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Content SOFTCOVER MANHOOD: THE RISE OF THE PAPERBACK
AND THE FEAR OF UNMANLINESS/ 1939-1959
by
James Scott Forman
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements fot the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1994
Copyright 1994 James Scott Forman
UMI Num ber: DP23191
All rights reserved
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This dissertation, w ritten by
James Scott Forman
under the direction of h.k& D issertation
Com mittee, and approved b y all its members,
has been presented to and accepted b y The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents fo r the degree of
D O C T O R OF PH ILO SO PH Y
^ — -*■— ■ — .
Dean of Graduate Studies
D ate .... August.. A.* .19.9 &.....:..
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
..
Chairperson
To Lisa and Olivia
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to acknowledge the invaluable guidance of Leo
Braudy, who helped shape my knowledge of the details of
scholarship and the telling of a story and who generously
contributed his time to work closely on every draft of this
project; Tania Modleski, who provided the tools of feminist
theory that began my interest in the project; Mike Messner,
who was both a supportive reader and friend; Peter Nardi,
who pointed me to recent scholarship in gay studies; Ron
Gottesman and Tim Gustafson, for reading early drafts;
Betty Bamberg, for her encouragement and guidance; the
Huntington Library and the Clark Library, for making
materials and space available to me; and both Olivia and
Lisa for their love and patience.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter One
Paperbacks in Battle--They Were Expendable:
The Armed Services Editions and the Revolution
in the Reading Habits of the American Male,
1943-1947
Chapter Two
Softcover Fatherhood: The Redomestication
of the Veteran
Chapter Three
Men's Worst Fears: Exploring the Feminine
and Hypermasculine in Mickey Spillane
Chapter Four
Policing Masculinity: The Congressional
Investigation of the Lurid Paperback
Chapter Five
White Collar Emasculation: The Paperback,
the G.I. Bill, and the Organization
Chapter Six
Looking Back at War: The Nostalgic Portrayal
of Wartime Masculinity in Paperback War Novels
Afterword
1-11
12-51
52-102
103-141
142-191
192-242
243-294
295-301
Works Cited 302-314
1
Introduction
I tasted the love she offered and gave it back
with all I had to give, crushing her until her
breath came in short, quick jerks.1
— Mickey Spillane,
One Lonely Night
In 1949 in one of the first works of modern literary
feminism, The Second Sex. Simone de Beauvoir scrutinized
texts by male authors such as D.H. Lawrence. In 1969 in
Sexual Politics. Kate Millett analyzed from a feminist
standpoint passages of works by D.H. Lawrence, Henry
Miller, and Norman Mailer. Thereafter, numerous feminist
critics turned their attention to largely ignored writings
by women to enlarge the literary canon, a project that
continues today. Eventually, however, some feminist
critics began to return to those first-examined works by
men, but this time with new tools and a new focus.
Scholars in the fields of sociology, cultural studies,
literary criticism, and feminist theory began to pay
increasing attention to literary representations of men and
masculinity, areas of inquiry that were virtually invisible
for decades when men were merely equated with 'people.'
Returning to historical events and texts with the tools
provided by feminist theory allows a fresh reading that
teases out themes of masculinity and gender previously
unidentified.
Thus, the project to historicize masculinity by
analyzing textual representations of masculinity,
effemination, and homosexuality relies on feminist theory
as its impetus and methodology. In Engendering Men (1990)
editors Joseph Boone and Michael Cadden credit feminism
with "foreground[ing] sexuality as a crucial component in
any thoroughgoing analysis of textuality" (2) and for
providing the authors with tools necessary for a type of
research "that might not always be the same as feminist
practice, but that remains in contiguity with its politics
(emphasis in original, Boone 1). Boone acknowledges the
"very real danger of feminism being used irresponsibly by
men" (23), and at the same time argues that pro-feminist
men have much to contribute to a discussion about
masculinity. Keeping constantly in mind the
institutionalized inequality between men and women, I
believe that this study can contribute to that ongoing
discussion of masculinity.
Representations of masculinity in television, film,
and literature have been studied by Kaja Silverman, Susan
Jeffords, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, among others.
According to Silverman, focusing on representations of
masculinity is necessary, because ideology manifests itself
in representation. Increasingly, the study of past textual
representations is helping us to understand how historical
events affect masculinity's constructedness.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's original work on masculinity
attracted much scholarly attention to the subject of
masculinity. In Between Men (1985), Sedgwick analyzed
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary representations
of the male "routing of homosocial desire through women"
(49) and homophobia's role in regulating male bonds.
Another important attempt to deconstruct masculinity
through examining "marginal representations" of masculinity
has been done by Kaja Silverman. In Male Subjectivity at
the Margins (1992), Silverman has written about
masculinities that undermine classic conceptions of
masculinity. As a feminist, she explains her focus on
masculinity rather than femininity as a crucial way of
understanding the dominant belief system under which women
must operate. Silverman analyzes the film The Best Years
of Our Lives, in which an amputee must become the passive
sexual partner, placing him in the classical female
position (71)? she gives a reading of such images of male
"lack" as subversive to the main tenets of masculinity. In
particular, I share Silverman's interest in the World War
II recovery period, which she identifies as "a historical
trauma" of such proportions that it caused a "radical loss
of belief in the conventional premises of masculinity"
(51). While indebted to Silverman's work, my own focus is
not so much on psychoanalytic analysis of representations
of masculinity as on close readings of masculinity in
popular texts and the historical events that shaped the
publishing of those texts and the cultural preoccupations
that influenced their reading.
Another very important piece of feminist research on
masculinity involves representations of masculinity during
and after the Vietnam War. In The Remasculinization of
America (1989), Susan Jeffords discovers in Vietnam War
representations an attempt to create an "arena of masculine
self-sufficiency" that excludes women and appropriates
reproduction as a male function (168). The logic of this
all-male arena is then brought home in the guise of a new
kind of postwar narrative that cast the vet as "no longer
the oppressor" but the unjustly victimized and oppressed,
"on a par with women, [and] blacks" (xiv). The Vietnam vet
became "an emblem for a fallen and emasculated American
male" (168), now in need of "special consideration."
