THREE

A Landslide of Books

The soldier at the front needs to have a cause in his heart as well as a gun in his hand.

 

—EMILY MILLER DANTON, LIBRARIAN

 

VOLUNTEERS FOR THE NDBC worked feverishly throughout November and December 1941 to organize and promote the largest book drive in American history. Time was fleeting and the project was monumental. As Althea Warren admitted to her colleagues: “It is going to take a full month of radio spots, pictures, stories, editorials, and half a million printed posters to get the mass mankind of our country to give in quantity.” The campaign needed a publicity director. Marie Loizeaux, the former publicist for the New York Library Association’s 1941 book drive, was hired immediately.

Loizeaux aimed to blanket the nation with book-drive posters, and shower every village, town, and city with receptacles for donations. There would not be a library, school, department store, or train depot that did not advertise the campaign or inform the public of where books could be donated, so far as she could help it. Loizeaux worked with major corporations, public transportation, and chain stores so that her publicity efforts would have the largest impact. She yielded impressive returns. National Transitads promised to display twenty thousand posters advertising the campaign in the trains it serviced. Bus tickets were redesigned to include a reminder to donate books. Safeway supermarkets agreed to display donation boxes and a book-campaign poster in each of its twenty-four hundred stores. Hundreds of radio programs—from college-run to nationally syndicated shows—vowed to advertise the book drive on the air. Newspaper reporters offered to announce information on the campaign, such as directing townspeople to book drops and identifying the types of books that were in highest demand.

The efficacy of Loizeaux’s publicity work was evident before the campaign even began. Donations from the public flowed in to the campaign’s coffers, and one eager publishing company sent a gift of one hundred thousand paperbacks. The nation’s willingness to give caused both delight and panic: if so many books were donated before the campaign even started, a landslide of books might overwhelm volunteers once it actually began. Turning to newspapers for help, Warren made a frantic appeal for additional helpers to apply at branch libraries.

 

Just as the campaign was taking shape, Japan waged its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Congress promptly declared war on Japan, and Germany followed by declaring war on the United States. Suddenly the nation faced one struggle in the Pacific and another in Europe and Africa. American troops began shipping out to fight Hitler’s army, and yet some wondered why the United States was taking action against Germany when it was Japan that had attacked Pearl Harbor. Librarians understood that the conviction to go to war would not last long if fueled only by hatred and a desire for revenge. Now they vowed not only to collect books for the servicemen, but to illuminate why the nation was at war.

The NDBC was renamed the Victory Book Campaign (VBC) to reflect the nation’s entry into the conflict. After being blessed with the support of President Roosevelt and the First Lady, who publicly donated books for the servicemen, the campaign officially began on January 12, 1942. The public turned out in droves to donate books and support their servicemen. “Carrying the books themselves, sending their chauffeurs with volumes stacked high on back seats, or calling up voluntary and library services to help move the larger contributions, New Yorkers began yesterday to fill the sorting table of the Victory Book Campaign,” the New York Times reported. Many celebrities helped raise awareness of the importance of the VBC. One of the grandest displays of publicity and patriotism occurred on the steps of the legendary New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street in Manhattan during the last two weeks of January 1942. The American Women’s Voluntary Services arranged for a series of programs featuring movie stars, popular bands, local personalities, Broadway performers, and military officials to build interest in the VBC and collect books. Several of the programs were recorded and broadcast on the radio to audiences across the United States. Each day, thousands of spectators besieged the library to catch a glimpse of their favorite Hollywood idols and donate to the drive. Benny Goodman, Kate Smith, Raymond Massey, Wendell Willkie, Katharine Hepburn, Chico Marx, and Kitty Carlisle were among the famous who threw their support behind the campaign.

Of the dozen or so performances given at the New York Public Library that month, the one that seemed to strike the deepest chord was actor Maurice Evans’s reading of Christopher Morley’s speech “The Gutenberg Address.” In the 1940s, Morley was a household name; he was an author, contributing editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and an organizer of the Sherlock Holmes enthusiast group the Baker Street Irregulars. A lover of literature and poetry, Morley began his writing career in 1912 and went on to publish countless novels, short stories, and poems. More than three thousand New Yorkers braved the cold to hear the dramatic reading of his address. Many thousands more listened on the radio.

Morley’s speech begins with the description of a young man packing a duffle bag before leaving home to join the services. Although there is some debate over his need for certain items, there is no doubt when it comes to the seven books he tucks into his bag. These books are his ration on pleasure. They will fortify his mind and keep him in good spirits. Morley attests to the fact that books provide company, soothe homesickness, and are vital armor in the fight against Hitler. Germany had weaponized books, as evidenced by the publication of Mein Kampf and the shameful book burnings. But Americans could use books to their benefit by reading whatever they desired and spreading the ideas they found between two covers. “Wars are won in the mind before they can be won in the field,” Morley observes.

