When Books Went to War (18 page)

 

On the whole, the council did not need to worry about how the servicemen felt about the ASEs. As one Army medical officer wrote: “Next to penicillin the Armed Services Editions are the greatest improvement in Army technique since the Battle of the Marne.” The letters received from around the world proved that the books did exactly what they were supposed to: they relieved boredom, elevated spirits, incited laughter, renewed hope, and provided an escape. There was a book for every taste, whether a man preferred
Sad Sack
comics or Plato. And everyone read. As one man said, “[I'd] bet dollars to GI Spam that half the men . . . never cracked a book before.” Yet he observed men read until the pages of each book were “so dirty that you can't see the print.” Even as their condition deteriorated, the men held on to their precious books. “To heave one in the garbage can is tantamount to striking your grandmother,” he said.

EIGHT

If it is to be left to the Adjutant General to decide what the Army is to be permitted to read then we might as well join the Nazis and stop fighting them.

 

—
LYNCHBURG (VA) DAILY ADVANCE
,
1944

 

A
S ACCOLADES FOR
the Armed Services Editions poured in during the summer of 1944, the Council on Books in Wartime waged a battle of its own—against censorship. While the council used certain criteria to guide its selection (avoiding books that might give comfort to the enemy, for example, or that professed discriminatory attitudes), it aimed to publish a range of titles from a variety of perspectives. This open-mindedness ran afoul of the government on occasion. In 1943, the council had come under fire for publishing an ASE of Louis Adamic's
The Native's Return
. The problem was that the first edition of this book, published years earlier, contained passages deemed sympathetic to Communism. When Michigan congressman George A. Dondero, a Republican, heard that the council was supplying this book to servicemen, he denounced the choice and questioned the council's motives in sending a book critical of democracy to American soldiers at war. As it turned out, the problematic passages had been removed in a later edition of
The Native's Return
, and it was this edition that had been reprinted as an ASE.
Opposition to the title ceased when the record was set straight.

The censorship fight waged in 1944 was spurred by congressional revision of the Soldier Voting Act. After the original law largely failed in making absentee ballots available to servicemen in the 1942 election (only twenty-eight thousand servicemen—out of millions—voted in 1942), Congress committed itself to drafting a new bill to facilitate wartime voting by those serving in the armed forces, as well as all others whose war work required their absence from home (for example, Red Cross volunteers). Instead of having each state set individual and possibly conflicting rules for casting a ballot, the federal law sought to provide a single method by which to cast a vote. As a joint letter to Congress from Navy Secretary Frank Knox and War Secretary Henry Stimson said, “the Services are unable to effectively administer the diverse procedures of 48 States as to 11,000,000 servicemen all over the world in primary, special and general elections.”

Throughout late 1943, Congress debated the language for the new voting bill. As this legislation began to take shape, Ohio senator Robert A. Taft, the brother of Charles P. Taft and a political powerhouse, asserted that some safeguard was needed to prevent the Democratic-led government from rigging the election by distributing pro-Democratic literature to the millions of people in the services. Taft adamantly opposed a fourth term for Roosevelt, and he distrusted the Democratic Party, believing it would disseminate political propaganda to the servicemen unless expressly prohibited from doing so. Taft proposed an amendment to the 1944 Soldier Voting Bill, known as Title V. This provision placed restrictions on amusements distributed to the servicemen, including books, so long as they were provided by the government and made some reference to politics.
Just as Charles Taft nearly derailed the 1943 VBC with his threats to discontinue funding, his brother's amendment to the Soldier Voting Bill would stymie the council's selection of ASEs and challenge the very freedoms at stake in the war. It is a remarkable coincidence that the greatest menace to the book programs of World War II happened to be a pair of brothers.

The Soldier Voting Bill underwent revisions during the winter of 1944 and returned to the Senate and House of Representatives in March 1944 for a vote. Without any discussion of Taft's amendment, the Senate approved the bill. Acknowledging that it was not the most effective legislation, senators agreed that it generally improved the likelihood that those who were in the services would have an opportunity to vote.
On March 15, the House took up the bill, and a heated partisan debate followed.

It was common knowledge that the vast majority of Americans in the services planned to vote for Roosevelt in the upcoming election. A February 1944 poll of servicepeople in the South Pacific revealed that 69 percent of American soldiers, sailors, and Marines would vote for a fourth term for Roosevelt, and 77 percent preferred to return to the United States under “the present form of government.”
Thus, there was a political incentive for Republicans to complicate the procedures for overseas voting, while Democrats strove to simplify it. By the time the bill entered the House for debate in March 1944, it no longer seemed to be about voting, but about both parties manipulating the ballot.

Discussion of the bill in the House deteriorated into a mudslinging contest. Democrats accused Republicans of intentionally making voting difficult. Republicans attacked Democrats for insisting that absentee voters use a “bobtailed ballot” (instead of listing the names of each candidate running for office as ballots on the home front did, the bobtailed ballot required voters to write in the names of each candidate for whom they were voting next to each office at stake in the election: President, Vice President, Senate, etc.). Republicans reasoned that, after twelve years in office, anyone could name the Democratic candidate for president, and the bobtailed ballot would thus favor Roosevelt. Representatives on both sides of the aisle criticized the bill for how complicated it had become. Democratic representative Daniel Hoch said: “In order to get a ballot a soldier must take three distinct oaths. He must literally swear his life away. Then, after all this swearing, if the ballot reaches home in time and is satisfactory to the Governor of his State it will be counted.” “If I were a soldier,” Hoch said, “I think that in disgust I would give it up and would not vote.” Republican representative Leland Ford spoke next: “Of all the hodgepodge, mixed-up measures that have ever come before this body for final determination, this so-called soldier-vote bill is the ultimate.” The bill, he said, was “clear as mud.”

