The Next Forty Years

How many citizen-soldiers will get to cast ballots under the cautious Soldier Vote Act of 1944 is still anybody's guess. But by last week one fact was clear: the act will keep servicemen as ignorant as possible of campaign issues.

The account of Nominee Dewey's acceptance speech printed in the Rome edition of Stars & Stripes omitted his criticisms of the Roosevelt administration. From Algiers came a report that the Mediterranean Stars & Stripes had been forbidden to print Associated Press political dispatches. Meantime the Army laid down rules for political writing in its papers; the resultant articles should put even the most eager G.I. to sleep.

Title V of the Soldier Vote Act, passed in mortal Republican (and Southern Democratic) mistrust of New Deal propagandists, forbids the Army & Navy to distribute any news or books "containing political argument or political propaganda of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result of [a federal] election." Last month military authorities obediently banned several recent books, including Charles A. Beard's dialogues on U.S. constitutional government, The Republic* and Catherine Drinker Bowen's biography of the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Yankee from Olympus.

Had Title V been in force in 1776, Tom Paine's The Crisis, which electrified the dispirited Continental Army, would have been snatched from the drumhead as he wrote and cast into the nearest campfire.

Educating the Masters. Said Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke, to the House of Commons in 1867: "Now we must educate our masters."

The politicians responsible for Title V were looking ahead no further than the next four years. But many a citizen is more concerned about the next 40 years, during which ten-million-odd veterans of World War II can, if they choose, dominate U.S. politics and government. Potentially, they are a pressure group which can make the G.A.R. and American Legion look like Youth Day at City Hall.

How are they being prepared for that responsibility? How are they being stimulated to think about public affairs--now, when they have time to think, when almost all their leisure thoughts are about the future? What are they being taught about the fundamentals of U.S. government and politics, about the acts and consequences of the G.A.R. and the Legion? The Army has produced effective movies, maps and texts on the background and progress of the war. To the comparatively few G.I.s who ask for them, the U.S. Armed Forces Institute has been selling self-teaching textbooks and correspondence courses on many subjects, including social and political sciences (TIME, Feb. 21). Now, under Title V, USAFI is refusing requests for two self-teachers prepared by the War Department itself (Labor Problems in American Industry, Economic Principles & Problems). USAFI has also felt compelled to wreck four correspondence courses because their standard textbooks fall under the ban. Other courses whose texts are likely to be saved from Congressional book-burning only by the wastepaper-salvage campaign include ."American Parties and Politics," "Problems of Democracy," "American Ideals." G.I. political education will be left to whatever printed matter the serviceman can get for himself, plus discussion groups permitted in off-duty hours.

By sharp contrast, the British Army orders discussions during duty hours, provides leaders and first-rate study material. Wrote Major Frederick Redefer, an able U.S. educator, after visiting England when Beveridge Plan discussion was at its height:

"The Army Bureau on Current Affairs . . . had just issued a pamphlet ... for use by discussion-group leaders. . . . The Government ordered this pamphlet to be withdrawn before it had been distributed. . . . But so great was the protest from the men in uniform that the Government had to rescind its order. . . . The pamphlet is being discussed by soldier groups wherever there is a British Army.

"I saw enough to realize that this is the most extensive adult educational program ever carried on in England. ... [It is] bound to produce better informed citizens!. . .

* Which, however, many a G.I. could read in slightly abridged form in LIFE (Jan. 17, et seq.).

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