In the address, Morley draws a parallel to America’s bloodiest conflict, the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address. Honoring the lives lost on that battlefield, Lincoln dedicated the nation to ending the war and proving that democracy and freedom could endure the test of time. Morley’s Gutenberg Address would honor the printed word and freedom of thought:

 

Twenty five score years ago a German workman brought forth a new idea, conceived in worship and dedicated to the proposition that men’s words can travel, that their thoughts can freely communicate and multiply, and are worth preserving. Now we are engaged in a world Civil War, testing whether that freedom of mind and word, or any other freedom, can long endure.

 

Through the efforts of librarians, politicians, authors, teachers, and the media, Americans came to understand that the nation was going to war in the name of freedom, not only to vindicate their losses in Pearl Harbor. Liberty itself was menaced. Europeans who had fallen under Hitler’s rule lost the freedom to read and discuss many ideas, and Americans began to realize the same could happen to them. The war began to feel less distant and more personal and immediate, especially as America’s armed forces swelled in size, and seemingly everyone knew a young man who was being sent off to war. By early 1942, one out of every three men between the ages of eighteen and forty-four left home to serve the nation. Those left behind on the home front were stirred by the VBC’s call for books. Not only would they try to meet the campaign’s goal of donating more books than the number housed in the libraries of the five largest cities in the world, they hoped to exceed it. After all, if Morley was correct, and wars were won first in the mind, American servicemen would need an awful lot of books.

 

Within two weeks of the campaign’s start, 423,655 books were collected. By the end of January, 100,000 books were sorted, bundled, and loaded onto Army trucks and shipped to camps. The VBC volunteers were impressed by the public’s response to the drive. “Although we realized that in setting our starting date we were giving scant time for preparation we rejoice [that though] we began half-cocked . . . we were ready to meet the requests . . . for books for troops in transit,” read the minutes of a January 1942 VBC board meeting.

Post librarians with empty bookshelves were overjoyed when shipments of victory books arrived. “It is hard for me to express my deep thanks for the very wonderful collection of books that the Book Campaign donated to our Post Library,” one library officer wrote to VBC volunteers. “Our library here is starting out from scratch,” and “I had spent days trying to figure out how I could get my shelves partly filled with the very limited funds that the Post Library had to spend,” he said. But the VBC had changed everything. This librarian reported that his shelves were now filled, and “I have had any number of people comment on the very fine choice of books.” Another librarian wrote, “You have started something here that I hope catches hold and spreads throughout the country, for these new and recent books are something that all the Army Camp Libraries are very much in need of.” It would take time for all post libraries to receive books; alongside letters of earnest thanks came pleas from desperate librarians for help in filling their empty stacks.

Yet inevitably, the initial fanfare faded. Although one million books were collected in the campaign’s first month, some felt this was nine million too few.

“Something’s wrong somewhere,” began a February 1942 editorial in the Saturday Review of Literature, a widely read periodical at the time. “It seems incredible that a nation of 130,000,000 people, who frequently buy one million or more copies of a single book, and where approximately 750,000 hold memberships in book clubs, should be so sluggish and indifferent about contributing books for men in the services . . . The goal of ten million books should have been reached in the first week, instead of one-tenth that number in a month.” It was not for lack of publicity that the campaign was off to such a start, for newspapers, radio programs, and magazines cooperated in giving the campaign prominence. Posters were hung on every surface that could accommodate them. They were in libraries, stapled onto telephone poles, and plastered on the walls of train stations and schools. What was the problem? The editorial concluded that perhaps the sacrifice being asked seemed too inconsequential compared to some of the more significant demands being made of the public. “Is it possible that the national psychology emphasizing bigness has caused us to think only in those terms—to the detriment of the small things that have to be done if we are to win the war?”

To be sure, an overwhelming list of demands was made on the public. Collection drives for all manner of goods were held, and Americans were expected to do their part and contribute. When the nation faced a crucial shortage of aluminum in the summer of 1941, it seemed airplane production would grind to a halt. Frantically, the Office of Production Management threw together a two-week nationwide aluminum-scrap drive in July, with hopes that fifteen million pounds of aluminum would be donated, enough to manufacture two thousand planes. Americans turned their homes upside down searching for every last bit of the metal they could spare. As one historian described: “Enthusiastic householders, delighted at the call for service, hauled an astonishing collection of aluminum wares to their village greens—Uncle Mike’s coffeepot, Aunt Margaret’s frying pan, the baby’s milk dish, skillets, stew pots, cocktail shakers, ice-cube forms, artificial legs, cigar tubes, watch cases, and radio parts.” Even when the unbelievable news was reported that no airplanes could be made from the donated aluminum (officials learned after the drive that only virgin aluminum could be used), the drive’s success in uniting the nation remained a badge of glory.

