When Books Went to War

by Molly Guptill Manning

  Another magazine to embrace the miniature wartime edition was the Saturday Evening Post, which printed the smallest of them all, measuring a mere three by four and a half inches: Post Yarns. These booklets were truly pocket-sized, and contained articles, stories, and cartoons. The Post sent ten million copies to servicemen around the world, with a proviso that the Yarns be passed from one reader to the next. Ben Hibbs, the Saturday Evening Post’s editor, said that the Yarns were designed because “war correspondents are always telling me of the hunger for reading material that exists whenever American soldiers and sailors pitch their tents or hang their hammocks.” The Yarns were the Post’s “attempt to make the lives of our fighting men a little happier,” and were distributed “without charge as a token of the admiration and gratitude of the Saturday Evening Post and the folks back home,” he said. The Battle Baby, Pony Edition, and Post Yarns were the most striking magazines produced during the war—and in the history of magazines. Small, lightweight, and entertaining, they were appreciated beyond measure.

  So why not books? The proliferation of practically weightless miniature magazines made the provision of hefty hardcovers, and the VBC itself, seem obsolete. If an arrangement could be made to produce and distribute smaller books using magazine-service models, the Army and Navy would be hard-pressed to ignore such an opportunity.

  FOUR

  New Weapons in the War of Ideas

  The first couple of days at sea our ship seemed to mill around without purpose. Then we stopped completely, and lay at anchor for a day. But finally we made our rendezvous with other ships and at dusk—five days after leaving London—we steamed slowly into a pre-arranged formation, like floating pieces of a puzzle drifting together to form a picture. By dark we were rolling, and the first weak ones were getting sick . . .

  After a while the sea calmed . . . The soldiers were routed out at 6:30 a.m., and at 10:00 a.m. every day they had to stand muster and have boat drill for an hour. Outside of that they had little to do, and passed the time just standing around on deck, or lying down below reading.

  —ERNIE PYLE, “CONVOY TO AFRICA,” 1942

  IN MAY 1943 the New York Sun broke the news that the Army and Navy no longer needed the VBC’s donated books. For the first time, the armed forces planned to purchase millions of paperbacks each month, with the help of an organization that called itself the Council on Books in Wartime. “Too many people looked upon the voluntary campaign as an opportunity to get rid of books that nobody would want,” the Sun said. The next day, the New York Herald Tribune picked up the story: “Public Campaign Fails, Army Will Buy Books,” the headline read. “American soldiers are going to have books if the Army itself has to buy them,” the article said.

  Believing that a 1944 campaign was likely, VBC volunteers were disappointed to learn that their work had been dubbed a failure. Days after publication of the Sun and Tribune articles, the USO informed the VBC that it would not provide any funding for a 1944 campaign. The VBC had no choice but to close its doors. With heavy hearts, and after lengthy discussion, the ALA officers voted to discontinue the campaign as of October 1, 1943. Volunteers across the United States received a letter from the VBC headquarters stating that the War Department planned to purchase books, and that the VBC would stop its book drive, as it was no longer needed. Outraged librarians made their opinions known. One librarian wrote to the VBC demanding an explanation for why the campaign was ending when the need for books was insatiable and “our warehouse is almost empty.” “If libraries are going to abdicate their peculiar war responsibilities and opportunities, they can expect to be treated with increased indifference,” said an incensed librarian from Cleveland. “Certainly the need for which the Campaign was brought into being has not been fully met—in fact, [it] has scarcely diminished,” wrote an exasperated librarian from the American Merchant Marine Library Association.

  Yet the decision was hard to argue. There was a limit to the quantity and usefulness of donated books, and it was time for a larger-scale effort: printing new books chosen and constructed expressly for Americans at war. The design was as important as the choice of titles. Cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who documented Army life in France, Italy, and Burma, once tried to explain for the home front the daily rigors an infantryman faced. He suggested:

  Dig a hole in your back yard while it is raining. Sit in the hole until the water climbs up around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for forty-eight hours, and, so there is no danger of your dozing off, imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire.

  Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors streaking down to sock you.

  After ten or twelve miles (remember—you are still carrying the shotgun and suitcase) start sneaking through the wet brush. Imagine that somebody has booby-trapped your route with rattlesnakes which will bite you if you step on them. Give some friend a rifle and have him blast in your direction once in a while.

  Snoop around until you find a bull. Try to figure out a way to sneak around him without letting him see you. When he does see you, run like hell all the way back to your hole in the back yard, drop the suitcase and shotgun, and get in.

  If you repeat this performance every three days for several months you may begin to understand why an infantryman sometimes gets out of breath. But you still won’t understand how he feels when things get tough.

  The physical demands made on an infantryman, or anyone fighting near the frontlines, required that all unnecessary items be removed from one’s pack. “You look everything over and try to find something else you can throw away to make the load on [your] blister[ed] [feet] a little lighter,” Mauldin said. Even gas masks were routinely chucked because the men were so desperate to lighten the weight they carried. It is not surprising that a hardcover book was unlikely to survive the final cut. As Sergeant Ralph Thompson sarcastically said, if “you could see what an infantryman’s normal impedimenta consist of, you’d understand why he doesn’t run out and buy a couple of 1,000 page historical novels to top off the load.”

  Yet they craved their reading. Army newspapers and magazines, such as Stars and Stripes and Yank, the Army Weekly, were in high demand. When each set of popular domestic magazines arrived, they were snatched up, pored over, and passed on to the next guy in line. Mauldin said that “soldiers at the front read K-ration labels when the contents are listed on the package, just to be reading something.” Books were wanted—but not hardcovers. What the Army and Navy needed were conveniently sized, featherweight volumes.

  While paperback books might seem like an obvious solution, the softcover book had not yet been embraced by all publishing companies. The war (and most notably, rationing) had sparked a new trend away from hardcover tomes and toward smaller softcover books, mostly provided by new paperback publishers and imprints. The shift was stark. In 1939, fewer than two hundred thousand paperback books were sold in the United States; by 1943, this number had climbed to over forty million. Before the 1940s, the publishing industry and bookstores had snubbed the paperback. Booksellers refused to place the inelegant and inferior softcovers in their shops, which were almost all devoted to stately, sturdy hardcovers. The profit margin on a hardcover book, priced at about ten times the cost of a softcover, was a significant obstacle to publishers in thinking beyond the format. However, the tides began to turn when publishers’ access to paper was slashed by rationing, and restrictions were placed on their consumption of cotton cloth used for hardcover book bindings (the government needed this cloth to make camouflage netting). As each publishing company faced the conundrum of producing books with only a fraction of the paper and cotton cloth they typically used, they came to grips with the idea that they would not be able to manufacture their usual quantity and quality of hardcover books using their ordina
ry methods.

  Pocket Books, the first American publishing company to mass-produce paperbacks, demonstrated that it could secure robust profits by selling paperbacks in drugstores and five-and-dime chains (such as Woolworth’s) instead of traditional bookstores. As its name suggests, Pocket Books printed smaller volumes that used less paper. Even the most stubborn proponents of hardcover books had to admit that paperbacks were well suited to overcome wartime restrictions. What emerged was a revolution in the American book industry. Time magazine declared that, between the budding paperback trade and off-the-charts book sales, 1943 “was the most remarkable in the 150-year-old history of U.S. publishing.”

  The concept for the Council on Books in Wartime was realized one fateful day in February 1942, when Clarence Boutell, the publicity director for G. P. Putnam’s Sons, had lunch with George Oakes, of the New York Times. Oakes mentioned that the Times had recently refurbished and renovated Times Hall, a theater on Manhattan’s Forty-Fourth Street, and that it was being made available to host programs by public-minded organizations. Boutell, who believed that books were an essential weapon for building morale and fighting the war of ideas, suggested that publishers assemble at Times Hall to discuss how books could be used to win the war. “The men of words shared the responsibility with the makers of guns and the users of them” to ensure victory and a lasting peace, Boutell averred. The two men agreed to ask their colleagues if they had any interest in such a program.

