When Books Went to War (10 page)

The program was first broadcast on Tuesday, February 22, 1944, at 11:30 p.m. (an hour so late that producers complained no one would be listening). At the beginning of the show, a narrator explains that listeners will hear actors reenact Menefee's experiences and conversations with Americans across the nation. The first town visited is Brattleboro, Vermont, where a furious father is heard refusing to allow his daughter to marry an Irishman. “No daughter of mine will ever sink
that
low,” he bellows. The narrator then remarks: “In New England you will find a well established social hierarchy—a caste system unparalleled in America except by the white-Negro relationship of the South.” The train moves on to Boston, where Menefee encounters a mutilated patriotic poster—with the word “United” changed to “Jewnited.” “Isolationism, anti-Semitism, [and] pro-appeasement are more rampant in Boston than in any city in the land,” the narrator intones. Describing anti-Semitic leaflets distributed in the subways, and violence directed against Jews, the narrator says he would expect such scenes in Nazi Germany, not in the United States.

As the train moves through the South, it stops in Mobile, Alabama, where the narrator observes booming shipyards, young girls soliciting in the streets, and rambunctious boys robbing stores and drinking alcohol. With a housing shortage and a city overrun with destitute families seeking employment, one native of the area tells the narrator that the “sooner the war's over the sooner we'll get 'em out of the shipyards, out of town and back to their pea patches and swamps where they belong!” As the train passes through Mississippi and Louisiana, the narrator observes that “large segments of the population are more interested in keeping the Negro in his place than in keeping Hitler and Tojo in their places.” “The resulting dissension must be very gratifying to Dr. Goebbels,” he concludes. Asked about the “racial question,” a local politician insists there is none. “There is white supremacy, and there always will be white supremacy. We have no patience with fellas in Washington, with their anti-lynching bills, their anti-poll-tax bills, and their anti-discrimination clauses in war contracts,” he says.

The train chugs through the Midwest, where the narrator comments that Chicago's black market flourishes; Detroit's race riots are “worse than most of the South has ever seen”; and Minneapolis seethes with anti-Semitism. On the West Coast, residents of California, Oregon, and Washington State can be heard complaining about food and housing shortages, absenteeism, labor turnover, and strikes. The narrator speaks of low morale plaguing the war plants, as management blames workers for being shiftless and dissolute, while workers blame management for long hours and difficult work conditions. Everyone blames the government for the lack of housing, childcare, and community facilities.

Yet following this damning account of division across the United States, the narrator asks Menefee to give his overall impression of America. He ends the program with a dash of optimism. “People are doing a wonderful job fighting this war, despite the mistakes that some are making,” Menefee states. Public opinion polls showed that Americans knew what they were fighting for and were determined to win the war and a lasting peace. Menefee concludes that Americans generally agreed on the course the nation was taking in the war and were willing to fight for peace and freedom.

“Assignment: USA” made people talk. Some Americans were offended by Menefee's characterizations and curt comments, while others felt that the episode discussed the nation's problems with a refreshing dose of honesty. Magazines and newspapers jumped at the opportunity to cover the controversial program.
Variety
reported that if “Assignment: USA” had been broadcast earlier in the evening, “the phone calls would have burned the insulation off the wires of NBC.” The substance of the show “scorched the air [and] made your ears burn”; it was just the type of program the country needed. The
New York Times
deemed it “the boldest, hardest hitting program” of the year. As word spread, NBC was pressured to rebroadcast the show at an earlier hour when more people could tune in and listen. NBC acquiesced, and when the program was replayed, some cities—such as Boston; Springfield, Massachusetts; and Mobile, Alabama—refused to carry it. According to
Time
magazine, “Boston was not amused” at the rebroadcast and had “heard all it wanted to hear . . . when the program first went on the air.”
Did the broadcast help in the war effort? Certainly it showcased the rigor of a free press and the right to dissent and raise a critical voice. The council was gratified by the segment's popularity and felt a sense of accomplishment in producing a show that sparked discussion about the issues plaguing the home front. It achieved precisely what the council had hoped.

 

While the council's radio programs enjoyed wide popularity, council members were concerned that the quantity of books recommended each week might overwhelm the public. The council decided to start a new project to promote only those titles deemed extraordinary, that clarified why the country was at war, what values were at stake, and under what terms the war should be ended. A War Book Panel was created to nominate and choose titles that could be published bearing the council's stamp of approval. Panel members included Irita Van Doren, editor of the
New York Herald Tribune;
Amy Loveman, associate editor of the
Saturday Review of Literature;
Lieutenant Colonel Joseph L. Greene, editor of the
Infantry Journal;
Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, retired; and J. Donald Adams, editor of the
New York Times Book Review
. The panel met periodically to discuss titles and vote on which would receive official endorsement. Selected books were republished and labeled “Imperative,” their front covers emblazoned with a large
I
. All council members were obligated to advertise these books as essential reading—even books published by rival companys. While they would certainly benefit monetarily by promoting the sale of books, never before had publishers collaborated so wholeheartedly as to advertise books published by their competitors.
Posters were displayed in libraries and bookstores to help publicize the new Imperative book program and the selected titles.

The first book branded Imperative was
They Were Expendable
, by W. L. White, which was chosen in November 1942. The book told the story of the servicemen who manned torpedo boats in the Philippines as Americans came under Japanese attack. Told from the perspective of four survivors (out of sixty men), the book did not shy away from the idea stated in the title: these men were considered replaceable and they knew it. “Suppose you're a sergeant machine-gunner, and your army is retreating and the enemy is advancing,” one of the survivors proposed. He continued:

 

The captain takes you to a machine gun covering the road. “You're to stay here and hold the position,” he tells you. “For how long,” you ask. “Never mind,” he answers, “just hold it.” Then you know you're expendable. In a war, anything can be expendable—money or gasoline or equipment or most usually men . . . They expect you to stay there and spray that road with steel until you're killed or captured, holding up the enemy for a few minutes or even a precious quarter of an hour.

