When Books Went to War (19 page)

“Censorship of matters other than those affecting security in wartime cannot be left to the arbitrary will of individuals, even if legally authorized, without grave jeopardy to democratic freedom of the press,” the council said. Once passed, this resolution was mailed to President Roosevelt, the postmaster general, the secretaries of war and the Navy, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the president of the Senate.

Next, the council drafted a press release listing books it was forced to reject for publication as ASEs due to Title V: Catherine Drinker Bowen's best-selling biography of Chief Justice Holmes,
Yankee from Olympus;
Charles Beard's acclaimed history of American politics,
The Republic;
Senator James Mead's anecdotal account of servicemen's lives overseas,
Tell the Folks Back Home;
Mari Sandoz's novel about a family in Nebraska,
Slogum House;
and E. B. White's compilation of articles previously published in magazines,
One Man's Meat
. The press release explained that, under normal circumstances, eighty-five thousand copies of these books would have been published as ASEs; however, because of the recent legislation, the council could no longer provide the servicemen with these or any other titles that might offend the law.

Many authors expressed their appreciation for the council's decision to challenge the law. Banned author Mari Sandoz thanked the council for its “vigorous efforts on behalf of the [banned] books.” Sandoz said that she believed the entire act was an alarming piece of political handiwork, for it did not provide an effective mechanism to streamline absentee voting, and the book provision seemed only to clarify the true nature of the act. “Even temporary infringement of liberty establishes dangerous precedents,” she said. Title V reminded Sandoz of a conference she had attended in 1938, where she met Dr. Friedrich Schönemann, of the University of Berlin. At the time, she did not believe Dr. Schönemann when he said that “the Nazis would not need to establish a government ban on books subversive to their ideals in America. We [Americans] would do it for them.” Now, to her horror, he seemed to be right.

 

The council decided it was duty bound to wage a fight for the repeal of Title V. From a monetary perspective, it did not matter to the council if one book was disqualified for ASE publication, since another would take its place. Yet the council could not tolerate the censorship of the servicemen's reading materials, or the precedent set by the legislation. As Archibald Ogden, executive director of the council, grumbled: “It looks as though from now until November, we can publish nothing but ‘Elsie Dinsmore' and ‘The Bobbsey Twins.'”

In late May 1944, the council began a campaign to pressure Congress to repeal the law. A letter was sent to editors of every major newspaper and magazine in the United States, which explained the council's ASE program and the effects of the Soldier Voting Act. The council asked that newspapers and magazines, which surely valued the freedom of the press, publish articles that would alert the public to the government's infringement of the servicemen's basic freedoms.

The degree of cooperation from the media was extraordinary. Throughout June and July 1944, critical articles were published lamenting the plight of the council as it strove to print a variety of books while the government worked to censor its selections. “Censorship for political reasons is a Fascist device which has no place in the United States,” avowed the
Syracuse Post-Standard
. It is “ridiculous to set the armed forces as a class apart from civilians in control of reading material.” An article published in Columbia, South Carolina, explained that, “since every voter except those who blindly follow a party line makes his decision on the basis of political, economic, and social thinking, this can only be interpreted by the Army and Navy authorities to mean a ban from service men's libraries, reading rooms, and moving picture shows, of everything that inspires, however indirectly, social, economic, and political thought.” It was difficult to believe that American libraries and reading rooms were being subjected to a “Goebbels's purge” because of a federal law, the article concluded. Virginia's
Lynchburg Daily Advance
lamented that, under the act, “almost any book except cook books, fairy tales, or text books on such subjects as astronomy and mathematics would be banned.” “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.” An article in the
San Antonio News
said: “One would think that the men who fight the Nation's battles would be quite able to decide for themselves what they would like to read,” and that “maybe they would rather skip voting this year than to have their reading-material censored.”

The
Chicago Sun
suggested the public not kid itself about the true nature of the act and Title V: it was a Republican move to deprive Roosevelt of a fourth term. “Congress in its wisdom has decreed that fighting men should be insulated from political ‘propaganda.' The idea was to protect these innocent young men from nefarious attempts to sway them for a F - - - th T - - m.” After considering the books being banned under Title V, the
Sun
remarked that not one of them had “any remote bearing on the F - - - th T - - m,” and that if they did have any political content, it was “in the same sense that the Constitution or a history of the United States might have it.” The whole episode seemed patently absurd, and the
Sun
said that the council “does well to protest this silly ban in the strongest terms.”

One of the most exasperating repercussions of Title V was the fact that best-selling books with no apparent political agenda were swept up in the ban. That Catherine Drinker Bowen's
Yankee from Olympus
, Charles Beard's
The Republic
, and E. B. White's
One Man's Meat
were somehow going to sway the upcoming federal election was nonsensical. After the
Rochester Times Union
carefully inspected every page of
Yankee from Olympus
, it concluded that the only portion of the book that could have triggered the ban was a description of a conversation between the chief justice and President Roosevelt that was confined to a single page and did not go beyond an exchange of pleasantries. “If this is ‘political propaganda,' then so's your ‘World Almanac,'” the
Times Union
said. Similarly, a Michigan newspaper scoured Charles Beard's
The Republic
, only to find no political partisanship; the book, however, did contain an “excellent discussion of how the fundamental principles of American government evolved from the Constitutional convention.” A favorite anomaly covered by the newspapers was the ban on E. B. White's
One Man's Meat
—a collection of whimsical essays about life in New England that originally appeared in the
New Yorker
and other periodicals; the very same essays were readily available to the fighting forces in the magazines they received. (White, himself, once admitted that he never understood why
One Man's Meat
was banned, but he liked that it was. “It shows somebody read it,” he said.)