Jeffords's work highlights some important similarities
between the end of World War II and the Vietnam War,
especially the male usurpation of cultural attention
through narratives of fallen masculinity. She explicitly
points out important differences, as we'll; unlike after
World War II, after Vietnam there was no "reinstallation of
the heterosexual family unit" (xiv). If war and its
aftermath, as various authors claim, constitute a
historical trauma sufficient to threaten the status quo of
gender, then careful studies of how gender operates in
texts generated during and after wars can help piece
together the relationship between historical forces,
masculinity, and dominant ideology.' Current researchers
like myself are greatly indebted to the pioneering work on
representations of masculinity done by Jeffords, Sedgwick,
Boone, and Silverman.
Very important and relevant research bearing on
masculinity has also been progressing in the field of gay
studies. Of special interest to this project is the
historical documentation of pre-war and wartime attitudes
and expert theories about homosexuality. Homosexuality
became a cultural preoccupation during and after the war,
greatly influencing representations of masculinity. In
Homosexuality and American Psychiatry (1981), Ronald Bayer
traces psychiatric beliefs about homosexuality, especially
concentrating on a shift in Official views in the forties
and fifties, when homosexuality began to be explained as a
"phobic response to members of the opposite sex" (29) .2 In
1952 when the American Psychiatric Association first
created the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Mental
Disorders (DSM-I). homosexuality was officially listed as a
sociopathic personality disturbance.3 Large studies during
the fifties pointed to "an intimate mother-son dyad" as a
probable cause of homosexuality. "[D]omineering" mothers
derailed normal heterosexual development by "feminizing"
and "demasculinizing" their sons. Fathers contributed by
becoming "detached" (Bayer 30-32).4 Experts concluded,
however, that any strongly motivated homosexual, through
sufficient therapy, could reactivate his original buried
and latent heterosexuality. Bayer's careful research
provides a rich context in which to view popular beliefs
about homosexuality, which were often simplified versions
of expert views. In particular, the blaming of the mother
helps explain many references to mother-son relationships
in the texts studies here.
Other research in gay studies helps make explicit some
of the mid-century shifts in attitudes^ about homosexuality,
especially in response to World War II. In Sexual
Politics. Sexual Communities (1983), John D'Emilio
chronicles the history of homosexuality in America.
"Although the medical profession strove from the 1880s
onward to wrest power over the fate of homosexuals and
lesbians away from the criminal justice system" (18), it
was not until World War II, when 16 million inductees had
to be psychiatrically screened, especially for
homosexuality, that psychiatry gained a central voice in
the discourse about homosexuality (17). D'Emilio then
chronicles a mid-1950's reassigning of homosexuality's
cause to social factors, such as the Depression, the war,
postwar conformity, women's shifting roles, and intense
demands placed on men.5 Homosexuality began to be viewed
in some circles as an escape from the demands of
masculinity. By the end of the fifties, psychoanalytic
explanations were beginning to be challenged by social
scientists, who replaced the idea of deviance with
"different norms of behavior" (D'Emilio 142). The slow
evolution of expert opinion about homosexuality is
paralleled in popular fiction, which, by the early fifties,
began tentatively exploring issues of homosexuality.
In Coming Out Under Fire (1990), Allan Berube
chronicles the fruitless attempts by military psychiatrists
to devise an accurate method for screening out homosexual
World War II military inductees. These attempts include
the following: checking the gag reflex with a tongue
depressor; asking about fellatio: identifying womanly body
types; Rorschach ink blot texts; and urine texts. None of
these proved reliable. Still, countless homosexuals were
detained in hospital wards to be examined and dishonorably
discharged. The study of large numbers of homosexuals for
the first time afforded experts a chance to observe
homosexuals at first hand. This led some psychiatrists to
revise their prejudices. Berube's exhaustive primary
research of army tests and policies, the results of which
were later suppressed by the army, provide a detailed
portrait of the military's wartime relationship to
homosexuality. Beliefs about homosexuality held by army
psychiatrists and officials illuminate the atmosphere in
which Spock's book and the war novels were written and
received, and provide us with a better understanding of the
G.I.'s attitudes toward homosexuality.
In Life Before Stonewall (1994), Peter Nardi and
others present interviews with homosexuals about their
experiences in the fifties. A particularly illuminating
interview is with Judd Marmor, a doctor and psychiatrist
who in the fifties practiced reparative therapy to cure
homosexuality. When asked what prevented him and other
psychiatrists from changing their views on homosexuality,
Marmor describes the "brainwash[ing]" that occurs in the
training for his profession, so that, despite evidence to
the contrary, he and his colleagues continued to believe
that homosexuality was caused by a "seductive" mother and
an "unloving" father (47) . Exceptions and contradictions
were consistently overlooked. Understanding how entrenched
were expert beliefs make the explorations of homosexuality
in mass paperbacks seem all the more bold and surprising
for the time.
These works in gay studies by Bayer, D'Emilio, Berube,
and Nardi provide a rich context in which to understand
representations of effeminacy and homosexuality in popular
softcover texts. Misunderstanding about homosexuality
pervaded the culture from the specialist to the lay public,
and the nuances of these misconceptions, especially the
fear involved and the blaming of women, shaped textual
representations of masculinity, emasculation, and
homosexuality.
Several notes on methodology are pertinent here.
Texts by Spock, Spillane, Torres, Riesman, Whyte, Hawley,
Wilson, Mailer, and Jones were selected because they were
enormously popular paperbacks; Spock and Spillane alone
account for more sales than even the Bible.6 Besides their
popularity, these nine texts seem to define certain nodal
possibilities for how masculinity was variously viewed in
the postwar period.
The approach taken here is interdisciplinary,
involving literary criticism, cultural studies,
demographics, sociology, and histories of psychoanalysis
and publishing. The central method was to analyze these
texts, while simultaneously investigating how those texts
functioned in the culture and how they were variously
interpreted by disparate readers, such as World War II
veterans, Congress, softcover editors, and the general
reading public. The project is essentially a text-based
analysis of fifties' representations of masculinity
situated within a rich and multi-faceted context.
