When Books Went to War Quotes

“In one memorable episode, Warren received a trusting note from a woman in the bookkeeping department via the library’s pneumatic-tube system, which ran between the library and store. “It’s very slow here on this rainy day,” the bookkeeper complained. “Please send me one of those novels you have had to withdraw from circulation as unfit for a lady to read.” Warren fulfilled the request and was surprised the next day to receive the book back, discreetly wrapped, with the message: “Blessings upon you! You’re quite right. This is not fit for anybody to read. Please send another just like it.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“One of the loudest voices to address this issue belonged to the American Library Association (ALA). Librarians felt duty-bound to try to stop Hitler from succeeding in his war of ideas against the United States. They had no intention of purging their shelves or watching their books burn, and they were not going to wait until war was declared to take action.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Authors whose books were selected as ASEs were rewarded with a loyal readership of millions of men. Word spread quickly about the titles that were perennial favorites, even reaching the home front. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which was written in 1925, was considered a failure during Fitzgerald’s lifetime. But when this book was printed as an ASE in October 1945, it won the hearts of an army of men. Their praise reverberated back home, and The Great Gatsby was rescued from obscurity and has since become an American literary classic.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“What is to give light must endure burning.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“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.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Some printed pages are medical plasters to extract pain, others are tourists' tickets out of boredom or loneliness to exhilarating adventures, still others are diplomas for promotion and drilling ideas into a quick-step.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Sadly, not all veterans had equal access to an education, even under the GI Bill’s amendments. Although no provision prevented African American and female veterans from securing an education under the bill, these veterans returned to a nation that still endorsed segregated schools and largely believed a woman’s place was in the home. For African American veterans, educational opportunities were limited. In the words of historian Christopher P. Loss, “Legalized segregation denied most black veterans admission into the nation’s elite, overwhelmingly white universities, and insufficient capacity at the all-black schools they could attend failed to match black veterans’ demand.” The number of African American students at U.S. colleges and universities tripled between 1940 and 1950, but many prospective students were turned away because of their race. For those African Americans who did earn a degree under the GI Bill, employment discrimination prevented them from gaining positions commensurate with their education. Many African American college graduates were offered low-level jobs that they could have secured without any education. Almost a decade elapsed between V-J Day and the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregated schools. It would take another decade after Brown for the civil rights movement to fully develop and for public schools to make significant strides in integrating.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Reading was credited not only with improving morale but easing adjustment and averting the onset of psychoneurotic breakdowns. According to one article: “When we read fiction or drama, we perceive in accordance with our needs, goals, defenses, and values,” and a reader will “introject meaning that will satisfy his needs and reject meaning that is threatening to his ego.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Once a nation fell to Germany, great care was taken to refashion that country’s concepts of culture, history, literature, art, media, and entertainment in an effort to solidify and reinforce Hitler’s power. Often, the first cultural pillar to be toppled was the library. Hitler created the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) to confiscate desirable books and other artifacts in occupied territories. They were intended for a Nazi university to be built after the war. Undesirable books, by contrast, were destroyed.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“As Americans trekked across France to Paris and leapfrogged from one Pacific island to the next, they would be surrounded by nothing but the war, and comforted by little apart from their books.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“They weren’t just for entertainment and diversion. Books also served as the premier weapon in fighting Adolf Hitler’s “war of ideas.” Nazi Germany sought control over people’s beliefs, not just their bodies and territory. From the 1933 state-sanctioned book burnings in Germany to the purging of libraries across Europe as nations were conquered by the Nazis, “un-German” reading material was threatened with extinction. The scale of destruction was impressive. By V-E Day, it is estimated that Germany had destroyed over 100 million books in Europe.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Librarians know from their own experiences that some printed pages are medical plasters to extract pain, others are tourists’ tickets out of boredom or loneliness to exhilarating adventures, still others are diplomas for getting promotion and drilling ideas into a quick-step.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Is it possible that the national psychology emphasizing bigness has caused us to think only in those terms – to the detriment of the small things that have to be done if we are to win the war?”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“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”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“One thing that impressed him was how quickly the ASEs fell apart under combat conditions. “A man reads a book to death very quickly while standing in the rain or snow without any shelter to keep the pages dry.” When there were more men than ASEs, it was “not unusual for a man to tear off the portion of a book he had finished to give it to the next man who doesn’t have a book to read saying—‘I’ll save my pages for you.’” Trautman had intended to bring examples of books in “a state of combat exhaustion” to show to the council, but the servicemen had resisted. “‘You wouldn’t take our books away, would you? We can still read them,” the men had said to Trautman.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“As Americans taunted death and marched toward in Europe in 1945, they were carrying of thousands of copies of titles that were forbidden in the lands they walked on.