Households were also asked to donate paper, rags, metal, and rubber. Families learned to think twice before throwing anything in the garbage. Paper was used to package everything from fuses to antiaircraft shells. Rags, such as old draperies and bedsheets, were needed to wipe clean the engines, power plants, and gun mechanisms in battleships to keep them smoothly operating. Rubber was so essential that when the United States faced a crippling shortage in the summer of 1942, the chairman of the Petroleum War Council announced that there was “not enough nonessential rubber outside the stock-pile to make an eraser for a lead pencil.” President Roosevelt begged Americans to donate any item made of rubber to help the nation overcome this crisis. Once again, the home front did not disappoint. In two weeks, more than 218,000 tons of rubber were collected nationwide, and at the end of the drive, the average contribution was approximately seven pounds of rubber for each man, woman, and child.

In his January 1942 State of the Union address, the president optimistically said that America’s “workers stand ready to work long hours,” to “turn out more in a day’s work” and “keep the wheels turning, the fires burning twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week” to supply much-needed war material. Ironically, just as millions of Americans took jobs in the defense industries and were paid handsome wages, consumers were asked to curb their spending so factories could focus their efforts on war production. “Life under a war economy will be like living at the depth of a great . . . depression,” the Wall Street Journal reported, to many a worker’s chagrin.

Rationing was another hardship on Americans. From cooking stoves and sugar cubes to rubber and gasoline, many items were in short supply. Instead of new automobiles rolling off assembly lines, there came vehicles for the war. General Motors manufactured planes, antiaircraft guns, aircraft engines, and diesel engines for submarines. Ford produced bombers, jeeps, armored cars, troop carriers, and gliders. Chrysler built tanks, army trucks, and mine exploders. Gone were the days when families would pile into their jalopies and go pleasure driving; the rationing of cars, gasoline, and rubber put an end to that. Pleasures grew simpler, as people spent more time at the movies, entertaining at home, playing board games—and reading.

Some adjustments were easier than others. As rationing was extended to even the most common goods, hysteria occasionally crept in. Within a couple of years, sugar, coffee, butter, cheese, canned goods, meat, paper, and clothing were all added to the list of restricted goods. By the end of the war, almost every food, with the exception of fruits and vegetables (which were often grown in backyard victory gardens), was rationed or unpredictably stocked. The appearance of even the most basic items on a store shelf could cause unbridled elation. Even years after the war, one man would never forget the spectacle his mild-mannered neighbor made, running down the street, screaming at the top of her lungs that, at long last, toilet paper was available at the local supermarket. While the director of the Office of Civilian Defense kept a chipper tone about these restrictions (“Whether or not we have more than one cup of coffee a day, or more than one spoonful of sugar in it, has little effect on us, though it may have a large bearing on the outcome of this war”), some found it difficult to take rationing in stride. A mere rumor of a new restriction could set off a stampede as people rushed to stores to stock up before an item was gone for good. When the Office of Price Administration announced civilian consumption of rubber products would be slashed by about 80 percent, one of the greatest buying rushes ever recorded in the sale of sporting goods occurred, as men flocked to stores to buy tens of thousands of golf balls. Women grabbed handfuls of corsets, girdles, and brassieres (the elastic threads used for undergarments were made, in part, from rubber). Panic trumped patriotism, and hoarding became such a problem that even retailers denounced it. “If it is news when a man bites a dog, it is certainly news when a merchant urges a customer not to buy,” one newspaper quipped.

President Roosevelt occasionally reminded Americans that rationing, supply drives, volunteer activities, and defense work were necessities in fighting total war. In one April 1942 fireside chat, the president maintained that the price for victory was not too high. “If you don’t believe it, ask those millions who live today under the tyranny of Hitlerism. Ask the workers of France and Norway and the Netherlands, whipped to labor by the lash,” Roosevelt said. “Ask the women and children whom Hitler is starving whether the rationing of tires and gasoline and sugar is too great a ‘sacrifice.’” The president gravely concluded, “We do not have to ask them. They have already given us their agonized answers.”

Considering the myriad ways that the public was asked to contribute to the war effort, that the VBC did not collect ten million books overnight was understandable. Instead, a steady stream of books flowed into the campaign’s donation bins as the drive inched toward its goal.

 

As late February gave way to March, Althea Warren’s four-month term as director of the Victory Book Campaign neared an end, with the goal of ten million books far from reached. Warren turned to publishers for help, asking for large donations of newly printed titles. Tens of thousands of new books were shipped to the VBC as a result. The VBC also asked publishers to advertise the need for readers to donate books after they finished reading them. Pocket Books did its part by printing a full-page notice in its paperbacks, asking readers to support sailors and soldiers by bringing their books to a local library for donation, or mailing them to one of the addresses provided (one was for Army libraries, another for Navy libraries).

