Free When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning Page B

that a live wire layman be put in charge of the campaign effort in every large center.” Between 1870 and 1900, librarianship had swung from 80 percent male to 80 percent female, though men held the majority of executive posts and women generally played second fiddle. The VBC’s first director, after all, had been described as “#1 in the field of
Women
Librarians.” Taft clearly was not a fan of the female-dominated group.
    When John Connor and the VBC survived the funding scare, he wrote to Althea Warren, describing the ordeal. “Taft began once again his gospel of the inadequacy of librarians and his preference to have business men do the job. He was permitted to speak his piece,” Connor said, but when others had “finished extolling the efforts of the librarians in the VBC effort, there was little that Charlie could do by way of rebuttal.” Connor expected a sympathetic response, and Warren did not disappoint. “How glad I am to have missed Mr. Charles P. Taft! Didn’t he make you want to haul off and slap him in the jaw? He is so full of criticism and with no suggestions to help,” she said.
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    The 1943 campaign produced fewer books than 1942, and many of them were not useful to the troops. Connor made arrangements to route unwanted books to organizations and areas that would appreciate them. An outspoken proponent of racial equality, he sent volumes to Japanese internment camps and begged the Army to send more to its African American troops.
    Connor also sent books to American POWs, though it wasn’t easy and had to be done via the YMCA’s War Prisoners’ Aid division. The books donated to the YMCA had to be rigorously sorted, as the rules governing what books would be accepted were onerous. For example, nothing published after September 1, 1939, was allowed, nor were materials that had any relation to geography, politics, technology, war or the military, or “any subject which may be considered doubtful.” Books had to be new or in mint condition; no signs of previous ownership or erasure were permitted. Anything written by or including material of Jewish authors or “émigrés from enemy or enemy-occupied countries” was rejected because such books would not be allowed in German-controlled POW camps.
    The VBC turned to publishing companies for help. In the month of March 1943 alone, the campaign collected fifteen hundred books from Funk & Wagnalls, over fifteen hundred from Harper & Brothers, four thousand from Doubleday, Doran, two thousand from W. W. Norton & Company, one thousand from G. P. Putnam’s Sons, and sixteen hundred from Alfred A. Knopf—to name just a few. Of them all, Pocket Books was consistently generous in donating its popular paperbacks. The five thousand books given to the campaign by Pocket Books in March 1943 supplemented the sixty thousand provided the month before.Beloved by the servicemen because they were lightweight and smaller than the traditional hardcovers, they easily made the rounds overseas as well as in camps and hospitals.
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    As donations from the public continued to slow, the question arose: why shouldn’t the armed services provide millions of books as part of its budget? Between 1941 and 1943 the Army and Navy had experimented with distributing magazines to the troops. The success of this program doomed the VBC.
    Despite early setbacks, delivery of popular periodicals was one of the greatest transformations in recreation for frontline soldiers to date. Originally, the Army and Navy ordered thousands of subscriptions to more than a dozen magazines, and planned to sort them into sets by bundling one copy of each into a single package for shipment around the world. In the Army, one set of magazines was supposed to reach each unit of 150 men. In reality, fifty- and seventy-pound packages, each containing two hundred copies of the same magazine, piled up at overseas postal-distribution