The American Publisher’s Series Goes to War, 1942–1946

Abstract

The Second World War exalted the importance of books in many ways, most of all by clearly demonstrating the ambivalent power of books to foster evil as well as good. What was good and what was evil, of course, lay in the eye of the beholder. During the run-up to the war, the Nazis reactively burned or banned millions of books that they deemed a threat to their noxious ideology. Proactively, Goebbels and others of Hitler’s henchmen published and circulated masses of books and other printed materials in conformity to the tenets of party doctrine. For its part, the US government, in anticipation of Hitler’s defeat, responded by purchasing and funding the special publication of large numbers of American books to accomplish the goal of weaning the civilians in both overrun and aggressor nations from years of Goebbels’s propaganda. As part of this undertaking, many of the burned-or-banned books were symbolically rubbed in the noses of the citizens of the shattered Third Reich. In concluding that, of all the media, books had the longest-term effect on people’s minds, the government endorsed the cornerstone of the publishers’ professional ideology, the notion that books were uniquely suited to perform vital cultural work.1