When Books Went to War (25 page)

 

The council, like so many other wartime organizations, began to wind down. At an August 1945 executive committee meeting, some members urged that the association immediately dissolve; others felt that there would be a continued need for ASEs during demobilization and that the council should continue its work for a brief period. The Army estimated that demobilization of an anticipated six million men would not be completed until July 1, 1946, or later. In addition, it announced that occupation forces were needed to the tune of five hundred thousand men in Europe, nine hundred thousand in the Pacific, and another six hundred thousand for overseeing the first year of peace. The council and War Department settled on the view that there remained a need for ASEs. Production of the books continued through the first half of 1946 at a rate of 110,000 copies of each title; beginning in June 1946, the project was scaled back to 80,000 copies of each title per month.

Many publishers expressed relief that the council would not yet disband, and hoped to continue the collaborative effort in some new fashion. As William W. Norton said at one council meeting, “it would be short sighted to dissolve so successful a cooperative enterprise of the publishing industry.” Norton even endorsed the idea of creating a “larger peacetime book organization [for] which the Council could be instrumental in laying the groundwork.”

In December 1945, Philip Van Doren Stern left his post as manager of the ASEs and returned to full-time work at Pocket Books. He was succeeded by Stahley Thompson, who helped design the ASEs at the outset of the project and had just returned to the United States after completing a term of military service with
Yank
. Up to this time, the council had generally expected that its ASE branch would be liquidated in the summer of 1946, since the last contract between the council and the government provided that the printing of ASEs would not continue for more than one year after hostilities had ceased. However, Paul E. Postell, who had succeeded Lieutenant Colonel Trautman as chief of the Army's Library Section, believed that the half million or more occupation troops who would remain overseas after the summer of 1946 would still need books. These men would largely serve in isolated constabulary units, which could not be easily served through regular library service. Thompson, fresh from a stint of service overseas, insisted there was still an unsated hunger for reading materials. The war might have ended, but the need for pocket-sized paperbacks had not. The Army and Navy hoped that the council would continue its work a little longer.

But as the size of the Army and Navy dramatically decreased, orders for new books also fell. In December 1945, the Army estimated that its monthly book needs would consist of a maximum of twenty thousand sets of twelve or fifteen books each, and the Navy hoped to secure approximately five thousand sets. This precipitous reduction in the scope of the project (to about 15 percent of the amount demanded at the height of ASE production) created problems. Fewer books meant higher prices. The council debated whether the War Department should simply purchase domestic editions of paperback books, as Pocket Books and other publishers sold paperbacks for as little as twenty-five cents. But they were still too expensive compared to ASEs, which cost as little as five cents apiece. Negotiations between Postell, Thompson, and the ASE management continued during the early months of 1946, with Thompson proposing a number of ideas on how to reduce costs. In the end, by adopting the methods used by Pocket Books and lowering production expenses by utilizing modern printing technology, the council was able to print runs of twenty-five thousand books that cost eighteen cents apiece. The council entered a contract with the Army and Navy to print series II through TT, for distribution from October 1946 through September 1947. Using the J. W. Clement Company of Buffalo for the printing, ASEs continued to be churned out at the pace of twelve titles per month, or about three hundred thousand books.

Unlike the earlier series, the ASEs in series II to TT took on the appearance of ordinary paperback books—they were bound on their long edge and were thus taller than they were wide. Rather than two columns of text per page, they had a single column. No longer were there two sizes of ASEs; the new upright-format books were all four and a quarter by six and a half inches. However, some features remained the same. The cover of each ASE continued to display a thumbnail image of the dust jacket from the hardcover edition, the back cover provided a short summary of the book, and the inside back cover listed the titles printed for the servicemen that month.

Midway through the contract for series II to TT, the Army informed the council that its budget had been cut and that it could no longer pay for the ASEs it had ordered. The Navy also faced a lack of funding for ASEs. Both services insisted they wanted the books they had contracted to buy, but payment was a financial impossibility. At a special meeting of the council's directors held in January 1947, Malcolm Johnson, the man who had first proposed the creation of the ASEs, suggested that the council examine its finances and determine if the books could still be printed. After discovering a surplus of funds, Johnson suggested that the council enter a new contract with the Army and Navy to print books through September 1947 by expending this surplus. The directors passed a resolution: the Army and Navy would each remit payment of one dollar in exchange for the council's production of series NN through TT—a total of 1.5 million ASEs. The council would cover the rest.

 

The ASE program finally came to an end in September 1947, when the final batch of ASEs was delivered to the Army and Navy. Among these titles were Max Brand's
The False Rider
(a western), Bob Feller's
Strikeout Story
(an autobiography), Thomas B. Costain's
The Moneyman
(historical nonfiction), Budd Schulberg's
The Harder They Fall
(a boxing novel), and Craig Rice's
Los Angeles Murders
(a mystery). The last ASE to be printed was Ernie Pyle's
Home Country
, a nod to America's favorite war correspondent, who was killed by a Japanese sniper in the Pacific.

As it wound down its affairs, the council received a flood of mail from servicemen who realized how much they would miss their monthly book ration. In the words of one captain, the ASEs “followed me through combat and now in the occupation phase. Needless to say, they have been a tremendous morale factor.” “I treasure them to such an extent,” he said, “that I should like to have them in my home in the future months when I return.”
The council responded that production had ended; there would be no new titles and all books had been distributed. But the ASEs continued on anyway. Some servicemen brought a book or two home to keep as war souvenirs or for future reading. Others grabbed a single volume to swap with others for the long ride back to the States. Those who remained overseas as occupation forces hoarded small collections of ASEs for their leisure hours. Some ASEs made their way into overseas military libraries—with call numbers added to their spines and circulation tabs kept on them. Some even survived long enough to serve the men who fought in America's “forgotten war,” Korea. Although new ASEs would not be printed, the profound impact they made on all those fortunate enough to experience them did not fade. As millions of veterans returned home, many would bring with them a love of reading that they did not have when they first went off to war.