  Back at his office, Boutell presented the idea to Putnam’s president, Melville Minton, who was interested enough to suggest they meet with Malcolm Johnson, of Doubleday, Doran & Co., to discuss it further. Publishing was a second career for Johnson, who had graduated from MIT with a chemical engineering degree and then spent seven years with the Standard Oil Company on a project in China. However, once he discovered publishing, Johnson knew he had found his true calling. He began as a managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly before landing a job at Doubleday. Johnson worked in publishing for the rest of his life. He became a prominent figure in the industry, and his opinion of Boutell’s idea carried weight. Luckily, he loved it.

  Representatives from several large publishing houses and key figures in the industry formed a working committee. Boutell was voted chairman of the group. With Johnson, other members included Donald S. Klopfer of Random House; Frederic G. Melcher, editor of Publishers Weekly; William Warder Norton, president of W. W. Norton; Robert M. Coles of the American Booksellers Association; George Oakes and Ivan Veit of the New York Times; and Stanley P. Hunnewell of the Book Publishers Bureau, the industry’s leading trade organization. At a March 1942 meeting, this group voted to form the Council on Books in Wartime, with the objective of exploring how books could serve the nation during the war. One week later, another meeting was held at which Norton suggested that the council’s slogan be: “Books are weapons in the war of ideas.” It was adopted on the spot. Membership quickly swelled to over seventy representatives of the publishing world.

  During the early months of its existence, the council seemed to be “a committee in search of a project.” All believed books had a definite role in the war, but how could they be mobilized into action? In the spring of 1942, the council hosted a meeting of publishing professionals at Times Hall to discuss this question. To spur discussion, each invited guest received an essay in advance written by council members, entitled “Books and the War.” The essay began by noting that total war was underway, with fighting not only “in the field and on the sea and in the air,” but also in “the realm of ideas.” It said: “The mightiest single weapon this war has yet employed” was “not a plane, or a bomb or a juggernaut of tanks”—it was Mein Kampf. This single book caused an educated nation to “burn the great books that keep liberty fresh in the hearts of men.” If America’s goal was victory and world peace, “all of us will have to know more and think better than our enemies think and know,” the council asserted. “This war is a war of books . . . Books are our weapons.” This missive did exactly what the council had hoped it would. Conversation flowed as writers and publishers contemplated their special role in the war. Interest in attending the Times Hall meeting burgeoned. So many requests for tickets to the event were received that many people had to be turned away.

  On May 12, 1942, Times Hall was filled to capacity with writers, journalists, editors, publishers, major government figures, and all others who had a stake in the freedom to print and publish the written word. For two nights, the book world converged to examine the themes in the council’s essay. The keynote speaker, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle Jr., commenced the program by asking that “everyone who has anything to do with books . . . take good care that the books are worthy of the place which is vouchsafed them.” Hitler had waged war on ideas, Berle said, and “if authors still may write, if publishers still may print, if universities still may teach, it is because, and only because, many and many men for faith alone are prepared to give their lives, their children’s lives, and all they have, for the defense of that right.”New York Times columnist Anne O’Hare McCormick took the podium next. She spoke of how there were three pressing wartime needs that only books could placate: Americans needed books that could clarify the issues wrapped up in the war, prove that the problems that seemed insoluble could be solved, and fortify resolve and help them endure the hardships they faced. “The book written to express and inspire big thoughts, big dreams, mature and steady purposes in America, a book written to the scale of America, will fire a million guns and launch a thousand ships,” McCormick’s voice boomed as a clatter of applause engulfed it.

