When Books Went to War (26 page)

Although politicians believed that veterans would enthusiastically take advantage of the panoply of benefits provided under the GI Bill, the law, at least initially, was grossly underutilized. While officials were relieved that veterans did not need to rely on the full scope of unemployment benefits, they were dismayed at the apparent failure of the GI Bill's education provision. As of February 1, 1945, only 12,844 of the 1.5 million who had been discharged from service—less than 1 percent—sought an education. That Army officials were disappointed was said to be “the understatement of the decade.” The
Saturday Evening Post
investigated, concluding that the average soldier “has no patience for books; he is becoming increasingly fed up with regimentation.” Men would rather obtain employment than an education, the
Post
said.

The
Post
was wrong. Overseas, men were eager to sign up for a free education, many just did not qualify for one. The most problematic provision of the bill was its age requirement: only those under twenty-five could receive more than one year of education. Many thousands of servicepeople were automatically excluded. “I would rather have had the Bill not passed at all,” one man who was over twenty-five years old said. “The smug assurances of our country's generosity constantly dinned into our ears . . . becomes sickening after a time when one realizes the full (and feeble) effects the Bill will have.”

The federal government took note of both the sluggish application rate and the complaints about the bill's exclusion of a large number of veterans who wanted an education. In late 1945, with the war finally over, Congress enhanced the law significantly. The maximum length of government-paid study increased from two to four years, restrictions that hampered the ease with which GIs could qualify for an education were dropped, and subsistence allowances were increased to help pay for expenses incurred outside of college tuition—such as groceries, rent, and books. Gone was the twenty-five-year-old age limitation that had excluded older veterans. Also, men were given more time to begin and complete their education; before the amendments, there was a seven-year window to finish one's schooling, but after the amendments, this period was extended to nine years. Numerous pamphlets were issued to help publicize, in easy-to-understand terms, what benefits the GIs could expect when they returned home. Every person in the military was given a pocket-sized booklet—similar to the standard ASE—entitled
Going Back to Civilian Life
. It provided information on where veterans could turn for help with personal problems stemming from their separation from military service, and how they could seek reemployment at an old job, obtain new employment, or work for the government. The booklet also provided a general explanation of the GI Bill of Rights, including information on education, unemployment compensation, and veterans' entitlement to a guarantee of loans for a home or business.

Librarians once again rose to action, and domestic libraries entered their own readjustment stage. Just as librarians prepared and educated their patrons as the United States transitioned to a nation at war (helping with everything from what plants would grow best in a local victory garden to assembling reading lists of books that would foster an understanding of why the world was at war), librarians assisted the nation as it demobilized. Many librarians established programs, with the cooperation of the Veterans Administration and the Red Cross, to help veterans learn more about the GI Bill of Rights. Librarians doled out advice about everything from reemployment and vocational rehabilitation to how a veteran could go about obtaining a loan, insurance, or an education. Some libraries secured films on readjustment and hosted movie nights; many libraries created reading lists that highlighted books that might help families deal with the problems demobilization posed. Still other libraries offered counseling services to assist veterans in signing up for the benefits being offered, and apprising them of what programs might interest them.

 

Between August 1945 and January 1946, 5.4 million Americans who served in the Army and Navy were discharged from service. As these veterans learned of the benefits available under the amended GI Bill, they turned out in droves to register for a college education. Enrollment reached its pinnacle in 1948, when 900,000 veterans signed up for college classes. Over the course of nine years, approximately 7.8 million veterans pursued education or training under the GI Bill, with a total of 2.2 million enrolling in college-level studies. From 1947 to 1948, 50 percent of college students in the United States were veterans, and the overall number of people attending colleges and universities was higher than ever before. Although some early critics believed that veterans did not want to learn, had no interest in reading books, and were inclined to pursue immediate employment rather than an education, veterans quickly earned reputations as mature, serious students; they attended classes, took meticulous notes, studied hard, and earned top grades. Non-veteran students began to resent having veterans in their classes because former GIs' high marks wreaked havoc on grading curves. Civilian students at the University of California began to refer to veteran students by the acronym DARs—Damned Average Raisers. “It's books, books, books all the time,” one exasperated student at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania said about his veteran classmates. “They study so hard we have to slave to keep up with them.”

Across the country, veterans outperformed the expectations colleges had for them; they had lower dropout rates than non-veteran students, and exhibited a work ethic that surprised many instructors. As one professor said, the veterans had “one priceless quality which is the answer of every teacher's prayer: they want to learn.” Not only did veterans exhibit a zeal for their classes, they pursued demanding courses of study, “gravitating especially toward business administration, followed by professional fields such as law, medicine, dentistry, and teaching, and then, in almost equal numbers, engineering, architecture, the physical sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences.” Even early opponents of the GI Bill were forced to admit that veterans made excellent students. Harvard president James Bryant Conant marveled at the quality of students ushered into universities through the GI Bill. He declared in 1946 that the legislation was “a heartening sign that the democratic process of social mobility is energetically at work, piercing the class barriers which, even in America, have tended to keep a college education the prerogative of the few.”
Many grateful veterans openly acknowledged that the GI Bill had changed their lives.