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Even temporary infringement of liberty establishes dangerous precedents,” – Mari Sandoz”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“As the council would do time and again, it erred on the side of providing a variety- of reading material rather than limiting the types of books sent to servicemen. As America’s army fought to preserve freedom, the council stressed the need to provide unfettered access to a diverse set of titles—even trashy ones.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Shortly after he declared April 17 as Victory Book Day, Roosevelt released a statement on how books played an essential role in the fight for freedom: We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny of every kind. In this war, we know, books are weapons.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“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.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“They weren’t just for entrainment and diversion. Books also served as the premier weapon in fighting Adolf Hitler’s “war of ideas.” Nazi Germany sought control over people’s beliefs, not just their bodies and territory. From the 1933 state-sanctioned book burnings in Germany to the purging of libraries across Europe as nations were conquered by the Nazis, “un-German” reading material was threatened with extinction. The scale of destruction was impressive. By V-E Day, it is estimated that Germany had destroyed over 100 million books in Europe.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“In 1939, fewer than two hundred thousand paperback books were sold in the United States; by 1943, this number had climbed to over forty million.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“A favorite anomaly covered by the newspapers was the ban on E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat—a collection of whimsical essays about life in New England that originally appeared in the New Yorker and other periodicals; the very same essays were readily available to the fighting forces in the magazines they received. (White, himself, once admitted that he never understood why One Man’s Meat was banned, but he liked that it was. “It shows somebody read it,” he said.)”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was perhaps the most popular ASE of them all. It provided such a vivid account of childhood that many men felt as though Smith were writing about theirs. Smith once estimated that she received approximately four letters a day from servicemen, or about fifteen hundred a year. Smith told a friend. “Most of my mail is from servicemen overseas and without exception, they say that everything in [A Tree Grows in Brooklyn] seems so true that it’s not like reading a book—it’s like being home in Brooklyn again . . . Some letters bring tears to one’s eyes,” she admitted. “I am very much touched by the service men away from home thinking so much of the book. I feel that I have done some good in this world.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“The soldier at the front needs to have a cause in his heart as well as a gun in his hand. —EMILY MILLER DANTON, LIBRARIAN”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Another serviceman wrote, “I do not know who you are or how your organization was ever started... however, I want to thank you for providing so many books in such a handy form for all of us in the service.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“Throughout the war, media reports of the growing number of GI casualties troubled those who were still fighting to no end. men objected to the anonymity the term “GI” conveyed “When we think of GI we think of items of issue, nut we are not issued,” Sergeant Frank Turman explained. “When we walk over our dead buddies we wouldn’t refer to them as dead GIs. And when we get home again, and see our buddies’ loved ones, we just couldn’t say: ‘Your son died a GIs death.’” Any body can be a Gl,” Sergeant Turman said, “but it takes a man to be a soldier, sailor or marine.” For those who were fighting on the frontlines, the dead were not nameless or faceless. The war claimed men they knew and loved, and it was torture. The pilot who negotiated, his plane through storms of flak knew the crew member who wis fatally struck; when the Marines charged a beach in an amphibious landing and enemy snipers opened up on them, they knew which of their friends had fallen; and when Japanese pilots swung their planes into Allied ships, damaging and destroying them, the sailors who survived knew who had perished. For the men at war, death was agonizingly personal. Yet they rarely talked about it”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“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.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“- Hitler prepared for battle by infiltrating Frances airwaves. Germany hired native-French broadcasters to unsuspecting listeners to tune in to amusing radio shows and music. Many listeners were oblivious to the propaganda was subtly included. These radio commentators expressed worry over the German army’s dominance and military strength, and predicted that France could not withstand an attack, The doubt Hitler’s radio programs planted in French minds quickly spread. Edmond Taylor, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who lived in France during this period, witnessed Hitler’s intricately choreographed propaganda campaign and how it crumbled Frances resolve. Describing it as a “strategy of terror,’ Taylor reported that Germany spent enormous amounts on propaganda and even bribed French newspapers to publish stories that confirmed the rumors of Germany’s superiority. According to Taylor, Germany’s war of ideas planted a sense of dread “in the of France that spread like a monstrous cancer, devouring all ocher emotional faculties [with] an irrational fear [that was] … uncontrollable.” So weakened was the confidence of the French that something as innocuous as a test of Frances air-raid-siren system generated ripples of panic; the mere innuendo of invasion somehow reinforced the idea that France would undoubtedly be defeated. Although the French government made a late attempt at launching an ideological counteroffensive by publicizing the need to defend freedom, it was as effective as telling citizens to protect themselves from a hurricane by opening an umbrella. When the invasion finally did come, France capitulated in six weeks. By similarly destroying the resolve of his enemies before invading them, Hitler defeated Poland, Finland, Denmark, Norway. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg in addition to France, all in under a year. Over 230 million Europeans, once free, fell under Nazi rule.”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

“In Boston, a writer to the Herald Tribune remarked that “the noblest feature of modem civilization, respect for human life, has been abandoned for the time being in Germany.” This Bostonian noted that while the “internal affairs of Germany are her own business... there are some practices which are so revolting to mankind, such a setback, for civilization, such a debasement of the human spirit that absence anywhere of protest against them is almost equivalent to approval of them”
― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II