: adherents sing the Marseillaise, anthem of the Paris Commune of 1871, and apostles include sinister subversives with European accents and dreams of domination. In addition to its hero Norman Worth—an anti-Jim Nolan rich-kid who, like the protagonist of Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, succumbs to the pressure to join—Dixon’s cast of characters includes a Jack London-ish poet and spouse who slug it out like a pair of amatory boxers; a religious manic, called Methodist John, who is “forever shouting ‘Glory, Hallelujah’” at meetings; and a skeptic called Truth Seeker, a “human interrogation-point” who asks the right questions and makes the wrong enemies, like Doc Burton in Steinbeck’s 1936 novel. I’ve always wondered about a comment Doc makes to Jim, characterizing communism as “pure religious ecstasy” and communists as “partakers of the blood of the Lamb,” midway through Steinbeck’s story. That seemed odd to me coming from a professional secularist and skeptic like Burton—until I read Dixon’s description, early in Comrades, of a socialist rally in 1900 San Francisco: “Norman turned and looked over the crowd of eager faces—and every man and woman singing with the passionate enthusiasm of religious fanatics—an enthusiasm electric, contagious, overwhelming. In spite of himself he felt his heart beat with quickened sympathy.”

comrades-thomas-dixon-jrDixon the propagandist of lost causes; Steinbeck the psychologist of latent motives. Antithetical in spirit on issues of justice, peace, and equality, they shared a rich, red-letter language, rooted in the King James Bible, that left plenty of room in their prose for poetry. I don’t know if Steinbeck read Comrades or ever met its author. As with Trump, I’m certain he would have hated both if he did. And knowing there’s a lynching coming, I confess that I can’t make myself watch Birth of a Nation all the way to the end. But I’ve read all of The Clansman, and it’s easy enough to imagine Trump’s father Fred, a Ku Klux Klan supporter in 1920 New York—or Trump’s white nationalist supporters in 2020 Charlotte or Charlottesville—responding positively to this passage from The Leopard’s Spots: “In a democracy you cannot build a nation inside a nation of two antagonistic races; and therefore the future American must either be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto.”  These words are worth remembering this Memorial Day. Reading them again, I realize I was right when I worked at Wake Forest 40 years ago and suggested that the portrait of Thomas Dixon Jr. in the library be moved to make way for one of Gerald Johnson, the Wake Forest alumnus who succeeded H.L. Mencken as the voice of iconoclasm at the Baltimore Sun. But that’s a memory for another Memorial Day.

A native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, William Ray graduated from Wake Forest at the age of 20 and received a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at the age of 24. Other than that, he claims no kinship with the ghost of Thomas Dixon Jr.

How The Grapes of Wrath Helps Fans Face COVID-19

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“Shattering Illusions of a Benign World”—an April 17, 2020 Wall Street Journal book review by the writer Robert D. Kaplan—compares the Dust Bowl disaster depicted by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath with the contemporary calamity of COVID-19. Citing Steinbeck’s 1939 novel as “a powerful, inspiring story of human resilience in the face of unfathomable hardship” with a hard-but-hopeful lesson for the age of COVID-19, Kaplan praises Steinbeck’s masterpiece as “a book about how the natural environment seals human destiny, even while fathoming human character as has rarely been done in literature.” Other fans in high places are drawing similar conclusions. An April 25, 2020 AZcentral.com opinion piece by USA Today contributor Edward A. Pouzar—“Manhattan is the inferno of coronavirus”—finds encouragement for discouraged New Yorkers in “the unbelievable Joad hope which helped the family move forward each day” in their flight from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to Depression-era California. Taken together, the two articles are another reminder of John Steinbeck’s remarkable reputation for relevance beyond the classroom, particularly with readers from the worlds of business and politics. Kaplan, a former foreign affairs reporter for The Atlantic and the author of 19 books of travel and political analysis, is a managing director at the Eurasia Group, a global consulting business that evaluates political risk for private clients. Pouzar is director of risk management for Deloitte’s consulting business in New York, the city Steinbeck once described as the only place he could live after California.

What Lyndon Johnson and John Steinbeck Overlooked

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For the past two years I have been doing research at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas on the correspondence between John Steinbeck and President Lyndon Johnson about the Vietnam War.  Steinbeck and Johnson were friends and communicated often. Steinbeck even helped write some of Johnson’s only inaugural address. I wondered how two great humanists got dragged into the Vietnam War, which became so unpopular that Johnson—like Steinbeck, a liberal—was forced to drop out of the 1968 presidential race. I also have questions about similar conditions in our time.

For the author of the Great Society, the expansion of the war ended the expansion of programs intended to provide opportunities for minorities, working people, and the poor that President Johnson had fought hard for and persuaded Congress to pass. For the author of The Moon Is Down, it created significant conflict and confused some readers. Steinbeck, who understood the power of informal social networks to address and survive oppression, wrote The Moon Is Down to demonstrate how members of such a network resist occupation by an enemy force in a democracy not unlike the United States.

From the point of view of Steinbeck’s writing of the 1940s, it can be seen that Ho Chi Minh’s mastery of informal networking contributed to North Vietnam’s defeat of the forces of South Vietnam and its American allies. This perception led Steinbeck to ask a critical question: “How could we lose a war against peasant rabble (informal networks) when we had all the modern advantages (formal system)?” There is a disconnect between the apologist who defended Johnson’s Vietnam policy in the 1960s and the advocate who wrote sympathetically about America’s “peasant rabble” in 1930s and their persecution by exploitative agricultural interests holding formal “ownership advantage” in California. Critics turned this against Steinbeck at the time, and it continues to trouble those of us who wonder why Johnson stuck with the policy and Steinbeck defended it.