11
Introduction Endnotes
1. Such behavior might be labeled "Masculine protest: a
tendency to compensate for feelings of inferiority or
inadequacy by exaggerating one's overt aggressiveness"
I Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the
English Language. Unabridged^.
2. This was the conclusion of Sandor Rado and his
adaptational school of psychoanalysis, which heavily
influenced many psychoanalysts.
3. The classification of homosexuality as sociopathic
remained until 1968 when the DSM-II classified it as a
"sexual deviation." Not until 1973 was homosexuality
removed from the category of deviance. The debates leading
up to that removal and the bitter aftermath among
psychiatrists are the main subject of Bayer's book.
4. The largest and most influential studies on
homosexuality were conducted in the 1950s in the state of
New York by Columbia University's Psychoanalytic Clinic for
Training and Research and by the New York Society of
Medical Psychoanalysts, the results of which were
interpreted by Irving Bieber in Homosexualitv (1962).
5. D'Emilio cites Lionel Ovesey, "The Homosexual Conflict:
An Adaptational Analysis," Psychiatry. 17 (1954): 243-50;
Evelyn Hooker, "Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual,"
MR, December 1957, pp. 32-39, and January 1958, pp. 4-11;
and Judd Marmor, ed., Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Roots
of Homosexuality (New York, 1965), pp. 83-107.
6. Note that Spillane's works are meant here to represent
the early fifties' paperback thriller, but that his works
differed from the average thriller by staying continuously
in print, which most of these works did not; Women's
Barracks was a more apt example of this other type.
12
CHAPTER ONE
Paperbacks in Battle— They Were Expendable:
The Armed Services Editions and the Revolution
in the Reading Habits of the American Male,
1943-1947
I was tempted to read some more while
they had us pinned down pretty tight.
I was wounded slightly that day, too.
The point is, I was thinking about that
book even under pretty intense
fire. . .
-- Veteran's letter,
quoted in Tebbel, p.3 2
[T]he shape and price of books have had
significant influence on their use.
— Frank Schick,
The Paoerbound Book in
America (1958)
The paperback revolution that occurred at the close of
World War II was related to another phenomenon, a postwar
rise in the number of male readers, one of the early
paperback's chief audiences, which was created during the
' 13
war by the publishing of the Armed Services Editions,
disposable reprints made for servicemen during World War
II. The history of the Armed Services Editions will
provide background and context for the ensuing history in
later chapters of the rise of the postwar paperback and the
changing nature of masculinity portrayed in those
paperbacks.
Although the proportion of male to female readers is
often difficult to document, from the time female literacy
approached male literacy, women have constituted a large
number, if not always a majority, of the total number of
readers. Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century
readers were often largely women, and women readers are
even more numerous today. A temporary but significant
mid-twentieth-century shift occurred, however, away from
female and toward male readers. It was a shift due to a
variety of rapid societal changes initiated by the war,
including the following: millions of men being trained and
transported overseas where most had time on their hands 7
relief from longtime male unemployment of the Depression, a
renewed wartime interest in reading about foreign lands;
women's overtime in defense plants; and paperbacks being
made more widely available to mass audiences, especially
servicemen. World War II helped bring together at least
three important elements which set the stage for both this
14
new readership and its ready acceptance of the paperback:
the convenience of the soft-cover book in the battlefield,
the wartime efforts of private publishers, and a new mass
male audience, which, due to the nature of transcontinental
warfare, often found themselves with time on their hands.
In the decades before the new mass male reader,
numerous attempts at re-establishing the paperback book in
the twentieth-century had failed. With the exceptions of
Pocket Books and Penguin, paperbacks had been unable to
prove themselves commercially viable: "Several new firms
were established between 19 3 0 and 19 3 7 which, with the
exception of Mercury Publications, did not succeed though
their failures helped pave the way for the successful
popular mass-distributed paperbacks of the forties" (Schick
61). Despite these failures, in the late thirties, Robert
de Graff was planning one of the most well thought-out
attempts to establish the modern mass-circulation
paperback. Coincidentally, the grab for territory by
Germany and Japan and the ensuring war was creating the
\
conditions for the formation of an unprecedented American
male reading audience.
Of course other conditions that had not existed before
were also of importance. Not only changes in world
politics but also in technology and industry were creating
the opportunity to reach this new mass audience.
Publishers' ambitions to create the mass paperback
coincided with breakthroughs in printing and binding
techniques, in distribution methods, and of course cheaper
printing through economies of scale. The publishing
industry was just beginning to experiment with a cheaper,
non-sewn binding (misleadingly called the "perfect
binding), in which the folds of the signatures were sliced
off and glued. In addition, non-animal, quick-drying,
flexible synthetic glues had been invented. Finally,
American News Company, the aging monopolistic distributor
of books and magazines, was ripe for fresh competition from
innovative independent distributors.
In retrospect, all these changes seem necessary for
the paperback's astonishing postwar acceptance. Yet
without the clearly-definable mass market of eleven million
G.I.s that was targeted by the Armed Services Editions it
seems unlikely that the paperback revolution would have
reached the audience it did. It was through the Armed
Services Editions that so many men became habituated to the
reading of paperbacks.
Throughout the first year and a half of war, well
before the establishment of the Armed Services Editions,
G.I. demand for books consistently outstripped supply. The
longer G.I.s were away, the more important books became for
both their entertainment and their sense of connection to
the American culture. Hundreds of thousands of hardcover
books and any available paperbacks were either purchased by
the services, sold in Army camps, or sent overseas by
civilians to G.I.s, The Army Library Service made mass
purchases from private publishers, including two
newly-operating paperback publishers in America, Pocket
Books and the U.S. division of London-based Penguin. Other
lesser suppliers of wartime commercial paperbacks were
Mercury Books, Avon, Dell, Infantry Journal Books, and
Superior Reprints (Schick 70). Altogether, through the
combined channels of government purchases, the Victory Book
Campaigns, the Red Cross's distribution of paperbacks, and
civilians sending books to soldiers, 25 million hardbacks
and 200 million paperbacks were given or sold to soldiers
during the entire course of the war.