And the government had one more inspired idea by which books would help veterans as they prepared to resume their civilian lives.

ELEVEN

We have taught our youth how to wage war; we must also teach them how to live useful and happy lives in freedom, justice, and decency.

 

—
MESSAGE TO CONGRESS FROM PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT
, 1943

 

W
ELL BEFORE THE
war ended, the U.S. government contemplated the likely problems that would arise from mass demobilization. One major concern was employment. It was difficult to comprehend how there would be enough jobs for the wartime labor force
plus
the fifteen million men and women (more than one in ten of the nation's population) who were returning home after completing their service to the country. Policymakers fretted over the “political consequences of massive unemployment, when hordes of young men, skilled in firearms, would begin to roam the streets, angry over their inability to regain a foothold in the civilian world.” Another concern on the home front was that veterans would return home harboring all manner of psychological issues: 2.5 million individuals had been discharged from military service on the basis of psychological maladies. Eradicating cases of soldier maladjustment was deemed a pressing matter of national security. To say the least, it did not do the servicemen any good when they heard that they were being compared to “psycho” killers back home. In the words of one veteran, “This prevailing tendency to regard a man who has been in uniform as a potential criminal lunatic is probably the most depressing phase of a veteran's homecoming and thoughts of home.”

The servicemen had their own anxieties. The Army's research branch conducted surveys revealing that many soldiers worried they would have “difficulty in settling down, getting over restlessness, adjusting to a steady job, or getting over the mental effects of the war.” Others feared they would not easily adjust to life as a civilian, or that they would feel unfamiliar with their friends and family. Those who well remembered the lasting effects of the Great Depression when they entered military service wondered whether there would be a shortage of jobs when they returned to the States. The research branch learned that some servicemen envisioned “a future of ditch digging and bread lines”; others predicted the nation would fall into another economic depression, and still others imagined an army of eleven million apple salesmen pounding the pavement to make a postwar living.

Concern about how the domestic economy would absorb the incredible influx of veterans had been the source of debate and controversy even before Japan surrendered. A mini scandal erupted over a well-publicized statement by Major General Lewis B. Hershey, the national director of Selective Service, who said in 1944 that it would be “cheaper to keep men in the Army than . . . to set up an agency to take care of them when they are released.” Hershey added that the economy might not be able to handle both the eleven million men in the armed services and the seventeen to eighteen million Americans who joined the workforce to serve the war industries. Hershey's statements, which millions of servicemen read in
Yank
, touched a nerve. “This plan would be quite feasible if it concerned a herd of cattle,” Sergeant Louis Doyle commented, as cattle “can assuredly be maintained more cheaply as a group than if given a measure of individual, free life . . . I would, however, remind Washington officials that we are human beings, not cattle, and claim a right to return to the society which we are at present bending every effort to maintain.”
The government rejected Hershey's view; instead, it focused on how it could provide for the diverse needs of the returning servicemen.

President Roosevelt had spurred the New Deal to help America dig itself out of the Great Depression. During the war, he championed legislation to benefit the returning veteran. As early as 1943, Roosevelt called on Congress to draft a bill ensuring that honorably discharged servicemen would return home with the promise that they could attend college and secure vocational training on the government's dime. “During the war we have seen to it that they have received the best training and equipment, the best food, shelter and medical attention, the best protection and care which planning, ingenuity, physical resources and money could furnish in time of war,” Roosevelt said in a message to Congress in 1943. Similarly, he believed the nation had an obligation to provide its veterans with the very best training and equipment after the war.

Roosevelt envisioned a law that would provide each man with a handsome sum of mustering-out pay, money that would tide them over as they searched for employment and readjusted to civilian life. Since some members of the armed forces might not immediately find a job, Roosevelt called for unemployment benefits to fill the breach until they could be absorbed by private industry. Some men and women had interrupted their education in order to serve the nation, and President Roosevelt asked Congress to provide veterans with the opportunity to attend college or apply for technical training after their discharge—at the government's cost. And Roosevelt wanted Congress to act without delay. “Nothing,” the president said, would be “more conducive to the maintenance of high morale in our troops than the knowledge that steps are being taken now to give them education and technical training when the fighting is over.”

At the time President Roosevelt announced these goals, a college education was largely outside the grasp of most working-class families. Placing a college degree within reach of every qualified veteran was extraordinary. In 1940 the average worker earned less than $1,000 each year, and the annual cost of a college education fell anywhere between $453 at state colleges to $979 at private universities.
Under Roosevelt's plan, higher education would be doled out irrespective of social class or wealth for the first time in American history. This democratization of education for veterans was a fitting conclusion to a war fought in the name of democracy and freedom.

The American Legion, a veterans' organization, took up the task of drafting a bill that would encompass President Roosevelt's vision. After months of hashing out language, the omnibus veterans' relief bill, which became the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944, was presented to Congress. Believing this title had “all the political sex of a castrated mule,” the Legion's publicity director urged calling it simply the “GI Bill of Rights.” This catchier name stuck. The GI Bill promised servicemen and servicewomen in the Army and Navy access to counseling, disability and unemployment benefits, low-interest loans for homes and businesses, and two years of college or job training. After the bill was unanimously passed in the House and Senate, President Roosevelt hosted a public ceremony on June 22, 1944, to celebrate his signing it into law. Roosevelt said that the GI Bill gave “emphatic notice to the men and women in our armed forces that the American people do not intend to let them down.”