The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer.
During the past century the United States has largely avoided government-sponsored book burning. The destruction of a โHarry Potterโ novel, desecration of a Koran, and the 1966 bonfire of Beatlesโ albums by a preacher angered by John Lennon saying the Fab Four were more popular than Jesus were private acts of zealotry.
The few examples of official immolations appear, in retrospect, faintly ridiculous. In the early 1950s, a few school boards torched piles of lurid comic books. In 1953, Roy Cohn, an aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy and later Donald Trumpโs lawyer and political mentor, directed the purge from embassy libraries of โsubversive volumesโ โ including Henry David Thoreauโs โWalden.โ
In the late 1950s, the Food and Drug Administration torched books written by the zany German-รฉmigrรฉ psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. His publications, the FDA claimed, fraudulently marketed the โorgone box,โ a contraption to enhance orgasms.
Elsewhere, government purges were far more sinister.
In May 1933, theaters in the United States screened newsreels of howling mobs of university students โ and some professors โ in Berlin burning piles of books, the first of many attacks. Encouraged by Joseph Goebbels, the new Nazi governmentโs โMinister of Public Enlightenment,โ the crowd targeted authors who they claimed โinjured the German spirit.โ
Among the first to burn were works by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Helen Keller and Ernest Hemingway. Henceforth, all books in Germany would stress โrace scienceโ and exclude ideas spread by โJewish and Negroโ writers or their sympathizers. (Wilhelm Reich later made the list โ apparently the only author whose books were torched in both Germany and the U.S.)
The Nazi assault on freedom of thought repelled most Americans. The New York Times labeled it a โliterary holocaust.โ Time magazine described it as a โbibliocaust,โ and Newsweek called it a โholocaust of books.โ These reactions marked one of the earliest appearances in popular discourse of the term โholocaust.โ
No doubt many Americans were terrified by the speed at which one of Europeโs most cultured societies descended into what one observer called โcollective insanity.โ For some, the flames evoked the grim prediction by 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine (whose work was soon added to the pyre) that โwhere they burn books, at the end they will also burn people.โ
When war erupted in Europe in September 1939, Nazis expanded their assault on ideas. By 1945, they had destroyed half of all books in Poland and Czechoslovakia and 55 million volumes in the Soviet Union, an estimated 100 million in all. Germanyโs ally, Imperial Japan, acted similarly, destroying many libraries in occupied China.
In 1941, when the U.S. entered the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the conflict as a โwar of ideasโ as well as a clash of armies. โBooks โฆ cannot be killed by fireโ nor could dictators โput thought in a concentration camp forever,โ he declared.
To defeat fascism, โbooks were weaponsโ in the arsenal of democracy. To get these weapons into the hands of soldiers, FDR initiated a campaign to collect and distribute reading material.
Public libraries became collection centers for a โVictory Book Campaign.โ In one year, this voluntary drive gathered more than 6 million titles. But this proved inadequate because many well-meaning donors simply emptied home shelves of unwanted publications.
To meet the challenge, in 1943, the War and Navy departments teamed up with more than 70 publishing companies to form the Council on Books in Wartime (CBW). Much like the wartime production surge of tanks, planes and warships, the CBW devised methods to print tens of millions of books cheaply and sized to fit into the pocket of a uniform.
These Armed Services Editions (ASE) cost less than a dime to produce and were supplied free to military personnel. In an era before electronic entertainment, officers compared books to penicillin in maintaining morale. ASE volumes were widely shared, and an unwritten code specified none should be thrown away. By 1945, 123 million ASE books circulated.
Titles ranged from contemporary fiction, to mysteries, humor, and westerns, as well as classics by Dickens and Shakespeare. The โGreat Gatsby,โ by F.โScott Fitzgerald, had been largely forgotten before it was reissued as a wartime paperback and became a perennial bestseller. The 1944 novel โA Tree Grows in Brooklynโ became a favorite among Marines, thousands of whom wrote letters to author Betty Smith describing the solace they found in the impoverished heroineโs pluck and perseverance. Perhaps that explained the programโs underlying appeal โ books offered an escape from the dangers and boredom of military life and a connection to distant home and family.
As the war in Europe ended in May 1945 and the ASE program wound down, soldiers donated many of their books to depleted European libraries. Upon demobilization, servicemen received a final ASE title, โGoing Back to Civilian Life.โ It explained how they could receive counseling, career guidance, medical care and utilize the generous educational, housing, and unemployment benefits provided by the new GI Bill of Rights. Veterans enrolled in colleges and training programs in record numbers following the worldโs most destructive war.
ASE editions transformed publishing as dramatically as online selling and e-books have in our time. Before the war, inexpensive paperbacks comprised a small, vaguely unsavory, niche market. By warโs end, civilian consumers purchased 40 million paperbacks annually. The market for inexpensive editions soon exploded, with 95 million sold in 1947 and 270 million in 1952.
Wartime readership accelerated creation of a more literate and worldly postwar American middle class โ certainly not an outcome anticipated by Nazi book burners!
In our time, as the written word is under assault by disruptive technologies and by leaders who dispute the very notion of โfactsโ and โtruth,โ how comforting to recall when the nation mobilized ideas, books and free speech as weapons to preserve democracy.