Despite such a variety of efforts, however, by 1942 it
was becoming increasingly clear that not enough books were
being supplied and distributed to meet G.I.s' needs. The
distribution of both hardbacks and purchased paperbacks was
piecemeal, difficult, uneven, and expensive. As Kenneth
Davis writes in Two-Bit Culture: The Paoerbackincf of
America (1984), the publishers had "no systematic method
for getting books to men stationed overseas, on ships, or
in field hospitals" (68) .
Moreover, hardcover books were not very practical in
the field; they were bulky, heavy, and not particularly
portable. With the exception of a handful of special
paperback titles put out for G.I.s by private publishers,
though, these unwieldy hardbacks were one of the major
sources of battlefield reading material for nearly the
first two years of war.
The wartime difficulties of supplying books to
servicemen, the high cost of hardbacks, the inefficiency of
purchasing and shipping hardbound books, and the
difficulties their distribution entailed meant that not
only private publishers but the military as well were
anxious to promote paperbacks. These problems were in the
forefront of the mind of the chief of the Army Library
Service, Colonel Ray Trautman, who early on saw the
advantages of the paperback in wartime. His efforts to
supply the Army with mass paperbacks were at first,
however, largely disappointing. Making the order
contingent upon the manufacturer producing an inexpensive
paperbound edition of the same text, Trautman had the Army
Library Section order numerous hardbound copies of a
publisher's title, Combined Operations; The Official Story
(Schick 71, Davis 69). The publisher, however, was unable
to meet his demand for a paperback version. Trautman
18
cancelled the hardbound order, seeking instead other
methods of acquiring mass paperbacks for the Army.
Private publishers could not supply all the paperbacks
Trautman and the Army wanted partly because of paper
shortages, partly because of the relatively small scale of
the 1941-42 paperback industry, and because of the absence
of suitable, up-to-date titles. Still, the Armed Services
continued to purchase whatever paperback books were
available. Up until the formation of the Armed Services
Editions, numerous 500-book kits of purchased commercial
paperbacks were shipped overseas, but publishers found
reprint rights difficult to procure, the title selection
meager, and distribution exceedingly poor. Without a more
systematic approach, sufficient paperback books could not
reach the G.I.
As the war progressed, publishers found they lacked
not just the materials but especially the personnel to even
hope to meet the Services' demands for increased paperback
production. The domestic labor shortage increasingly
compounded the limited capacity of private publishers to
take on new projects, complete old projects, or to meet the
publishing demands of war. Those publishing employees left
at home were among the diminishing number of men who were
not conscripted for military service or did not enlist; as
the war progressed there were fewer and fewer skilled and
19
qualified men available for home-front labor— and an
insufficient number of women, always under-represented in
skilled publishing positions— with the skills and
experience to meet this shortfall.
Yet from this diminishing labor force, more and more
production was required because of a "greater. . . demand
for reading material" (Schreuders 49). The labor shortage
among publishers became so acute by 194 3 that it was
mentioned almost weekly in the pages of such trade journals
as Publishers Weekly. In the October 2, 1943 issue appears
this characteristic remark: "The urgency of the manpower
situation must necessarily point-up any talk dealing with
publishing in a third year of war" (Dutton 1336). With
each successive year, the problems of relying on the
industry to supply government needs were being compounded.
The result of all these factors, including a lack of
titles, paper, and labor, was a paucity of paperbacks, and
books in general available for shipment overseas to the
troops. The inadequacy of both publishers' efforts and
gifts from civilians to supply the soldier are revealed in
the relatively small number of books in the hands of
servicemen after the first two years of war. Despite its
self-congratulatory tone, the figures in this Publishers
Weekly editorial of October 9, 1943— just weeks into the
20
Armed Services Editions project— reveal the pressing need
for the Editions:
The largest library system in the world has been
created for our armed services. In less than two
years over ten million books have been purchased
by the Army alone, three million of which have
gone overseas. To this book supply has been
added five million and more books from the
Victory Book Campaign and now the Armed Services
Editions of the Council on Books are going out
and are shipped at the rate of a million and a
half a month. (Melcher 1425)
These figures indicate that only eight million books were
distributed overseas for over ten million fighting men.
(Over roughly the same time period, the Armed Services
Editions would distribute about ten times that number of
books.) The need for the Armed Services Editions and their
cheaper, higher-output editions was becoming glaringly
evident.
Too many obstacles prevented private publishers from
supplying sufficient books for the war effort. After two
years of war, a different approach was clearly called for:
"The more Americans sent off to war, the greater the demand
for reading material. After a few years, that demand
became so large that it could only be filled by a
publishing venture aimed exclusively at the military
market" (Schreuders 49).
On March 17, 1942 the publishing industry formed the
Council on Books in Wartime. The Council was composed of
publishing experts from private companies who had agreed to
consider public interests by directing the use of books in
winning the war. F.D.R. emphasized the importance of the
Council's mission in writing that "all who write and
publish and sell and administer books. . . will rededicate
themselves to the single task of arming the mind and spirit
of the American people with the strongest and most enduring
weapons" (Council, i, also in Schick 69-70). The
President's martial metaphor of wartime books as weapons
"arming the mind" would be echoed later by the Armed
Services Editions' slogan "Books are Weapons in the War of
Ideas." This slogan was illustrated on a ribbon-like
banner held in the beak of a dive-bombing eagle which
carried a book (apparently hardbound?) in its talons.
President Roosevelt even forced the image into an extended
metaphor: "a war of ideas can no more be won without books
than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like
ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range,
and mount the most powerful guns" (Council i). But though
the metaphor of books as weapons helped foster the desired
image of books as not frivolous but imperative to victory,
events would show that book manufacturing was unlike what
went on in the defense plant; publishers would never quite
relinquish their marketing orientation, metaphoric
armaments or not.