By early March 1942, 4 million books had been collected. Yet VBC sorting centers rejected 1.5 million of them as unsuitable for the training camps. Many of the early pleas for books did not mention the (seemingly obvious) need for the public to provide books specifically suited for young men in the services. In some instances, it seemed that the public may have confused the book drive and the waste paper campaign. Newspapers had a field day reporting some of the titles donated. How to Knit, An Undertaker’s Review, and Theology in 1870 were among the million and a half books that would not be sent to the servicemen.

The VBC did what it could with these titles. It sold decrepit books to the waste paper drive and used the proceeds to purchase textbooks or other highly desired books that were not frequently donated. Children in need benefited from 5,679 juvenile titles, via the VBC and the Save the Children Federation. Books that were topically off-kilter for young men were sent to overburdened libraries in war-industry areas. (Palatial war factories were built in many small towns, causing thousands of people to migrate to them to secure employment; but there was often a shortage of homes, food, and resources to support these burgeoning populations. Libraries in these areas could not meet demand, and the VBC’s donations were greatly appreciated.) Valuable books, such as first editions or extremely rare tomes, were sold and their proceeds were used to purchase books requested by the camps.

While the VBC did not waste a single book, it could not continue to act as a clearinghouse for all unwanted books in the United States. Newspapers assisted the campaign by publicizing the types of books that Americans in the armed forces would want most. Books “musn’t be dirty, worn or juvenile,” and the “soldier’s preferences are for fiction, biography, history and technical works in that order,” one newspaper instructed. The Red Cross suggested: “Be sure they are of the kind your own son would want to read if he were in the service.”

 

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Americans were leaving training camps and going to war. By the early spring of 1942, American warships were deployed in the Atlantic, Arctic, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, and American troops were stationed in South America, Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. Americans were scattered around the world.

They faced a mix of hardship, exhaustion, boredom, and fear. The infantry who served in North Africa slept on the ground every night, and quickly developed the survival instincts of soldiers. Almost reflexively, the slightest hum of an airplane sent dirt flying. “Five years ago you couldn’t have got me to dig a ditch for five dollars an hour,” one man said. “Now look at me . . . Any time I get fifty feet from my home ditch you’ll find me digging a new ditch.” Besides developing a penchant for foxholes, the infantry acclimated to months without bathing, weeks without clean socks or clothing, and long periods of eating unsavory rations out of tin cans and packets. They were always filthy, tired, and overburdened. There were times when the men marched all night, could not move a muscle during the day (or risk being detected), and “lived in a way that is inconceivable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it,” as war correspondent Ernie Pyle described. The infantry—or “the God-damned infantry, as they liked to call themselves”—“had no comforts, and they even learned to live without the necessities,” he added.

The amount of time spent twiddling thumbs, waiting for something to happen, was almost as miserable as when the fighting started. As Private First Class H. Moldauer complained: “Monotony, monotony, all is monotony. The heat, the insects, the work, the complete absence of towns, women, liquor . . . The irregular mail, which has become regular in its irregularity.” He even found himself resenting “the monotony of prefixing the name with those three little—awfully little—letters: pfc.” While most accounts of war focus on battles, skirmishes, and combat, the everyday life of a soldier consisted of far more waiting than fighting. And there was perhaps nothing that weighed so heavily on the mind and body as waiting. In the words of war correspondent Sergeant Walter Bernstein, war “is nine-tenths ordinary grind with no excitement and a great deal of unpleasantness.” But when excitement came, “it is mostly the loose-boweled kind that you would just as soon be without.”

When a battle began, the fear of death overwhelmed almost all else. Artillery and mortar fire were terrifying. Their deafening noise was only a precursor to the appalling destruction they unleashed. At their worst, they could atomize a man’s body, sometimes resulting in near-obliteration. A man might be talking to a friend one minute and be unable to recognize him the next. Shells and flak ripped through flesh, limbs were severed, and explosions threw mangled body parts into the air and covered the ground with human carnage. Besides the dangers from above, the earth underfoot was riddled with German mines. One wrong step could change a life. This lurking danger became so ingrained in men’s minds that, even years after the war, veterans would think twice before walking across a patch of grass, preferring to instead traverse an asphalt or concrete pathway.

Being exposed to a stream of death changed the way the men understood the war and their own role in it. Just as they felt they had checked their individuality at the training-camp gates, in combat the men came to the depressing realization that they were mere cogs in the military’s machine. Like broken equipment that was exchanged for new gear, the Army sent in fresh troops to take the place of those wounded or killed in battle. But the very concept that human beings were treated as replaceable—casting off one man after his life was lost or his body incapacitated and plugging in another who might also be replaced down the line—brought on the uncomfortable feeling that the military viewed men as expendable. According to E. B. Sledge, who served in the First Marine Division on Peleliu and Okinawa, this realization “was difficult to accept.” “We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness,” Sledge said.