  After its Times Hall convention, the council considered a number of different projects, with the two most significant being radio broadcasting and recommending relevant books for the public to read. First it turned to radio. Focusing on the home front, the council produced programs highlighting books that clarified the values at stake in the war and provoked debate about what the nation was fighting for and how peace could be achieved. These programs—Books Are Bullets; Fighting Words; Mightier than the Sword; and Words at War—consisted of author interviews, book discussions, and dramatizations of books. Of the hundreds of episodes that were broadcast, the most sensational of them all was the Words at War adaptation of Selden Menefee’s book Assignment: USA. Rather than focus on how the war had unified the nation behind a common goal, Menefee boldly exposed the hypocrisy of fighting a war for democracy and freedom when inequality and social strife ran rampant at home. The radio dramatization of Assignment: USA took its listeners on a train ride around the United States, as a narrator commented on the problems Menefee witnessed in several cities. Nothing was ignored—labor disputes, isolationism, prejudice, racism, anti-Semitism. It proved to be one of the most controversial radio programs of the decade.

  The program was first broadcast on Tuesday, February 22, 1944, at 11:30 p.m. (an hour so late that producers complained no one would be listening). At the beginning of the show, a narrator explains that listeners will hear actors reenact Menefee’s experiences and conversations with Americans across the nation. The first town visited is Brattleboro, Vermont, where a furious father is heard refusing to allow his daughter to marry an Irishman. “No daughter of mine will ever sink that low,” he bellows. The narrator then remarks: “In New England you will find a well established social hierarchy—a caste system unparalleled in America except by the white-Negro relationship of the South.” The train moves on to Boston, where Menefee encounters a mutilated patriotic poster—with the word “United” changed to “Jewnited.” “Isolationism, anti-Semitism, [and] pro-appeasement are more rampant in Boston than in any city in the land,” the narrator intones. Describing anti-Semitic leaflets distributed in the subways, and violence directed against Jews, the narrator says he would expect such scenes in Nazi Germany, not in the United States.

  As the train moves through the South, it stops in Mobile, Alabama, where the narrator observes booming shipyards, young girls soli
citing in the streets, and rambunctious boys robbing stores and drinking alcohol. With a housing shortage and a city overrun with destitute families seeking employment, one native of the area tells the narrator that the “sooner the war’s over the sooner we’ll get ’em out of the shipyards, out of town and back to their pea patches and swamps where they belong!” As the train passes through Mississippi and Louisiana, the narrator observes that “large segments of the population are more interested in keeping the Negro in his place than in keeping Hitler and Tojo in their places.” “The resulting dissension must be very gratifying to Dr. Goebbels,” he concludes. Asked about the “racial question,” a local politician insists there is none. “There is white supremacy, and there always will be white supremacy. We have no patience with fellas in Washington, with their anti-lynching bills, their anti-poll-tax bills, and their anti-discrimination clauses in war contracts,” he says.

  The train chugs through the Midwest, where the narrator comments that Chicago’s black market flourishes; Detroit’s race riots are “worse than most of the South has ever seen”; and Minneapolis seethes with anti-Semitism. On the West Coast, residents of California, Oregon, and Washington State can be heard complaining about food and housing shortages, absenteeism, labor turnover, and strikes. The narrator speaks of low morale plaguing the war plants, as management blames workers for being shiftless and dissolute, while workers blame management for long hours and difficult work conditions. Everyone blames the government for the lack of housing, childcare, and community facilities.

  Yet following this damning account of division across the United States, the narrator asks Menefee to give his overall impression of America. He ends the program with a dash of optimism. “People are doing a wonderful job fighting this war, despite the mistakes that some are making,” Menefee states. Public opinion polls showed that Americans knew what they were fighting for and were determined to win the war and a lasting peace. Menefee concludes that Americans generally agreed on the course the nation was taking in the war and were willing to fight for peace and freedom.