That the efforts were coordinated by private industry
partially explains the non-military mentality. The Council
would eventually come to oversee two branches of its
publishing operations— Armed Services Editions and Overseas
Editions— which were not government owned, but both
non-profit, private publishing projects. In addition to
the important contributions of Robert de Graff of Pocket
Books, the three members of the Council's Managing
Committee were all civilians, Richard L. Simon, S. Spencer
Scott, and Philip Van Doren Stern.
But before forming the Armed Services Editions, the
Council on Books in Wartime created a short-lived
publishing venture in which certain privately-published
books, even if they were merely popular nonfiction or
general reading for the G.I.s., were labeled "imperative"
for the war effort. The first, and as it turned out next
to last, title of this series was W. L. White's nonfiction
account of war, They Were Expendable. Largely as a result
of the book's new status, it reached the 1942 domestic
bestseller list. But the word "imperative" was widely
criticized as antithetical to the principle of free choice,
considered especially important in reading. In a short
time, this criticism of the word itself caused the
Imperative Program to fail.
Clearly the needs of the government's war effort would
be better served by a larger-scale project such as the
Armed Services Editions than by the previous piecemeal and
uncoordinated efforts of private publishers or the merely
hortatory use of the label such as "imperative." This
larger effort would not only be in the government's
interests, however; some publishers believed they had as
much if not more to gain from the venture. But since
publishers were determined that the project would address
their needs also, it meant long delays in negotiations with
the government. Publisher's anxieties, hopes, and
suspicions about the project created friction, hesitation,
and strain between industry and government.
The government's and the publishers' interests were,
of course, not always at odds. If they hadn't shared many
goals, the Editions might never have been published. The
intersection of government and private interests occurred
in other industries as well, from automobile production to
steel manufacturing. But in publishing especially, aside
from the tensions caused by paper rationing, it is uncanny
how the wartime interests of the American government and of
the commercial paperback publishers conveniently
intersected— even dovetailed— with the result that even in
time of national emergency, publishers never had to abandon
their own interests entirely. The Army wanted paperbacks
24
for its soldiers, more than could be purchased from
wholesalers; reciprocally, the paperback publishers needed
to prove to a wary publishing industry that paperbacks
could be accepted by a public accustomed to hardbacks.
Backed by government resources and prioritization,
wartime publishing presented a safe arena in which to try
out and perfect a feat which had never been tried in this
way before: publishing on a huge scale. Inexperienced with
mass audiences, these new publishers needed a somewhat
homogeneous test market on which to gain experience with
paperback production and editorial policies and to
establish a readership with less resistance to reading
paperbacks; conveniently for them, the Armed Services
comprised a captive audience, and a receptive one: eleven
million men who needed inexpensive, expendable reading
materials.
Still, commercial interests by definition occasionally
diverge from public interests; this fact not only caused
the difficulty of negotiating the Armed Services Editions'
contract but also shaped some of the most fundamental
details of the Editions— including their actual size and
format. With the failure of its Imperative Program, the
Council on Books in Wartime turned their attention to
alternate means of supplying G.I.s with books. Over a
period of time, they met to consider a scheme proposed to
25
them by Colonel Trautman to use idle rotary presses to
produce inexpensive paperbacks for G.I.s. Not to be
thwarted in his acquisition of paperbacks for G.I.s,
Trautman had turned to the graphic arts specialist of the
Information Branch of the Special Services Division, H.
Stanley Thompson. Until he consulted Thompson, Trautman
had not seen any way to acquire paperbacks except by
purchasing them from private companies.
But Thompson knew that the rotary presses used by
catalogue houses and also by pulp and digest-size magazines
were partially idle because of the slow-down during war of
all non-essential commerce, especially mail-order
catalogues. Shortages caused by the war had also decreased
pulp and digest business volume, leaving these presses
under-utilized. Using these presses— by conscripting
them— would not interfere with the private book publishing
industry. Thompson proposed to Trautman that the military
use these idle presses to produce paperbound books for the
services. But Trautman knew that for a publishing venture
of the scale they had in mind, the Army would need the
assistance of the private publishing industry. Therefore,
he submitted the proposal to the Council on Books in
Wartime.
Although Trautman's proposal was immediately seen to
have merit, the book industry's varied commercial interests
26
greatly delayed the Council members from reaching an
agreement on it, again uncovering the conflicts between the
public and private aspects of the enterprise and the
continued business considerations publishers brought even
to their contribution to the war effort. Publishers
perceived that they had two conflicting interests
concerning paperbacks for war. They saw the chance to
create an enormous postwar paperback readership; but at the
same time they feared that the cheap wartime editions they
were being asked to produce might end up hurting sales of
their own publications later. Both of these perceived
interests— the hopeful and the fearful— played key roles in
the negotiations for and development of the Armed Services
Editions.
The hopes of publishers had been greatly intensified
by publishing successes during the first years of war,
during which time the modern mass market paperback was
already beginning to emerge. The trailblazer publishing
house, Pocket Books, though it had only been in business
for four years, was by 1943 selling 3 million paperbacks a
month. In fact, by that time some felt that the mass
marketing of books represented the democratization of
reading— "when book reading and buying had reached outside
the small world of the intellectuals to the mass audience"
(Tebbel 47).
In 1943, however, the modern mass paperback was still
too new for the publishing industry to embrace it
whole-heartedly. The mass audiences that would be reached
after the war still remained undreamed of. In addition,
there was still residual resistance by the industry to any
inexpensive reprints and also by the consumer to buying and
reading paperbacks. Many publishers remained adamantly
opposed to any lower-cost mass editions. Most established
hardback publishers felt cheap reprints weakened sales of
the original hardback edition. Only thirteen years
earlier, W. W. Norton strongly opposed even the hardback
dollar reprints introduced by other publishers, announcing
their belief that "many book buyers who would otherwise buy
books at $3 or more wait for their appearance in
reprint. . . a vicious circle" (in Tebbel Vol 3 492).
