When I was growing up, many of the dads in my neighborhood had served in World War II. True to stereotype, none of them talked much about the war. Information came sideways.
My best friend's dad, who'd been in the Air Force in China, taught us to how say "hot water" in Mandarin. Another dad, an Army vet, let slip that he'd burned his uniform upon returning home, which puzzled us. And my own dad, a Navy vet, once said something about the "funny paperbacks" around during the war.
It wasn't until I began researching my book on The Great Gatsby that I realized my father had been one of the millions of servicemen on the receiving end of what's been called the "biggest book giveaway in history."
When the U.S. entered World War II, there was an effort to get books into the hands of servicemen to combat boredom. The books, though, had to be light and small enough to fit in servicemen's pockets. That was only one of the challenges faced by a group of publishers, librarians and booksellers who composed the Council on Books in Wartime.
The distribution program the Council eventually adopted stood in contrast to the Nazi book burnings that began in 1933. The motto of the Council on Books in Wartime was: "Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas." America would initiate a program for servicemen that would implicitly affirm the freedom to read widely.
Col. Ray Trautman is the hero of this story. In a terrific forthcoming book called A Librarian's War, coming out in September, Molly Guptill Manning details how Trautman came up with the idea of not just distributing books for the troops, but producing them. The Armed Services Editions, or ASEs as they were called, were those "funny paperbacks" that my father had mentioned to me.
Printed on pulp paper, the Armed Services Editions began rolling off presses in 1943; by the time the program came to an end in 1947, nearly 123 million books were distributed to U.S. troops. The greatest distribution was on the eve of D-Day. Soldiers going over in landing crafts carried ASEs in their pockets. The most popular of the D-Day titles was Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Just as inspiring, to my mind, was the fact that the Council's selection committee didn't limit its choices to just those books they assumed the troops would like. Sure, there were plenty of cowboy stories, Tarzan tales and suspense fiction. Forever Amber, a steamy historical romance by Kathleen Winsor, was especially popular. But among the 1,322 titles produced during the lifetime of the ASEs were Moby Dick, biographies of Frederick Douglass and Queen Victoria, essays by Lincoln and Emerson, and poetry collections by Longfellow, Keats and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
It must be acknowledged that the ASEs were overwhelmingly written by white authors. It should also be acknowledged that there were efforts to ban some of the books. In A Librarian's War, Manning describes how, in advance of the 1944 presidential election, Armed Services Editions that were perceived, however indirectly, to favor then-President Roosevelt were targeted for purging.
In response, newspapers around the country ran editorials and letters from readers decrying the bannings. Even the troops themselves got wind of the bannings and protested. Manning quotes one soldier's letter that says: "It will be recalled that Mr. Hitler got his start by banning and burning books with which he, in his wisdom, did not agree." Widespread pushback triumphed and soldier's freedom to read prevailed.
If you can't wait for A Librarian's War, there are other good books to read about the Armed Services Editions, including Manning's earlier book on the program called When Books Went to War and a slim volume published by the Library of Congress called Books in Action.
I found myself at the Library of Congress back in 2012, on the trail of how The Great Gatsby, published in 1925 to mixed reviews and disappointing sales, came back from relative obscurity so quickly after F. Scott Fitzgerald's death in 1940. A crucial part of the answer was the Armed Services Editions. Gatsby was published as an ASE in 1945: 155,000 copies were distributed to servicemen that year.
The Library of Congress, our national temple of books, has the only complete collection of Armed Services Editions. Anyone can apply for access. Believe me, it's a powerful experience to hold one of these little books and think of the service it performed.
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