Despite the spirited debate, the House voted the bill into law. Although he did not veto the act, President Roosevelt criticized it, calling it “wholly inadequate” and “confusing.” In the end, if those in the services wanted to vote, they would have to use a bobtailed ballot, and each state was required to provide a list of candidates to the secretaries of war and the Navy for distribution abroad.

Lost in all the bickering, largely ignored, was Senator Taft's amendment to the bill—Title V. This provision prohibited the government from delivering any “magazine . . . newspaper, motion-picture, film, or other literature or material . . . paid in whole or in part with Government funds . . . containing political argument or political propaganda of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result of any [federal] election.” It sounded simple, but what counted as propaganda? Any work of nonfiction with a political sway? If the act was violated, a person could be criminally charged and convicted. Punishment included a fine of up to $1,000, one year of imprisonment, or both.

The War Department immediately notified the council that the ASEs would be affected by the law. Title V “uses the broadest terms (‘literature or material') which include every medium of information and entertainment,” the department warned. And the clause “‘political argument or political propaganda of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result' of a Federal election, is similarly broad in sweep,” it added. In light of the penalty for violating the law, the War Department advised that “reasonable doubt as to whether material . . . is ‘designed or calculated to affect the result of any election' should be resolved in favor of prohibition.”
If a book so much as touched on a political theme, the council was urged not to print it. Naturally, members of the council wished to avoid serving jail time, but they also refused to be bullied into complying with legislation that restricted servicemen's freedom to read.

Philip Van Doren Stern tried to get around the restriction by asking publishers to grant the council blanket permission to delete any sentences or paragraphs that referenced politics from proposed ASEs to avoid violating Title V. He drafted a letter stating that the “law is quite clear,” and the council would have to adapt to Title V. “This is not a matter of choice, but of necessity,” Stern said. This letter was circulated to a handful of publishers and the War and Navy Departments before being mailed to the council's entire membership. Stern's proposal was immediately quashed. “I hope you didn't send the letter out as it is,” Richard Simon, of Simon & Schuster, replied. Not only was the tone “much too apologetic and frightened,” but “that law is not clear.” The “words ‘political propaganda of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result of any election for the Federal offices mentioned above' make just about as unclear and loose a phrase as I can think of,” Simon said. Echoing Simon's disapproval were the Army and Navy, both of which opposed editing books in order to make them acceptable under the law. The Navy noted that any deletions would “almost certainly result in coloring the intent of the author,” and, perhaps more importantly, “such procedure will undoubtedly result in the charge that the War and Navy Departments . . . are presenting ‘half truths' to the armed forces,” which would be “a most undesirable, if not dangerous, moral effect since there is involved one of the principles for which we are fighting.”
Better to omit a book than to edit it.

That same spring, a troubling series of incidents caused council members to wonder whether the government was as solicitous about preserving freedom as it professed. The first surrounded the publication of Lillian Smith's book,
Strange Fruit
. While many critics and reviewers praised the book's bold and poignant handling of a story that touched on important social and cultural issues, it was soon banned in both Boston and Detroit for its obscenity. Boston did not take this ban lightly. Abraham Isenstadt, a Massachusetts bookseller who ignored the ban and sold
Strange Fruit
at his store, was arrested, charged, and convicted of violating state law by “selling literature containing ‘indecent, impure language, manifestly tending to corrupt morals of youth.'” On appeal, his conviction was affirmed. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts explained that the book's “four scenes of sexual intercourse,” two of which featured “strongly erotic connotations,” tended to “promote lascivious thoughts and to arouse lustful desire in the minds of” those who read it.

Boston's book ban became a topic of national discussion because it seemed incompatible with the ongoing war being fought to preserve freedom. In fighting the war of ideas, Americans were told that they should read any book they desired in order to exercise their freedom and protest Hitler's destruction of books. But not this book, in this city. Yet restrictions on books did not start and end in Boston. Shortly after Boston's ban of the book, the federal government became involved in policing, and even expanding, the restrictions on
Strange Fruit
. Beginning in May 1944, the U.S. Post Office Department barred shipment of
Strange Fruit
and notified the publisher, Reynal & Hitchcock, that if it continued to distribute the book by mail, those responsible could risk prosecution under a federal statute prohibiting the mailing of lewd books. Reynal & Hitchcock defied the Post Office's restrictions, and said it was willing to accept that risk. The postmaster, however, next broadened his position, announcing that any publication that contained an advertisement for
Strange Fruit
could not be mailed. Leading newspapers and magazines, such as the
New York Herald Tribune
and the
Saturday Review of Literature
, were individually warned by the postmaster to stop running advertisements. Norman Cousins, the editor of the
Saturday Review of Literature
, publicly rebuked the postmaster's actions, stating that he had every intention of continuing to sell advertising space to promote
Strange Fruit
. “Censorship is no trivial matter . . . So far as Americans are concerned it involves their very traditions. Who in the post-office is charged with the responsibility for seeing that these traditions are not easily and ignorantly brushed aside?” “We not only protest your order; we refuse to follow it without due process of law,” Cousins defiantly added.

As the debacle over the ban on
Strange Fruit
unfolded, the council's executive committee held an emergency meeting at the Morgan Library in Manhattan to draft a resolution emphasizing the importance of free literature in wartime, and renouncing the “increasing tendency on the part of the government to encroach that freedom.” Between Title V's ban on ASEs containing even a passing reference to national politics or United States political history, and the Post Office's stance on mailing
Strange Fruit
, the council recorded “its anxiety over these manifestations of intolerance on the part of its government.” The council accused the Post Office Department of resorting to “star chamber action in denying the use of the mails to works which deal honestly and courageously with basic problems of our democracy.”