In addition, most publishers felt the reading public
would show a strong resistance to accepting paperbound
books: "skeptics said that what had worked in Europe would
never work in America" (Davis 31). Convincing proof that
paperbacks would be accepted was needed in order to combat
the "industry's coolness" (Davis 37): "The wholesalers were
both hostile and reluctant at the beginning. . ." (Tebbel
Vol 3 7). Frank Schick in The Paperbound Book in America
(1958) identified "[pjublic prejudice against paperbacks"
as the reason for various paperback houses' failures in the
1920s (61). Although the passage of time, the effects of
the Depression, and the initial efforts of Pocket Books may
have lessened this prejudice, there was still a need to
establish a mass audience that would more readily accept
the reading of paperbacks. The paperback still needed an
arena in which to prove itself to publishers and the
public; G.I.s reading Armed Services Editions would be that
arena.
It was not only the mass readership, however, that was
to make the Armed Services Editions a prototype for later
mass marketing; it was also their mass distribution. The
publishing industry could not distribute the tens of
millions of copies it would produce to so many remote parts
of the globe. It is difficult to determine what role
government distribution— and later private postwar
distribution— played in the success of the paperback.
Certainly the paperback's low price and convenient physical
format encouraged readership. As Schick points out, "the
shape and price of books have had significant influence on
their use" (120). Not just content, but also form
determines readership. It is equally true, however, that
without breakthroughs in the distribution of
paperbacks— and their eventual postwar sale in corner
drugstores, newsstands, and train stations— their success
might never have occurred. The Armed Services Editions
29
functioned for the publishing industry as a giant and early
experiment in mass distribution in which the publishers
produced 122 million books for which the government
supplied both the readers and the massive distribution
infrastructure that the publishers could never at that time
have put in place. This was significant in giving
publishers crucial experience with mass distribution
several years before real breakthroughs in domestic
distribution could be realized.
Publishers looked to the Armed Services Editions
because they hoped the Editions would help them reach a
market that the industry was not prepared to reach; private
paperback publishers were not yet in a position to tap such
a vast mass market, though soon after the war they would.
But in 1943 they still needed the book distribution system
that only the wartime government could supply, and through
the Army Library Service such a distribution system had
remained in place since World War I (Schick 70). This was
exactly the kind of system that the newly-born mass
paperback needed in order to prove its ability to be widely
accepted.
Not all publishers were immediately enamored by this
vision of the future, but being publishers themselves,
members of the Council on Books in Wartime recognized the
enormous appeal of creating a mass distribution system and
targeting an entirely new audience, and they dangled these
possibilities in front of reluctant publishers to gain
their cooperation. The Council began promoting the idea of
the Editions knowing its biggest selling point for
publishers would be the potential postwar market: "The
point was made to the publishers that it would be of
tremendous benefit to the book industry in the long run to
provide books to millions of members of the Armed Forces,
many of whom had never before done much reading" (Schick
71). Easily tempted by this potential, wartime publishers
became hopeful that the books the G.I. received, and in
particular the paperbacks of the Armed Services Editions,
would significantly influence postwar publishing: "it will
be this returned service group that will make the demand,"
a Publishers Weekly editor wrote (Melcher 1425). Because
of this sales pitch, the Council on Books in Wartime's
campaign to convince publishers began to find real success
even with the most reluctant publishers; with time, seventy
publishers agreed to offer their titles for reprinting by
the Editions. There was not only much civic-mindedness
involved but also enormous optimism about the potential of
postwar book sales based on the premise of this
newly-created reading market.
But publishers were not naive. They were also aware
that even the wartime success of the Editions could not
31
assure the much-touted postwar mass market. Experienced
publishers had the practical business sense to raise hard
questions— though only to deny those questions'
implications:
Will the demand for recreational reading be
maintained when the books must be paid for by
individuals or by home-town taxes? If the answer
is to be yes, and we believe it will be, the
Service Libraries may prove the most important of
the many influences that are building up an
unprecedented demand for books in the years just
ahead. (Melcher 1425)
Notwithstanding the imbedded cautionary note, this 1942
editorial in Publisher's Weekly titled "Books in the
Postwar World" seemed to make almost tangible a demand for
books after the war, strongly motivating publishers to
cooperate.
Publishers were considering their postwar interests
even as they began to define the wartime project. Indeed,
the above evidence of publishers' awareness of the impact
of the Armed Services Editions on postwar publishing was
written less than thirty days into the Editions project.
Before even the second month's Editions books were shipped,
their impact on developing a postwar mass market readership
was being analyzed, even relished, as publishers
anticipated "what all this reading by millions of young men
and women will mean when the war draws to an end." In such
a climate of optimism, they couldn't help but predict "an
unprecedented demand for books in the years just ahead."
Publishers were indeed hopeful--on occasion
realistically— about the possibility of a newly-created
mass of postwar readers, especially male readers. But even
publishers7 most realistic hopes for the postwar were
ameliorated by their enormous fears. Despite the
widespread enthusiasm for the Editions, publishers7 worries
continually delayed its implementation and largely ended up
defining the format of the Editions. The physical form of
the books was influenced by considerations of not only how
the books would reach the hands of the soldiers but also
how the books would not ever reach and saturate the
non-military, domestic book market.
Publishing maintains a memory of past wars. The
American Civil War set a precedent for the Armed Services
Editions, when many thousands of dime novels were donated
by Beadle & Co. to the Union army. In 1863, James Redpath
designed for the military a ten-cent edition, "Books for
the Campfires," with Louisa May Alcott as its first
author.1
Despite several publishers7 successes in the Civil
War, however, World War I left many publishers gun-shy
about contributing cheap editions to the war effort, since
their generosity came back to haunt them; postwar peacetime
sales of their regular commercial editions ended up
suffering badly from competition with their own cheap
editions, which were dumped on the market by the military
at the close of World War I (Davis 71). Despite the
willingness of American publishers to make their own
contributions to the war effort, their foresight in holding
back until their postwar commercial interests were
sufficiently and legally protected once again exemplifies
both the private nature of the Armed Services Editions and,
on the part of the new paperback publishers, even as the
Armed Services Editions were being conceived, a
consciousness of how such a project could contribute— or
detract— from their own postwar marketing ambitions.
Almost nothing was of more central concern to publishers
than marketing as they entered into these negotiations.
