Grapes of Wrath: Socialism

At the time of the novel's release the socialist party of America was actually becoming pretty popular. The average worker was pretty enticed by the idea of socialism despite the fact that as we know a perfect socialist state is virtually impossible due to corruption and the inability of man to share power, at the time it struck them all as a pretty cool idea and one that they could easily get behind. The novel took a pretty sympathetic view on the poor man, and your average worker because of the main characters being a family down on their luck and forced to move out of their homestead and state in hopes of striking it back over in California. Due to this sympathetic and realistic portrayal of the poor and it's never before seen point of view critics and other people were pretty angry at Steinbeck. The book got publicly banned in a few places and some people even bought it just to burn it (yea that will show him let's increase his book sales.) Political correspondents attacked the book calling it rubbish and a simple tool of communist propoganda to indoctrinate the common citizen against the United States government so that the Socialists could take power and run America right into the ground. Evidently stupidity and ignorance have been in America much longer than just today which is a relief. The fact that they could interpret such things from such a boring and plain novel is just amazing to me. It's just a statement on how much people's lives sucked back then and he gets called a communist in that day and age? He should be lucky he didn't write and release the novel when McCarthism was going on or he would have been straight out of luck. Anyway the point is that if people try hard enough they can just pull out anything from a book and call it what they want or say that it represents something in even the most minuscule of fashion which just amazes me that people have the capability to be so stupid some times.