The discomforts, dangers, and stressors of war were a brutal yoke to bear. Lacking relief from the strain, some men inevitably reached a breaking point. As Lieutenant Paul Fussell explained, the soldier “suffers so deeply from contempt and damage to his selfhood, the absurdity and boredom and chickenshit” of military life, “that some anodyne is necessary.” While rest periods provided a temporary relief from the fighting, they offered no escape from the servicemen’s surroundings. Letters from home and books were favorite items because they could be carried anywhere and retrieved whenever one needed a moment of solace, even on the frontlines. Yet overseas mail service was notoriously irregular and painfully slow. Americans in North Africa reported going months without mail. Misunderstandings and frustrations abounded. War correspondent Ernie Pyle reported that one soldier in his unit, who had gone three months without a single letter from his wife, became so disgusted by her remissness that he wrote her of his plans to get a divorce. After mailing this letter, the same man received one huge batch of fifty letters covering the entire three-month period. He immediately sent a telegram to his wife to take back his divorce threats.

In the absence of mail delivery or diversions afforded by sports equipment and movies, books were often the only entertainment the men had. And they were treasured. According to one Army chaplain, books gave the men “something worthwhile to occupy their minds and make it possible for them to more easily keep their minds on something constructive rather than dwelling too much on the destructive aspects of the war itself.” In addition to merely distracting the men, studies dating back to World War I concluded that books had a therapeutic quality, enabling humans to better process the difficulties and tragedies they endured. Army psychiatrists agreed that books helped divert the mind, providing relief from the anxieties and strains of war. Reading was credited not only with improving morale but easing adjustment and averting the onset of psychoneurotic breakdowns. According to one article: “When we read fiction or drama, we perceive in accordance with our needs, goals, defenses, and values,” and a reader will “introject meaning that will satisfy his needs and reject meaning that is threatening to his ego.” From books, soldiers extracted courage, hope, determination, a sense of selfhood, and other qualities to fill voids created by the war.

Many men who were injured in the war found hope and healing in the books they read as they recovered. Charles Bolte, who was wounded in Africa, hospitalized, and distressed over his future as he faced the amputation of his leg, remembered a momentous day. A friend (who was being treated for a bullet wound) walked up to Bolte’s bed, triumphantly waving a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, which he had found in the hospital library. Bolte found comfort in a story about a hero who discovered that crying relieved the pain in his broken leg. Until then, Bolte had never dared cry. The story convinced him to cover his head with his blankets and give it a try. “It helped me, too,” Bolte said. Although he endured multiple amputation surgeries, Bolte turned to reading throughout his hospitalization and credited books with helping him mend and move forward. “What happens during convalescence from a serious wound can sour or sweeten a man for life,” Bolte remarked. For him, the latter occurred. “It was the first time since grammar school that I’d had enough time to read as much as I wanted to,” he said. While there were many things that helped him heal, Bolte placed the dozens of books he had read as among the most important. Tens of thousands of men would share Bolte’s experience over the course of the war, finding in books the strength they needed to endure the physical wounds inflicted on the battlefield, and the power to heal their emotional and psychological scars as well.

The therapeutic effect of reading was not a new concept to the librarians running the VBC. In the editorial Warren published on the eve of commencing her tenure as director, she discussed how books could soothe pain, diminish boredom or loneliness, and take the mind on a vacation far from where the body was stationed. Whatever a man’s need—a temporary escape, a comforting memory of home, balm for a broken spirit, or an infusion of courage—the librarians running the VBC were dedicated to ensuring that each man found a book to meet it.

They needed more of them. Training camps’ stores were being depleted as men were encouraged to take a victory book with them when they left for overseas service. Thousands of donated books were loaded onto Navy ships embarking on a mission. It was not an uncommon sight for piers to be lined with boxes of victory books; servicemen would grab a title before they boarded ship. These journeys could last weeks, and were notorious for their tedium and emptiness. Books were an ideal way to pass the time. As millions of volumes accompanied men as they shipped out overseas, millions more were needed to replenish training camps and keep up with demand.

 

In March 1942 Warren left the campaign, replaced by her close friend John Connor, who had served by her side as assistant director. Connor had degrees in business administration and library science, and had worked as an assistant librarian at Columbia University before joining the VBC. He passionately opposed censorship during wartime and was a champion of civil rights. Despite his strong opinions (which were not always popular), his personable manner made him well-liked. As one colleague described Connor, “He was always there with a smile, a handshake, and a kind word.”

Under Connor’s direction, librarians went into overdrive during the early spring of 1942 and were rewarded with an upswing in book donations. They harped on the types of books soldiers wanted, advertised the books that were most popular, and reminded (and begged) the public to give. Sorting centers happily reported that these efforts impacted not only the quantity of contributions but the quality of books received as well. By April 1942, book donations had climbed to 6.6 million volumes.