Even in 1943, then, paperback publishers' anticipation
of a postwar paperback boom colored by fears of a postwar
paperback glut made them approach the war effort with
commercial interests in mind, and the ensuing negotiations
between the private and public sectors reflect anticipation
of the postwar atmosphere. As a result, as John Jamieson,
historian for the Library Service, notes in Books for the
Army (1950), "The contract would contain an agreement that
the books were to be kept out of the civilian market"
(148). This important clause in the contract— a "critical
stumbling block" in negotiations (Davis 71)— immediately
34
made the Armed Service Editions "[un]available to
civilians" (Tebbel 32).2
For the cautious and experienced publishers, such an
apparently airtight legal clause, however, was not enough
reassurance that their wartime generosity would not lead to
postwar regrets. Just as Schick maintains that shape
influences use, so also does intended use influence shape.
The publishers were not content merely to rely on legal
assurances that they would not later be competing with
their own sold-at-cost products; in addition, therefore,
they negotiated that the physical attributes of the Armed
Service Editions would preempt any possibility of their
being resold in the postwar U.S. The books would not only
be disposable but actually be designed to self-destruct.
This physical guarantee was accomplished through two
variations from the then-current 194 3 industry design for
paperbacks. The first change was that they would be
printed on even less expensive, less durable paper than
were contemporary paperbacks. This also served the
project's other important goal of keeping costs down, but
its adoption was equally intended to limit the useful
lifespan of such editions, thus discouraging their
re-emergence in the domestic market.
I
Whereas current libraries sort paperbacks as
"expendable," "ephemeral" texts estimated to hold together
for between two to fifteen readings per copy, one might
logically assume that the Editions, printed as they were on
cheaper paper, were even more ephemeral. Yet they were in
such demand that they received many more readings than
contemporary paperbacks. One soldier wrote, "The books are
read until they're so dirty you can't see the print"
(quoted in Jolles and in Tebbel 32).
A second alteration in then-current paperback design
would likewise cut costs while also insuring a short
lifespan; instead of being glued along the cut
signatures— a "perfect" binding--these editions would
merely be held together by a single staple, "to ensure
their eventual destruction after a number of readings.. In
other words, they were expendable" (Davis 71). They were
expendable partly because their design announced as much.
Flimsy paper and staples clearly signaled to servicemen
their expendability, so the servicemen treated them as
temporary, consumable objects: "the books were passed on
until they literally fell apart or, as was often the case,
were deliberately pulled apart. . . . A veteran recalls
passing around torn-out pages among the men while flying to
a parachute jump site" (Davis 74). The staple influenced
how the reader consumed the books--as a temporary pleasure
designed to self-destruct.
With such physical reassurances of these books'
impermanence, in addition to the legal clause, the last
hurdle to producing the Editions had been cleared and the
joint venture was signed. The Armed Services Editions
would join the Overseas Editions (books for liberated
territories) as a branch of the Council on Books in
Wartime. Although usually called the Armed Services
Editions, its official name was Editions for the Armed
Services, Inc., a non-profit corporation established by the
Council on Books in Wartime. The "Inc." serves as a
reminder that this project was government-supported, but
not government-run or government-owned. The government
would provide financial backing, a distribution system, and
a captive audience— the first truly mass readership of over
ten million, but publishers would provide all the rest.
With their fears allayed, those publishers that had merely
watched the progress of the negotiations now began to
select titles to offer for reprinting. Paperback
publishers who had a special interest in the success of the
Editions, however, not only watched the progress of the
negotiations with great interest, but also influenced them
and later became intimately involved in ensuring the
project's success. As the founder of Pocket Books, Robert
de Graff was one of these who had a vested interest in
promoting the Editions. He not only served on the board of
37
the Council on Books in Wartime but also eventually became
extremely active in helping manage the Editions.
Likewise, Philip Van Doren Stern, a veteran hardback
and paperback publisher, a 1939 charter member of Pocket
Books and by then director and executive of the company,
saw the opportunity the Editions would provide for
paperbacks. From the 1941 U.S. involvement in the war
until the formation of the Editions in the summer of 1943,
Stern had served with the Office of War Information. As
director of the major U.S. paperback publishing house,
Stern was interested in establishing the viability of
paperbacks. Because of his experience and his keen
professional interest in helping the paperback become
established in America, he was a natural to take over the
day to day operations of the Editions.
But Stern agreed to manage the project only if he was
still allowed to continue running Pocket Books, Inc.
Unlike the commitment required of those in the military, in
Stern's case his patriotic duty did not preclude his
participation as a private citizen in paperback empire
building. During the war, Stern spent his mornings in his
office at Pocket Books running that private firm and then
walked a few.blocks to spend his afternoons coordinating
the operations of the Armed Services Editions. As John
38
Tebbel in A History of Book Publishing in the United States
(1981) writes,
On a typical day, he worked from 9:30 to 11 on
the Editions, then hurried over to Pocket Books,
two blocks away, where he stayed until 5 o'clock,
when he returned to his other office, signed
mail, and completed the day's business there.
(32)
Stern's position with the Armed Services Editions was by no
means a simple or a parttime job, however: "he decided
which books were to.be issued and maintained contact with
the five branches of the military, five printers, various
paper factories, twelve typesetters, and the entire
membership of the Council" (Schreuders 49) . He
accomplished all of this while he was still in charge of
the daily operations of the largest paperback publishing
house in America. Stern's running both publishing ventures,
simultaneously typifies the American publisher's dual
commitment to the Armed Services Editions and their own
firms; they willingly contributed to the war effort, but
would not entirely relinquish their commercial interests.
Despite the commercial interests of the seventy
participating publishers, however, they supplied their
publishing houses' titles to the Editions at only the most
nominal of costs, the publishers splitting one-cent
royalties with the authors. Most of the titles, about
fifty new ones per month, were reprints, except for some
composed anthologies. Nearly all were unabridged.