The council's media campaign generated an avalanche of letters to the editors of newspapers and opinion pieces slamming the Soldier Voting Act and demanding its repeal. Democracy on the home front was thriving: people were speaking their minds and criticizing their government. The backlash concerning Title V also showed that the public understood that books were not mere stories; they contained vital information that helped soldiers understand why they were fighting and risking their lives. Books were intertwined with the values at stake in the war, and Americans would not tolerate any restriction on their reading materials.

On symbol-laden Fourth of July, the War Department made an announcement that, due to the Soldier's Voting Act, it was forced to withdraw several textbooks used in Army education courses. These textbooks, which had been used in teaching history and economics to soldiers for years, had fallen into disrepute because they made at least a passing comment on politics or government. A few days later,
Time
magazine reported that the Army newspaper
Stars and Stripes
was forced to censor its news stories in order to avoid offending Title V. For example, when the Rome edition of
Stars and Stripes
published a story about the Republican candidate for president, Thomas E. Dewey, it was forced to omit Dewey's criticisms of the Roosevelt administration. Another report said that the Mediterranean edition of
Stars and Stripes
was forbidden to print Associated Press articles on politics. The U.S. Air Force Institute was compelled to stop offering four of its correspondence courses because certain textbooks fell under the ban.
Time
commented that these books were “likely to be saved from Congressional book-burning only by the waste-paper salvage campaign.” It seemed incomprehensible that such actions were being taken in order to comply with American legislation. The
Saturday Review of Literature
diagnosed Congress with a bad case of “censoritis”; the only known cure was repeal of Title V.

On July 3 and 5, 1944, the council met with the Writers' War Board to strategize their next move. The two organizations agreed that they would personally contact Senator Robert Taft, Title V's sponsor, to pressure him to support amending or repealing the law. A special committee of council members joined members of the Writers' War Board, the Authors' League, and the writers' organization PEN to draft a formal letter to Senator Taft. The missive began by mentioning the recent publicity that Title V had received, noting that “all of it [was] sympathetic to our point of view.” Striking a conciliatory tone, the letter insisted that no one believed it was Taft's intent to prevent the distribution of books that fell under a literal interpretation of the bill. Yet best-selling books containing no political propaganda were subject to the ban. The council warned that it would use the press and radio, at home and overseas, to inform the public and servicemen about Title V, and its “implication that the men overseas cannot be trusted with the same reading matter available at home.” The alternative: Taft could meet with the council to come up with a solution.

Lieutenant Colonel Trautman soon informed the council that, after a recent meeting with five Army generals, a decision had been made that the bill would be interpreted even more strictly than before, causing additional books to fall within the scope of the ban. The Army's position effectively was to double down its support for the council's attack on the bill. A draft of the council's meeting minutes reveals that Philip Van Doren Stern “reported that the Army had told him unofficially that they will continue to interpret the bill literally in the hopes that it will force a repeal or revision” of Title V.
Stern's remark was omitted from the final version of the council's minutes.

Senator Taft, a scion of Ohio's powerful Taft family, a son of a president himself, and a perennial contender for the White House, was not prone to avoiding battles. Within days of receiving the council's letter demanding amendment of Title V, the senator sent an unapologetic response, insisting that the council did not seem to understand the act. After noting that any book could be privately purchased and sent to those in the services, Taft emphasized that it was only books purchased with government funds that were affected. Taft smugly noted that “no one can question the wisdom of the provision which prohibits the expenditure of government money to print and distribute books containing political argument and political propaganda just before the 1944 election.” Taft faulted the Army for reading the act much too strictly and added he did not see how
The Republic
or
Yankee from Olympus
contained political argument or propaganda. Yet the senator did agree to travel to New York to discuss the legislation and possible revisions to it.

On July 20, Senator Taft met with several members of the council, Lieutenant Colonel Trautman and several other Army representatives, Norman Cousins of the
Saturday Review of Literature
, and Carl Carmer of the Writers' War Board. The group met at the Rockefeller Lunch Club in Manhattan, where Taft spoke for roughly fifteen minutes, explaining that it was not the intention of Congress, nor was it his purpose, to limit the supply of printed matter to those fighting the war. He expressed willingness to sponsor amendments to the act that would ameliorate the problems that had arisen. In response, the council and its supporters offered the senator three options: repeal, removal of the criminal punishment clause (making violation of the law practically meaningless), or amendment of the law to prohibit only those books that, when considered in their entirety, were obvious political propaganda.

A representative from the Army spoke next on how Title V had hampered the Army's massive program of information and education. To avoid violating the law, the Army had adopted the motto “Leave it out when in doubt.” Educational courses were dismantled, and individual books were removed from library shelves. “We believe that the best soldier is an informed soldier,” an Army spokesperson said. “We believe that we can fight a better war and end it sooner with men who know what is happening in the world.” But the recent limitations on books and educational courses had thwarted the Army's objectives.

Despite his tenaciousness, Senator Taft was in a sensitive political position. He did not want to be seen as supporting censorship of servicemen's reading materials. Nor did he want to be called out for backtracking on his own legislation. Thus, after meeting with the council, Taft issued a statement, reiterating his long-standing belief that “the general principle of prohibiting government funds for political propaganda is admitted by all, but the provisions of the act are somewhat too strict and make administration by the Army too difficult.” He openly criticized the Army's interpretation of the law, but conceded that he would sponsor amendments to the act in order to increase its flexibility.