If momentum continued to build, it seemed possible that the campaign’s goal would soon be met. Turning to the White House for help, the VBC requested that Friday, April 17, 1942, be designated Victory Book Day. The president obliged. At a press conference, he “asked the cooperation of all citizens, newspapers and radio stations to make [it] a success.” When reporters asked President Roosevelt what types of books should be donated, he responded jokingly: “Anything except algebra,” before stating simply that the public should give the same books that they had read and enjoyed. The Army and Navy were composed of civilians, and their reading tastes were no different from the home front’s.

The president, who described himself as a “reader and buyer and borrower and collector of books” for all his life, held the VBC and other book organizations in high esteem, for he sincerely believed that books were symbols of democracy and weapons in the war of ideas. Shortly after he declared April 17 as Victory Book Day, Roosevelt released a statement on how books played an essential role in the fight for freedom:

 

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny of every kind. In this war, we know, books are weapons.

 

With the president’s Victory Book Day declaration, Connor worked volunteers into a frenzy to prepare for the final charge to meet the campaign’s goal of ten million volumes. Librarians were impressed by the public’s response. Stories of citizens and businesses going the extra mile proliferated. A man in New York City’s Chinatown painstakingly went from one apartment to the next collecting books in a rickshaw. Milkmen collected books from their customers’ doorsteps. Libraries prominently posted thermometer charts that tracked book donations. Even children got involved. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts pounded the pavement, collecting books through door-to-door solicitations in their neighborhoods. One Boy Scout troop collected an astounding ten thousand books in a single day. Around the nation, heaps of books were piled into donation bins. Nearly nine million books had been collected by the end of April 1942.

 

One million to go. As most commencement ceremonies for colleges and universities were held in May, the VBC decided to ask American universities to protest Germany’s book burnings—which had begun at its universities—by assembling books for donation. Letters were mailed to every college and university in the United States proposing this idea. The letter urged that books be exhibited in a conspicuous place, such as at the center of graduation festivities. It would be a powerful contrast: American colleges collecting piles of books for donation to the services to memorialize the piles of books collected by the Nazis for burning. In the event that universities wished to remark on the significance of the books collected, the VBC recommended a passage from Milton’s Areopagitica: “Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

Although the VBC’s letter was not sent until the beginning of May 1942, many schools organized last-minute collections to coincide with graduation festivities. Among them were the University of Arkansas, Tougaloo College, the University of Denver, the University of Kansas, the University of Scranton, and Bowdoin College. Several universities used the VBC’s suggestions as a blueprint for their own book ceremonies, right down to reading the passage by Milton.

 

The VBC was not the only organization to think back to the 1933 book burnings that May. With the passage of nine years and a formal declaration of war, the book burnings were cast in a new light: a warning of the destruction that would follow. In nine years’ time, cities were destroyed, millions of lives were lost, and devastation had spread across Europe like a plague. As one newspaper remarked, “Hunger, forced labor, imprisonment, concentration camps, unarmed crowds of fleeing citizens slaughtered from the skies, nations murdered without cause”—these “are the spectacles that have succeeded those bonfires of books.”

One of the most acclaimed book-burning memorials of 1942 was the radio program They Burned the Books, by Stephen Vincent Benét, a Pulitzer Prize winner. Renowned for his epic poem John Brown’s Body, and the short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” Benét was known for his ability to intertwine history with fable in striking prose. Aired by the Columbia Broadcasting System, They Burned the Books was such a sensation that copies of the script were immediately printed and sold in book form. Over the next four years, this program would be retransmitted over the airwaves countless times.

They Burned the Books begins with a stark warning: “Justify the enemy. Appease him. Excuse him. Pardon, condone or accept him. And, by any intelligent process of thought, you will arrive at the diabolical, tortured, debased world of Germany and her Axis partners.” A bell then tolls nine times, after which the Berlin book burnings are reenacted for listeners. The narrator introduces several of the authors whose works were destroyed, and recounts the reasons given by the Nazis for throwing their books into the flames. One was the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, whose well-known poem “The Lorelei” had been famously set to music by Friedrich Silcher:

 

I know not if there is a reason

Why I am so sad at heart.

A legend of bygone ages

Haunts me and will not depart.

 

The air is cool under nightfall.

The calm Rhine courses its way.

The peak of the mountain is sparkling

With evening’s final ray.

 

The lyrics of “The Lorelei” had been memorized by millions of Germans; burning copies of the song would not eliminate it. Instead, the Nazis, “with totalitarian courtesy . . . kept the song—and blotted out [Heine’s] name.” “Author well-known—since 1842. Author unknown—since 1933,” the narrator scoffs. “That’s what they do to soldiers of humanity, that’s how they rob the soldier of his sword.”