I am curious to know how two of my favorite Americans, both domestic change agents, got sucked into such an ugly and damaging foreign war. I am also interested to learn what overlooking the lesson of Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and The Moon Is Down—about the power of informal networks—warns us about in our day. From Wall Street to the Arab street, citizen rebellions are organizing organically to overcome oppression and bring about change. As in Johnson’s time, formal systems are responding with overwhelming force that has the opposite of the intended effect. When authoritarian overreach becomes violent and protestors become victims, today’s Tom Joads also say, “I’ll be there.”

Several years ago I wrote about the lessons of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, laying out the theory and practice of the informal networks that I saw there, and which I use in my own work as a consultant. Now I would like to hear from other admirers of Steinbeck and Johnson who share my curiosity about their folly and my concern about our future. Please share your thoughts on the subject in the comment box below.

Photograph of John Steinbeck with Lyndon Johnson courtesy Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

Before The Grapes of Wrath, Anger in Seminole County

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Richard Grant, the British travel writer who plumbed Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez in the September 2019 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, now sheds light on The Grapes of Wrath—without mentioning Steinbeck’s name—in the October issue of the same magazine. “Rebellion in Seminole County” recounts the populist revolt that swept through parts of the rural South in the environment and aftermath of America’s entry into World War I. In 1915 there were more registered members of the Socialist Party in Oklahoma than New York, and in 1917 a group of Seminole County, Oklahoma tenant farmers who looked and sounded like Tom Joad joined something called the Green Corn Rebellion, an armed insurrection aimed at local draft boards, big-city bankers, and the interventionist Wilson administration in Washington. Among the organizers who eventually served jail time were two of the uncles of Ted Eberle, a former Seminole County commissioner who was interviewed by Grant for the article. “They thought they could overthrow the government and avoid the draft,” said Eberle, though confiscatory interest rates, plummeting land ownership, and corporate-capitalist war profiteering were also factors in the movement. Steinbeck was a curious teenager who read voraciously and thought deeply when blood was spilled in the name of social justice in Oklahoma 100 years ago. Contemporary readers may be forgiven for making a notional connection between the Oklahoma back story of The Grapes of Wrath and the nugget of Oklahoma history brought to light by Richard Grant in the October issue of Smithsonian Magazine, where a brilliant freelancer has enlightened students of Steinbeck for the second time in two months—this time without even mentioning Steinbeck’s name.

Photograph of Ted Eberle by Trevor Paulhus courtesy of Smithsonian Magazine.

Steinbeck Still Stings on Prince Edward Island

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A December 18, 2018 letter to The Guardian (“Farmers become shopkeepers of crops”), from the son of a farmer in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, cites The Grapes of Wrath to complain that Canadian oil billionaire Robert Irving is abusing family farmers to get his way with local government on land use issues benefiting his agricultural company’s bottom line. “As I read with interest the piece by Shelley Glen [“Serving the greater good”] on Irving’s holding the government and farmers of P.E.I. hostage, capitalizing on our government’s fears and because they believe they are indispensable,” writes Bruce Macewen, “I’m reminded of the words of John Steinbeck in his 1939 masterpiece ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and how chillingly prophetic his words were and are.” The passage from Chapter 19 of Steinbeck’s novel quoted in the letter describes how “farming became industry” in America, dispossessing families of “Irish, Scotch [and] English German” immigrants going back generations, like those on Prince Edward Island. According to a South Florida business website that describes Irving’s family as Maine’s largest landowner and “one of North America’s most secretive business dynasties,” Irving recently paid $11.2 million for an estate in Wellington, Florida, a wealthy enclave located midway between Mar-a-Lago and Belle Glade, a farm community where Big Sugar is king.

Photo courtesy Prince Edward Island Potato Board

José Andrés Takes The Grapes of Wrath Literally

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José Andrés, the Puerto Rican-born celebrity chef and restaurateur known for high-end cooking at expensive addresses, says The Grapes of Wrath inspired World Central Kitchen, the nonprofit organization he founded to feed victims of natural disasters like the fires that ravaged northern California in November. In a December 4, 2018 Washington Post interview, he explained his decision to extend the charity’s reach south, to Baja California, to feed refugees from Central America tear-gassed by the U.S. government and living in temporary housing provided by the city of Tijuana. “In the end, it’s very simple,” he said. “Our motto comes from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. ‘Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people may eat, I will be there.’” José Andrés has been nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.

Review of Short Stories Pairs Steinbeck and Nietzsche

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Steinbeck: The Untold Stories, short stories about John Steinbeck by Steve Hauk, were plumbed and praised in a recent review, written by Stephen Cooper, connecting Steinbeck’s concept of “collective mind” to the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche. First published by the print journal Steinbeck Review, the article has been turning up at various online outlets, including the Los Angeles Post-Examiner, thanks to Cooper’s reputation as a writer, like John Steinbeck, whose words reward reading whatever the format. “Glimpsing Steinbeck’s ‘Collective Mind’ Through Steve Hauk’s Stories” is worth savoring, even if Nietzsche isn’t your cup of tea.