{"id":31809,"date":"2015-06-27T02:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-06-27T06:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31809"},"modified":"2015-10-11T13:45:58","modified_gmt":"2015-10-11T17:45:58","slug":"american-literacy-and-the-unanticipated-boost-that-was-world-war-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/06\/27\/american-literacy-and-the-unanticipated-boost-that-was-world-war-2\/","title":{"rendered":"American literacy and the unanticipated boost that was World War 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terry Teachout<\/a> makes the unusual claim that it was the Second World War that “made America literate”:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s said that two things about war are insufficiently appreciated by those who, like me, have not known it first-hand: 1) It is, when not terrifying, mostly dull, and 2) it is, like all human enterprises, subject to the operation of the law of unintended consequences. Few aspects of World War II better illustrate both of these points than the Armed Services Editions publishing project. Between 1943 and 1947, the U.S. Army and Navy distributed some 123 million newly printed paperback copies of 1,322 different books to American servicemen around the world. These volumes, which were given out for free, were specifically intended to entertain the soldiers and sailors to whom they were distributed, and by all accounts they did so spectacularly well. But they also transformed America\u2019s literary culture in ways that their wartime publishers only partly foresaw \u2014 some of which continue to be felt, albeit in an attenuated fashion, to this day.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Thus, the Armed Services Editions, which were published by a civilian organization called the Council on Books in Wartime \u2014 compact, oblong, two-column-wide paperbacks that were designed to slip easily into the pockets of a uniform. They were sold to the military for six cents per volume. Since books were regarded by the U.S. government as \u201cweapons in the war of ideas,\u201d the military specified that nothing would be published that might \u201cgive aid and comfort to the enemy, or which may be detrimental to our own war effort,\u201d or that was not in accord with \u201cthe spirit of American democracy.\u201d Still, it was the Council on Books in Wartime, not the military, that chose the titles, and while a few of the longer ones were abridged, none were censored.<\/p>\n

The first ASEs were shipped in September of 1943. About 155,000 crates of books were subsequently distributed each month. Each crate contained between 30 and 50 new titles that fell into one of the following categories:<\/p>\n