After discussing the works of Heine, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, and many other authors whose books were burned, the narrator urges that they could live on in the minds of those who had read them, but only if Americans chose to fight for their preservation, and for intellectual freedom. “This battle is not just a battle of lands, a war of conquest, a balance-of-power war. It is a battle for the mind of man.” Although America did not realize in 1933 that the book burnings were the beginning of Hitler’s total war, “we know it now,” the narrator intones. The war being fought was for all the books that had been burned, for all the voices the Nazis tried to silence, and for all the innocent people whose blood had been spilled. History featured many instances of people trying to squelch freedom of thought, but the most egregious offender of them all was Adolf Hitler. “We are waiting, Adolf Hitler. The books are waiting, Adolf Hitler. The fire is waiting, Adolf Hitler. The Lord of Hosts is waiting, Adolf Hitler.”

By 1942, the words that Goebbels spoke one dreary night in 1933 had begun to come to fruition, but not as he had hoped. The pile of ashes in Berlin’s Bebelplatz was not forgotten. Those ashes were now a symbol of the freedoms at stake and the danger that the Axis powers presented. Now books would flourish in numbers greater than before. Authors would not be silenced. A new phoenix would arise: an army of words, thoughts, ideas, and books.

 

Within one month of the ninth anniversary of the Berlin book burning, another million books were collected by the VBC. The campaign’s goal had been met. Librarians across the United States celebrated. Letters from appreciative servicemen emphasized what a difference a box of books could make. From Africa, a man wrote “to let you know that your efforts of boosting morale of the troops going overseas are not in vain. On our voyage over here,” he said, “there were thousands of us on the ship, [and] we were all overjoyed beyond words to find that we had some books to read to pass the time during our leisure moments, and there were many.” A lieutenant in the Army Air Corps stationed in Alaska thanked the VBC for not forgetting the men in his remote corner of the war. He noted that, even as he wrote his letter, men were reading the books the VBC had sent, “and I can assure you that they are very grateful.” From the United States Naval Station in Rhode Island, a captain reported that books were being devoured. As the men were not permitted to leave the station, the reading room was one of the few places where they could relax and lose themselves in books.

As the armed forces swelled in size, however, the need for books grew. Many felt that the VBC, having met its goal, could not simply stop its work. But even its continuing efforts would not be enough. There were two problems: the exhausted supply of donated books and the growing pool of millions of men in the services who needed to travel light. Hardcover books were fine for training libraries, and even onboard battleships. But they weighed down every soldier who had to carry them into the field.

The VBC struggled for renewal in 1943. It bore the brunt of scathing criticism from Isabel DuBois, the head of the Library Section of the Navy. DuBois oversaw nearly a thousand Navy libraries and eight hospitals, and took great pains in developing lists of quality books with which to stock them. The VBC trespassed on DuBois’s duties, and she did not appreciate the intrusion. She had opposed the 1942 VBC and vehemently resisted the notion of a 1943 campaign. After receiving a shipment of victory books in the summer of 1942, DuBois wrote to Connor that if the books she received were a “sample of the books which have been sorted by librarians, it is the worst indictment of my profession I have ever seen. These were the same titles which I discarded in 1917 and 1918 and the 25 years in between has not made them any more valuable.” She added: “When I think of the tremendous waste in transportation and handling, it leaves me simply appalled. In other words, are gift books worth it? As you know, I never thought they were, but I am more firmly of the opinion than ever.”

The VBC also faced stiff political opposition from the government’s Charles Taft, who only reluctantly approved funding the campaign again, despite his complaint that he was “positive it is not making an impression in the larger centers.” He was “convinced that this is because the librarian has been made chairman.” “I raised serious questions at the very first meeting as to the use of the librarians in this capacity,” he said. “If this were just a brief drive I would not say anything about it but it is expected to be a continuing effort, and I am satisfied that it is going to bog down unless you establish as a general policy that a live wire layman be put in charge of the campaign effort in every large center.” Between 1870 and 1900, librarianship had swung from 80 percent male to 80 percent female, though men held the majority of executive posts and women generally played second fiddle. The VBC’s first director, after all, had been described as “#1 in the field of Women Librarians.” Taft clearly was not a fan of the female-dominated group.

When John Connor and the VBC survived the funding scare, he wrote to Althea Warren, describing the ordeal. “Taft began once again his gospel of the inadequacy of librarians and his preference to have business men do the job. He was permitted to speak his piece,” Connor said, but when others had “finished extolling the efforts of the librarians in the VBC effort, there was little that Charlie could do by way of rebuttal.” Connor expected a sympathetic response, and Warren did not disappoint. “How glad I am to have missed Mr. Charles P. Taft! Didn’t he make you want to haul off and slap him in the jaw? He is so full of criticism and with no suggestions to help,” she said.

 

The 1943 campaign produced fewer books than 1942, and many of them were not useful to the troops. Connor made arrangements to route unwanted books to organizations and areas that would appreciate them. An outspoken proponent of racial equality, he sent volumes to Japanese internment camps and begged the Army to send more to its African American troops.

