“They Tell You To Do Your Thing But They Don’t Mean It”: 50 Years of THE CHOCOLATE WAR

It might be hard to imagine a premise for a YA book like this in 2024: a high school boy becomes the target of bullying because he refuses to take part in the school’s annual fundraiser. Parts of it resonate, of course—bullying certainly is still a reality for today’s teens—yet bullying over a fundraiser seems like but a small subplot of a contemporary YA title.

But in 1974, Robert Cormier published The Chocolate War, and 50 years later, it’s still a novel that remains relevant, chilling, and a powerful example of how realistic, dark, and attuned to actual teen lives YA literature truly is. Cormier’s book has its golden anniversary this year, and it seems right to dive into its history, its intimate connection to censorship, and how the title still resonates today. Without question, The Chocolate War is a foundational and canonical text in young adult literature.

The Chocolate War follows Jerry, a freshman in a Catholic high school called Trinity. His mother has recently died and his father has been mentally and emotionally absent as he grieves. But Jerry quickly makes friends with Roland, AKA “The Goober,” when Jerry is recruited for the school’s football team. This year, Trinity has an interim headmaster in the former vice principal named Brother Leon, and Brother Leon is ambitious—he wants to officially become permanent headmaster. One of Brother Leon’s goals is to sell double the number of chocolate bars than they have in the past as a way to raise more money for the school. To do it, he plans to rely on people like Archie Costello, who is one of the leaders in the school’s secret society called The Vigils. The Vigils isn’t a nice secret society, and the group loves to pull mean-spirited pranks. 

Archie isn’t going to just go along, though, with the request from Brother Leon. He will sometimes, but not every time. It’s a power play, of course, and it’s rebellion, too, against authority. 

But Archie’s first task is to tell Jerry and every other potential recruit for The Vigils that he cannot sell any chocolate for 10 days. He has 10 days to say no when his name is called and he’s expected to talk about how many boxes he has sold. But when days 11 and 12 roll around, Jerry continues to say no. He continues to not participate.

Not only does this get everyone in his class riled up—it’s an act of defiance for the long-held Trinity tradition—but Jerry’s refusal to take part in the sale also defies the Vigils. He shouldn’t be messing with the school and his peers, let alone the Vigils.

But Brother Leon is unhappy, too. He recruits Archie to put the pressure on to sell more and to pressure Jerry specifically to get to work. Jerry is subjected to physical bullying but the real torment comes in less physically-aggressive means. He’s laughed at. He’s prank-called over and over. These are little things, and while Jerry continues to stand up for not wanting to take part in the chocolate sale, they do start to get to him mentally. It comes out in little ways—he feels bad that his father, for example, knows about the phone calls. When he summons the energy to call the one girl he’s been eyeing, Jerry doesn’t have the strength to actually talk to her for fear of what she might say. And even though Goober is much more open about his feelings, and he’s tried to convince Jerry to get on board selling, he still supports Jerry’s decision-making. Jerry’s impacted because he feels weird. He doesn’t feel sad about not participating. He doesn’t feel guilty for it nor guilty for how Goober’s reacting. He just feels weird. That weirdness might be empowerment but given the environment Jerry is steeped in, he can’t allow himself to truly experience that feeling. 

Finally, Jerry’s noncompliance becomes such a thorn in the side of the tension between Brother Leon and Archie that Archie decides it’s time for Jerry to really feel the heat. First, Archie recruits the biggest school bully, Emile Janza, to beat him up after school. Even that brutality doesn’t stop Jerry’s refusal to sell chocolates, so Archie ups the stakes: there’ll be a boxing match at night between Jerry and Janza that invites students to not only watch but to vote on who gets to throw blows. It’s a teacher who shuts down the lights on the field where the match is happening, and even though it cuts the visibility, Jerry is still beaten by Janza. He’s hurt so much that he’s nearly lost consciousness, and when he turns to The Goober at the end, he says he should have just sold the chocolates. 

Ultimately, Archie is caught for coordinating the fight, but this isn’t a story with a happy, bow-tied ending. Brother Leon tells Archie he’s proud of the work he and the Vigils did to sell as much chocolate as possible, and that if he’s promoted to headmaster in the new school year, Archie and his secret society peers will have special powers and privileges at Trinity. 

Even if Jerry learns the hard truth that standing up for what you believe in leaves you open to invasion, to attack, to unrelenting scrutiny, it is hard as a reader not to love him for what he does. And I think because he’s strong in his convictions and a target because of this, it makes the messages and truths he learns even more difficult to take. How come a nice guy, one who is harming no one ends up the victim?

The Chocolate War was daring in 1974 for not giving readers a happy ending. It was daring for not giving into the idea that standing by your convictions is key to success—for Jerry, it certainly was not. It’s a deeply uncomfortable book to read because of how bleak it is, but it’s the kind of darkness and truth that resonates with young readers because they see it play out in their lives every single day. Cormier stated that again and again when asked what inspired him and why he would write such a dark book for teenagers. 