 

Reviews pegged the book as the most significant personal war experience yet published. It was well deserving of the “Distinguished Service Medal, the ‘I' for Imperative,” one newspaper said.

About four months later, the council announced that John Hersey's
Into the Valley
would be its next Imperative. Hersey told of his experience as a war correspondent on Guadalcanal, where he accompanied a company of Marines on a mission to take the Matanikau River from the Japanese in October 1942. According to Hersey, after a long march into the dense jungle, enemy snipers opened up, Japanese machine guns rattled off rounds, and mortars were lobbed—their shrill whistling gave a brief, terrifying warning that a shell was about to burst. Hersey watched as Americans were unable to set up their own machine guns quickly enough and were forced to retreat, carrying injured and dying men back to camp.
Into the Valley
provided a realistic account of what battle was like, describing acts of heroism on the part of the Marines without overly romanticizing their experience.

In May 1943 the third Imperative was selected—Wendell Willkie's
One World
. The book told of Willkie's tour of Allied nations during the fall of 1942 as an American ambassador at large, and recorded his impressions of the leaders and people he encountered. Willkie urged Americans to shed their isolationist tendencies and recognize that countries needed to cooperate with one another to achieve peace and maintain it after the war. The fourth Imperative, announced in July 1943, was Walter Lippmann's
U.S
.
Foreign Policy
. This book argued that America's failure to readjust its foreign policy to account for its acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 and Germany's aggression during World War I rendered it completely unprepared for war in 1941 and threatened its ability to make peace. Lippmann provided a brief history of America's diplomatic relations and wars, challenged America's fondness for isolationism, and urged Americans to recognize their commitments to the world. The book was lauded for making foreign policy accessible to the masses, and widening the area of discussion from small groups of intellectuals to hundreds of thousands of people.

The fifth Imperative was another of John Hersey's,
A Bell For Adano
, which was the only work of fiction endorsed under the program. This book challenged Hitler's propaganda about America's heterogeneity being its weakness. (In September 1941, Goebbels had declared that the “America of today will never be a danger to us. Nothing will be easier than to produce a bloody revolution in the United States. No other country has so many racial and social tensions. We shall be able to play many strings there.”
) The hero of Hersey's story is an Italian American GI who takes part in the invasion of Sicily and wins the trust of the Italian locals because of their shared heritage. Hersey advanced the notion that America's armed forces had an advantage in the world war precisely because they represented a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities.

The sixth and, as it turned out, final Imperative book was named in September 1944, Edgar Snow's
People on Our Side
. Snow, a war correspondent for the
Saturday Evening Post
, took a seventeen-country tour from April 1942 through the summer of 1943. Primarily focusing on his experiences in Russia, China, and India, Snow described the political, economic, and social problems that plagued these nations.

It is not entirely clear why the Imperative program came to an end. Selection of a seventh book began, but the War Book Panel voted in equal number for two books, and it seems this tie resulted in a stalemate. In the spring of 1945, the panel selected Ralph Ingersoll's
The Battle Is the Payoff
, but this title had already become a bestseller; it seemed unnecessary to crown as an Imperative a book millions of people were already reading. And at that point, the end of the war was in sight.

Despite its modest number of titles, the Imperative program was a success. Indeed, as with Hollywood and the film industry, the war was good for reading and the book industry. Americans purchased about 25 percent more books in 1943 than they did in 1942. The new paperback format was a hit, as Americans craved simple pleasures in times of peril. This increase in book buying was indicative of an expanded market of book buyers. As
Time
magazine observed, by 1943, “book-reading and book-buying reached outside the narrow quarters of the intellectuals and became the business of the whole vast literate population of the U.S.”
No longer were books linked to wealth and status: they had become a universal pastime and a fitting symbol of democracy.

 

The council's greatest achievement was neither its radio programs nor its Imperative series. In 1943 it turned its attention to the book needs of U.S. servicemen. Publishers knew that soldiers, sailors, and Marines craved books, but hated the VBC's bulky hardcovers. Although the council had reached out to the VBC to offer assistance in supplying the servicemen with books, the relationship between these two organizations never warmed. In fact, when council members Richard Simon (of Simon & Schuster) and John Farrar (of Farrar & Rinehart) met with VBC members in December 1942, Farrar cryptically described the meeting as a “fairly complicated one and inconclusive,” and then added: “I had best report on it orally.”
The two organizations never meaningfully worked together.

As of early 1943, no book existed that met the specific needs of servicemen stationed on the frontlines. It would have to be invented. As publishers puzzled over how to affordably produce small-sized paperbacks, a few men worked on a blueprint that would revolutionize the industry. After consulting with Lieutenant Colonel Trautman and graphic artist H. Stahley Thompson, Malcolm Johnson presented a proposal to the council to reconstruct the book—inside and out.
Although they would leave the meeting with more questions than answers, the plan met a chorus of approval. The “Armed Services Edition” was born.

Over the next several years, the production of these books would be beset with challenges. But with the cooperation of every major United States publishing company and the Navy and War Departments, the council championed the most significant project in publishing history. The organization in search of a project had finally found a lasting one.

FIVE

Dear Sirs:

I want to say thanks a million for one of the best deals in the Army—your Armed Services Editions. Whenever we get them they are as welcome as a letter from home. They are as popular as pin-up girls—especially over here where we just couldn't get books so easily, if it weren't for your editions.