Read Online When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning - Free Book Online Page B

happily reported that these efforts impacted not only the quantity of contributions but the quality of books received as well. By April 1942, book donations had climbed to 6.6 million volumes.
    If momentum continued to build, it seemed possible that the campaign’s goal would soon be met. Turning to the White House for help, the VBC requested that Friday, April 17, 1942, be designated Victory Book Day. The president obliged. At a press conference, he “asked the cooperation of all citizens, newspapers and radio stations to make [it] a success.” When reporters asked President Roosevelt what types of books should be donated, he responded jokingly: “Anything except algebra,” before stating simply that the public should give the same books that they had read and enjoyed.The Army and Navy were composed of civilians, and their reading tastes were no different from the home front’s.
    The president, who described himself as a “reader and buyer and borrower and collector of books” for all his life, held the VBC and other book organizations in high esteem, for he sincerely believed that books were symbols of democracy and weapons in the war of ideas. 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:
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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.
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    With the president’s Victory Book Day declaration, Connor worked volunteers into a frenzy to prepare for the final charge to meet the campaign’s goal of ten million volumes. Librarians were impressed by the public’s response. Stories of citizens and businesses going the extra mile proliferated. A man in New York City’s Chinatown painstakingly went from one apartment to the next collecting books in a rickshaw. Milkmen collected books from their customers’ doorsteps. Libraries prominently posted thermometer charts that tracked book donations. Even children got involved. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts pounded the pavement, collecting books through door-to-door solicitations in their neighborhoods. One Boy Scout troop collected an astounding ten thousand books in a single day. Around the nation, heaps of books were piled into donation bins. Nearly nine million books had been collected by the end of April 1942.
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    One million to go. As most commencement ceremonies for colleges and universities were held in May, the VBC decided to ask American universities to protest Germany’s book burnings—which had begun at its universities—by assembling books for donation. Letters were mailed to every college and university in the United States proposing this idea. The letter urged that books be exhibited in a conspicuous place, such as at the center of graduation festivities. It would be a powerful contrast: American colleges collecting piles of books for donation to the services to memorialize the piles of books collected by the Nazis for burning. In the event that universities wished to remark on the significance of the books collected, the VBC recommended a passage from Milton’s
Areopagitica:
“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
    Although the VBC’s letter was not sent until the beginning of May 1942, many schools organized last-minute collections to coincide with graduation festivities. Among them were the University of Arkansas, Tougaloo