Cormier was inspired to write the book not from some fantastical or far-fetched idea. It came in the form of his own son, who was tasked with selling chocolate bars to fundraise money for his school. Robert told his son Pete that if he didn’t want to sell the bars, he didn’t have to, so Pete chose not to. That single interaction was enough to spawn the classic. 

At first, the book was a hard sell to editors. It uses harsh language and has bleak themes, in addition to having quite a bit of on-page physical violence. Of course, none of that should have mattered when the book was being shopped because some of the biggest books of that time—some of the very foundational novels that would lay the foundation for young adult literature more broadly, included S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume, published in 1968 and 1970 respectively. 

But the book earned strong reviews when published, and it won several accolades, including being named a Best Book of 1974 by School Library Journal, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, placement on the ALA Best Books for Young Adults list, as well as both A Lewis Carroll Shelf Award and a Margaret A. Edwards Award which recognized the book among others by Cormier as significant and lasting contributions to literature for young adults. 

It should be of little surprise that the book has been subject to challenges and bans since its publication. It’s the violence, the language, it’s “less than wholesome sexual activity,” and ironically, the refusal to submit to adult authority that have been cited again and again as reasons for the book’s banning. Cormier hated to take time from work to defend his books, but he carved out a lot of time and space to help librarians and educators who were fighting such challenges. 

Fitchburg State University is home to the Robert Cormier papers and among them are many of his letters and perspectives on censorship. In one, linked in the show notes, he articulates five distinct thoughts on censorship that still resonate 50 years on. In the first, he states that all parents can tell their children what materials are appropriate for them but that that power does not extend to telling all children what’s acceptable. He elaborates on this in his second point, where he relays a story about attempted censorship of The Chocolate War in a Massachusetts classroom by the parents of a girl who made her go to the school library during classroom discussions of the book. She was made to feel like an outcast being pulled from her class, but more, she’d already read the book a year before, emphasizing that by complaining, all the parents had done was highlight how little control they actually had. He also explains that books like his are those that young readers, educators, and librarians praise because of how honest he is in depicting life as it is—not in some rose-colored, unrealistic manner. 

In a letter he wrote to a reader in 1995, he said the following:

In May this year, The New York Times published a compelling story about one of the most disturbing censorship battles Cormier endured. In 1986, English teachers at a Florida middle school stood up against the ongoing pressure to ban books like The Chocolate War, which was sweeping the nation. Those educators became subject to harassment much like that which happened in the book itself—there was bullying and phone calls meant to intimidate them. But it was a letter that stated “You All Shall Die” that showed up in the school’s mailroom that took the situation to a whole new level. 

Cormier supported those educators, but it troubled him a lot. He thought about it all the time as he sat down to write, about how it was teachers and librarians who were defending the right for him to write what he did and the right for young people—his books’ target readership—to access them. The mid-’80s, amid Reagan’s “education reform” initiative and the rise of the Satanic Panic led to a moral panic over the content of books across the nation…and thus, a wave of censorship that looked much like today’s. The Chocolate War was the most challenged book in 1987. That was only a year before the book’s film adaptation came. 

The Chocolate War continued to face challenges during ever era of increased censorship in America. It was the third most banned book between 2000 to 2009, including landing at the number one spot in 2004. It did not even make the top 100 list, though, in the following decade, and in our current ongoing manufactured morality crisis over books, The Chocolate War has been rarely challenged. It appeared on the list of 444 books challenged by a single parent in the Elkhorn Area School District (WI) in late 2023, though it was returned to shelves. Central Lyon School District, Red Oak School District, Nevada Community Schools, and Alta-Aurelia Schools (IA) removed it from shelves in 2023 following Iowa’s Senate File 496 ruling (whether it’s been returned is unclear). But beyond those situations, it has not been included among other books currently being targeted. 

And it’s that shift from being the clear target of ire to being included only in broad sweeps of attempts to rid collections of any or everything potentially controversial that we should end this episode. If a book that riled the censors so much in the first 30 years of its publication for so-called violence, sexual inappropriateness, and messaging hardly catches the eyes of contemporary banners, then perhaps the whole thing is manufactured. Were parents truly concerned about content, then a book which made parents mad for decades would indeed continue to be making parents mad today—but we know this isn’t about the content of books. It’s about the illusion of control. 

It’s about playing the role of Brother Leon or Archie in The Chocolate War and fighting an imaginary battle for power. Because when someone like Jerry sticks to their convictions and continues to stand outside of the pressure to conform, it might be that he’s hurt temporarily as today’s kids are when books are made inaccessible to them and they are used as pawns in an imagined “culture war,” they don’t learn the lesson that they should simply give up.

They learn the lesson that their entire lives will be about fighting for what they believe to be right and true—and this generation of teenagers is more than ready for the battles that adults have created for them. 

I last read The Chocolate War 10 years ago when it celebrated its 40th anniversary. I’m looking forward to revisiting it soon because despite how innocuous the premise might sound, the book becomes more and more relevant every single day. If you haven’t read it, I hope you’ll give it a shot and see where and how its themes not only resonate but appear in some of today’s enduring and powerful literature.