Sadly, not all veterans had equal access to an education, even under the GI Bill's amendments. Although no provision prevented African American and female veterans from securing an education under the bill, these veterans returned to a nation that still endorsed segregated schools and largely believed a woman's place was in the home. For African American veterans, educational opportunities were limited. In the words of historian Christopher P. Loss, “Legalized segregation denied most black veterans admission into the nation's elite, overwhelmingly white universities, and insufficient capacity at the all-black schools they could attend failed to match black veterans' demand.” The number of African American students at U.S. colleges and universities tripled between 1940 and 1950, but many prospective students were turned away because of their race. For those African Americans who did earn a degree under the GI Bill, employment discrimination prevented them from gaining positions commensurate with their education. Many African American college graduates were offered low-level jobs that they could have secured without any education. Almost a decade elapsed between V-J Day and the Supreme Court's landmark decision in
Brown v. Board of Education
, which struck down segregated schools. It would take another decade after
Brown
for the civil rights movement to fully develop and for public schools to make significant strides in integrating.

As for female veterans, societal pressures caused many to forgo educational and other opportunities under the GI Bill in favor of serving a traditional domestic role. Policymakers and labor unions that had eagerly urged women to fill positions in the war industries while millions of men served overseas changed their tune after the war. Facing a “back to the kitchen” movement, women were implored to leave the workforce to make way for male veterans. Barriers were raised as employers favored men over women to fill positions. Under these circumstances, women, like African Americans, faced the prospect of gaining an education under the GI Bill only to be robbed of the chance of putting their degree to full use. It would take time for policymakers to discover that male veterans could be absorbed into the workforce without sending the domestic economy spiraling toward depression. And it would take until the 1970s before higher education became fully “co-ed.”

 

If it had not been for the mountains of books that were sent to the training camps and overseas units during the war, many men may never have developed an interest in reading, studying, or returning to school. Thanks to the council's troop-friendly format and carefully curated selections for each month's reading ration, books became an irresistible pleasure—even to those who eschewed books before the war. As even the
New Republic
, which had expressed doubts about the ASE program back in 1943, observed in 1945: “If ‘Editions for the Armed Services' did no more than provide good reading matter, and plenty of it, for those who already had the habit when they went into the army, this would be a sound and useful enterprise. In fact, however, it goes far beyond this; it is teaching literally millions of Americans to read books, many of them good books, who never read anything but newspapers, and in them chiefly the comic strips.” The council and the Victory Book Campaign were responsible for showing men that they could thrive at book learning and studying after the war. As the
New York Post
boasted in the spring of 1945, America had “the best read army in the world.”

Many ASE authors witnessed the postwar impact of the program firsthand. Wallace Stegner, author of
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
, recalled the “flood of GI students” who enrolled in his classes at Stanford University. “I found that a lot of them had read N-32 in the South Pacific or the European theater.” He was humbled that so many men had read his book while at war. “The book gave us a bond,” he said. It “gave them a certain confidence in me, and me a lot of respect for them.” Other authors maintained correspondence with veterans, and were updated on their progress after the war. Helen MacInnes, author of
While Still We Live
, would never forget one young soldier who insisted that her ASE “got him
enjoying
literature.” This man began to read constantly and developed an interest in attending college after the war. Years later, when he completed his PhD dissertation, he sent a copy to MacInnes, for he had dedicated it to her: “the writer of the novel that started his reading.”

By the time this generation of veterans returned home, many had already tackled Plato, Shakespeare, and Dickens from the frontlines. Others had read about history, business, mathematics, science, journalism, and law. When faced with the opportunity to earn a college degree, these men had already proven that they could apply their energies to an activity as scholarly as reading and thrive. After all, if they could read and learn burrowed in a foxhole between shell bursts, surely they could handle a course of study in a classroom.

 

Just as the GI Bill granted all veterans access to an education—irrespective of wealth and class—books underwent the same democratization during the war, thanks to the paperback revolution. Before the war, Pocket Books and Penguin Books were the only companies experimenting with the softcover trade. Now there was Avon, Popular Library, Dell, Bantam, Ballantine Books, New American Library, and others. These companies produced classics as well as modern fiction and nonfiction. As more publishing firms jumped onto the paperback bandwagon, sales skyrocketed, from 40 million in 1943 to 95 million in 1947. In 1952, sales leapt to 270 million, and in 1959 paperback sales exceeded hardcovers for the first time in American publishing history. Paperbacks were no longer quarantined to drugstores and five-and-dimes. They were sold everywhere, from traditional bookstores to newsstands, variety stores, tobacconists, and railroad stations. The servicemen would no longer have Armed Services Editions, but the booming paperback trade ensured they would have an endless supply of pocket-sized softcovers.

Today, a memorial in Berlin's Bebelplatz commemorates the Nazi book burnings of 1933. Set into the plaza's cobblestones is a glass plate covering a subterranean room lined with empty bookshelves. Visitors may peer downward and consider the tens of thousands of volumes that were destroyed in that square because of the ideas they contained. No parallel monument has been erected in the United States to commemorate the number of books collected and produced to combat the Nazi's war of ideas. Perhaps this book may serve as a memorial to those efforts.

Books have always housed the world's most powerful thoughts and ideas. It was not until World War II, however, that these repositories of knowledge were refashioned into indomitable weapons of warfare. On one side,
Mein Kampf
spread Nazi ideology and propaganda, hatred and devastation. On the other, books spread ideas in the face of their very destruction, stimulated thought about the terms of a lasting peace, and built understanding. As Hitler waged total war, America fought back not just with men and bullets, but with books. Despite the many advances in modern warfare—from airplanes to the atomic bomb—books proved to be one of the most formidable weapons of them all.

It is estimated that more than 100 million books perished over the course of the war. This figure includes books that were destroyed by air raids and bombs as well as by book burnings.
Through the efforts of the Council on Books in Wartime, over 123 million Armed Services Editions were printed. The Victory Book Campaign added 18 million donated books to the total number distributed to American troops. More books were given to the American armed services than Hitler destroyed.