4

The Church Was Scandalized By The Nudity In Michelangelo's The Last Judgment

Even if you don't recognize Michelangelo's The Last Judgment by name, you probably know it. It's what experts (me) call "that bigass painting on the Sistine Chapel," visited by over 25,000 people a day. Perhaps you know it by its original title, Dong Party In The Sky (And You're Invited!!!).

Will no one give Jesus a high-five?!

In the 1530s, a fresco of ripped dudes flying around nude ruffled some feathers, despite looking like Michelangelo had never actually seen a naked person in real life. Seriously, the people in this painting have weirdly lumpy bodies, like they're stitched together out of raw chicken breasts or a plastic Walgreen's bag stuffed with mashed potatoes.

Besides the Mickey Rourkian leather-sack-full-of-boots bodies, people were incensed that Michelangelo broke from orthodox depictions of Christ (depicted as beardless), angels (depicted as wingless), and butts (depicted as existing). The use of foreshortening was also condemned, because perspective is the work of the Devil, I guess? Michelangelo also mixed Christian and pagan iconography, such as including Charon, the oarsman of the River Styx from Greek mythology.

"I swear to Zeus, if you guys don't stop your weeping and gnashing of teeth, I will beat you with this goddamn oar."

3

A Critic Told Walt Whitman To Kill Himself Over Leaves Of Grass

Walt Whitman's poetry collection Leaves Of Grass is a really wonderful book that almost ruined his life, but you probably know it as a plot point on Breaking Bad. Whitman is one of America's most treasured poets, right up there with Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Charles "My Blood Can Be Used to Sterilize Medical Instruments" Bukowski. He wrote about America, the majesty of nature, and jizz.

Upon the book's publication in 1855, Whitman's boss found it so offensive that he fired him. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier was so disgusted that he threw his copy into a fire. Prominent literary magazine The Criterion called it "a mass of stupid filth," and called Whitman "a poet (?)," which is the kind of unintentionally hilarious, tepidly shitty one-liner you'd expect to read on Yelp, the open mic of the internet.

If that doesn't convince you how shocking a book that is now taught in high school was, here's a contemporaneous review from The Saturday Press, which was a precursor to The New Yorker. The critic (?) here straight up says that Whitman should kill himself with the casual cruelty usually seen in death squads and YouTube comments. Despite the controversy and being completely banned in Boston, Leaves sold out the day it was released.

So what popped out all these monocles in shock? Well, Whitman's poems had the audacity to suggest that maybe immigrants were OK, perhaps men and women should be equal, and that this whole slavery thing was maaaaaybe bad. Besides that, his poems were criticized for appealing to the senses. If that sounds ridiculous, keep in mind that at this time, people also believed that eating flavorful food made you want to masturbate.

Of course, there was also all the jizz:

Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swell-

ing and deliciously aching,

Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of

love, white-blow and delirious juice,

Even more troubling were Whitman's apparent allusions to homosexuality. While today we're reasonably certain that Whitman had romantic relationships with men (and probably banged Oscar Wilde, because history is delightful), at the time, it was a subject of speculation. That review from The Criterion ends with a phrase in Latin that translates to "that sin that must not be mentioned." Welcome to the 1850s, where love between two men was treated like Voldemort.

Related: Bicycles Cause Lesbians: The 26 Weirdest Moral Panics Ever

2

The U.S. Postal Service Was Told To Burn Copies Of Ulysses

James Joyce's Ulysses is an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, but instead of monsters and heroes, it's about a boring Irish guy describing his poops. Ulysses is credited with popularizing stream-of-consciousness in fiction, and is regularly considered to be one of the greatest novels ever written. That didn't stop it from being banned in the United States for 12 years after it was first published in 1921, and due to a legal loophole, it wasn't sold in Ireland until the '60s.

1

The Grapes Of Wrath Was Considered Communist Propaganda

The Grapes Of Wrath, if you've always been too ashamed to ask, is a book written by John Steinbeck in 1939 about a poor family from Oklahoma who move to California to try to escape the crushing poverty of the Dust Bowl. Despite being so relentlessly depressing that it makes Cormac McCarthy's The Road seem like Paddington 3: Revelations, The Grapes Of Wrath was a full-on sensation. It won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and it was a major factor in Steinbeck winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. It wasn't just a bunch of smarty-pants critics who liked the book, though. Less than a year after publication, Grapes had sold over 430,000 copies. To put that into perspective, it took Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone two years to sell 300,000.

Grapes also immediately caused a gigantic shitstorm. Plenty of moralizing busybodies took umbrage with the novel's use of realistic colloquial language -- which is to say that the characters talk like actual people and occasionally swear. The novel also famously ends with a woman who's just delivered a stillborn baby nursing a man so he doesn't starve to death. (Yeah, it's a laugh a minute.) That scene was viewed as being so pornographic that congressman Lyle Boren made a speech before Congress condemning the book, saying it "exposes nothing but the total depravity, vulgarity, and degraded mentality of the author." In fine American tradition, he seemed to have more of a problem with naughty words and boobs than, you know, realistic depictions of people dying horrifically. He would have loved the MPAA.

But it wasn't the vulgarity that caused the biggest problems. No, it was the fact that Grapes was anti-laissez-faire, anti-xenophobia, anti-corporatism, pro-union, pro-worker's-rights, and pro-collectivism. What do we call someone who suggests that poor people don't deserve to starve to death in 1939? That's right, a filthy COMMUNIST!

Criticism of the book came from everywhere, but the charge was led by the Associated Farmers of California, a corporate farm of the sort that was depicted in the book as destroying food during famine (which they totally did). They used their considerable wealth and influence to lead a smear campaign against Steinbeck, calling the book communist propaganda. Which was weird, since Stalin banned the book because it showed the poorest Americans having cars.

The Associated Farmers of California got the book banned in Kern County, where much of the plot takes place, got it banned from several school curriculums and libraries, and hosted public burnings of the book. That last move kind of backfired, since this was 1939 and some other guys had very much already made book burning their "thing."

Believe me, this is only a cursory look at the insanity that The Grapes Of Wrath caused. I didn't even mention J. Edgar Hoover's involvement, or that the Associated Farmers of California took out ads in newspapers demanding a boycott of the film adaptation. But this story has a happy ending. To combat pressure from business interests to ban books, the American Library Association created the Library Bill of Rights to protect The Grapes Of Wrath. It's a text they still use today as a bulwark against censorship, because it's not like the urge to silence voices ever goes away. We just keep changing who and what our fragile minds need to be shielded from.

William Kuechenberg is a screenwriter seeking representation. You can check out his work on Script Revolution or view his mind-diarrhea on Twitter.

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