Connor also sent books to American POWs, though it wasn’t easy and had to be done via the YMCA’s War Prisoners’ Aid division. The books donated to the YMCA had to be rigorously sorted, as the rules governing what books would be accepted were onerous. For example, nothing published after September 1, 1939, was allowed, nor were materials that had any relation to geography, politics, technology, war or the military, or “any subject which may be considered doubtful.” Books had to be new or in mint condition; no signs of previous ownership or erasure were permitted. Anything written by or including material of Jewish authors or “émigrés from enemy or enemy-occupied countries” was rejected because such books would not be allowed in German-controlled POW camps.

The VBC turned to publishing companies for help. In the month of March 1943 alone, the campaign collected fifteen hundred books from Funk & Wagnalls, over fifteen hundred from Harper & Brothers, four thousand from Doubleday, Doran, two thousand from W. W. Norton & Company, one thousand from G. P. Putnam’s Sons, and sixteen hundred from Alfred A. Knopf—to name just a few. Of them all, Pocket Books was consistently generous in donating its popular paperbacks. The five thousand books given to the campaign by Pocket Books in March 1943 supplemented the sixty thousand provided the month before. Beloved by the servicemen because they were lightweight and smaller than the traditional hardcovers, they easily made the rounds overseas as well as in camps and hospitals.

 

As donations from the public continued to slow, the question arose: why shouldn’t the armed services provide millions of books as part of its budget? Between 1941 and 1943 the Army and Navy had experimented with distributing magazines to the troops. The success of this program doomed the VBC.

Despite early setbacks, delivery of popular periodicals was one of the greatest transformations in recreation for frontline soldiers to date. Originally, the Army and Navy ordered thousands of subscriptions to more than a dozen magazines, and planned to sort them into sets by bundling one copy of each into a single package for shipment around the world. In the Army, one set of magazines was supposed to reach each unit of 150 men. In reality, fifty- and seventy-pound packages, each containing two hundred copies of the same magazine, piled up at overseas postal-distribution centers, where they languished for months. More often than not, the magazines were never sorted, and instead hundreds of identical magazines would eventually be shipped to one unit. The next month, the same unit might not receive any periodicals. This haphazard distribution was incredibly frustrating for those in the services. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin observed, magazines arrived “late and tattered, if they arrived at all,” and “half of the magazines carry serial stories, which are a pain in the neck to the guys who start them and can’t finish them” because they never receive the next issue. It would take almost two years to straighten out these problems.

The 1942 reorganization of the Army’s Special Services Division, which was responsible for serving the morale needs of the servicemen, brought an end to slipshod magazine delivery. Special Services set up a giant assembly warehouse near the New York Port of Embarkation, where tens of millions of magazines were received, sorted, and bundled into sets. Initial offerings included: American Magazine, Baseball Magazine, Collier’s, Detective Story Magazine, Flying, Infantry Journal, Life, Look, Modern Screen, Newsweek, Omnibook, Popular Mechanics, Popular Photography, Radio News, Reader’s Digest, Superman, Time, and Western Trails. Each weekly set included one copy of most magazines; for titles such as Life and Time, three copies were provided to keep up with demand. (In 1945, a special “WAC Magazine Kit” was developed, which was distributed to hospitals and Women’s Army Corps units overseas and consisted of Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Mademoiselle, Personal Romances, True Confessions, True Story, and Woman’s Home Companion.)

The first sorted sets were mailed in May 1943, and from that point forward, magazine deliveries became regular, and the popularity of periodicals continued to grow. Between July 1943 and January 1946, the number of magazine sets distributed to the servicemen increased sevenfold. Due to the overwhelming demand, additional titles were added to each set, including Overseas Comics, the New Yorker, Pic, and Hit Kit. To keep magazine service affordable for the Army and Navy, publishers sold their magazines at cost. The average price for the September 1944 monthly set of one hundred magazines (based on four weekly deliveries of twenty-five magazines in a set) was only $3.86.

To minimize costs and make concessions for paper rationing, some magazines experimented with printing armed forces editions. Generally, these publications contained no advertisements, used twenty- to twenty-five-pound paper instead of the traditional forty-five- or sixty-pound paper, and were a fraction of their usual size. Newsweek published a “Battle Baby” edition, Time printed a “Pony Edition,” and the New Yorker, Science News Letter, and McGraw-Hill Overseas Digest all printed special overseas editions. All of these magazines were roughly six by eight inches and used paper that was akin to newsprint. The miniatures saved paper, but the smaller print was brutal on the eyes. Newsweek’s Battle Baby was a reproduction of the regular magazine shrunk down to size, which resulted in text that approximated seven-point font. Sergeant Sanderson Vanderbilt, an avid reader, joked that “after a few more years of squinting my way through pony-size overseas editions of Time,” he would surely go blind. One historian seconded this sentiment: “Even in good light one could not read it very long at a time.”

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.