Besides the use of staples and lower quality paper,
another prominent change in format from standard industry
paperbacks was the Editions' size. Although this might
also be seen as an attempt to distinguish these editions
from competing with commercial paperbacks or as a
convenience adapted to the size of the G.I.'s pocket, the
explanation in this case is probably more straightforward.
Thomas L. Bonn in Under Cover: An Illustrated History of
American Mass Market Paperbacks (1982) has written that the
Editions were !l[d]esigned to be portable (they fit
comfortably into the pocket of an army fatigue
jacket) . . . .1 1 (48) . Many have taken the fact that these
editions exactly fit the pocket of a G.I.'s uniform as
evidence that they were designed with just this in mind.
Schreuders has written that: "The oblong format was not
only chosen because it fit well in the pockets of uniform
jackets, but also because it was economical to print"
(Schreuders 49-50) .
But was the size of the Editions determined by the
size of the G.I.'s fatigue pocket or by the physical
dimensions of the presses? The 'pocket-sized' theory
validly applies to the Armed Forces educational texts, the
size of which the Army Institute editorial director,
William E. Spaulding, decided would be dictated "by the
dimensions of the soldier's pocket" (quoted in Schick 73).
That the Editions fit into the G.l. pocket, however, was
probably merely a coincidence or, at best, an afterthought.
Portability was a consideration, certainly, since the
inconvenience of hardbacks in the field had helped
instigate the Editions. The inexpensive paper and light
covers caused them to weigh "one-fifth as much as a normal
book" (Tebbel 31). They were also bound not on the long
side but on the short side, a format some publishers have
tried from time to time since (Bonn Undercover 126).
Instead of one block of print per page, they were printed
in two columns, like a magazine. Yet the probable
determinant of the Editions' final size seems to have been
less the G.l. pocket than the type of printing presses
standing idle and available for use, the rotary presses
discussed earlier.
Because they were printed on rotary presses, the
Editions were "printed from curved stereo plates that were
not normally used for books. . ." (Tebbel 31). Whereas
mass market paperbacks are either 4 1/4" by 7 1/8" or 4
1/8" by 6 1/2", the rotary presses required that the
Editions either be much larger or be cut in half to make
them significantly smaller, 5 1/2" by 3 7/8", about half
the size of Reader's Digest. Editions printed not from the
rotary presses but from the pulp presses were to be 6 1/4"
by 4 1/2". In either case, the small height of the
Editions--around four inches— gave them a distinctive look.
On both types of presses they were printed two up and
sliced apart where they were joined at the feet. The
smaller books contained up to 320 pages, the larger, up to
512 pages (Schreuders 49); a character count was necessary
for every text in order to match up two joinable texts with
similar numbers of pages and to stay within a maximum
number of characters. Covers were printed at a separate
location.
The Army and Navy purchased the books at cost, about
six cents each plus ten percent for overhead. In September
1943, 50 titles were produced, and subsequently 30 titles
per month, which was raised to 40 titles per month in
August 1944 until the end of the war (Schreuders 51). The
Armed Services Editions continued publication after the war
until September 1947, but only at twenty titles per month
and in smaller editions of 25,000 copies, and after October
194 6 appearing in the standard Pocket Books size
(Schreuders 51). Through Stern's and other publishers'
efforts, the Armed Services Editions became an enormous
success and greatly accelerated the industry's paperback
publishing experience. Although there are few hard
figures, most historians agree that the Armed Services
Editions' strongly influenced the postwar paperback market
and "formed a significant aspect of the paperback
development" (Schick 69). From 1943 to 1947, Armed
Services Editions produced more than 1,322 titles and more
than 122 million copies at an average of 6.09 cents each
(Davis 72, Schick 72). The results of over 1,322 titles
rivaled any private publishing house venture; as Piet
Schreuders in Paperbacks. U.S.A.: A Graphic History.
1939-1959 (1981) points out, "it took Pocket Books 2 0 years
to get that far— number 1322 didn't appear until 1960"
(50) .
Although among those books printed servicemen were
free to choose what to read, they were constrained in their
choices by what titles were reprinted as Editions. Because
data on what books G.I.s actually read is scarce, out, it
is only possible to infer the most general conclusions
about the G.I.'s interests from the Editions' "market"
conditions. Characteristic of a market are both the
products that manufacturers target for it and the demand
that the market makes on manufacturers— not at all a
one-way street. In the early months, Stern could not know
what titles servicemen would prefer to read. Therefore,
within bounds, he necessarily helped shape the serviceman's
tastes along the line of his hardback and paperback
publishing experience, his preferences in titles, and his
perceptions of what servicemen would read.3
His biases and instincts were, however, constrained.
He was completely dependent on what titles the seventy
publishers associated with the Council on Books in Wartime
submitted for consideration. Nominated titles were next
submitted for consideration by a volunteer committee, which
in turn recommended titles to Stern and the Editions'
staff. All selected titles then had to be approved by the
respective services; the final veto was retained by
Trautman for the Army and by Isabel Du Bois, Navy
Librarian, for the Navy. Even further governmental control
in influencing the list came in 1943 in a Congressman's
criticism of a work supposedly favorable to communism,
further constricting Stern's freedom to choose titles.
Within these considerable constraints, however, Stern
managed to use his publishing instincts and his small paid
staff of ten to put out an impressive and regular list of
books without the usual delays caused by bureaucratic
red-tape or vicious infighting. At first these lists
included titles deemed by Stern and his staff to be of most
interest to servicemen. The first list of September 1943,
absent of any then-current bestsellers, included Dickens's
Oliver Twist (abridged), Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat.
Saroyan's The Human Comedy. Graham Greene's The Ministry of
Fear. Melville's Tvpee. Conrad's Lord Jim. and The Fireside
Book of Dog Stories. Since this list necessarily preceded
any response from servicemen, it reflects not the
serviceman's preferences but the selection committee's and
especially Stern's preferences, which tended a bit toward
the British and the classic. But as preferences from the
servicemen began to be identified, chiefly in the form of
servicemen's letters to the ASE but also by demand from the
field, these preferences began to influence Stern to some
extent. After two years of Armed Services Editions
publishing, Stern probably had a better idea than anyone
which titles were most popular: "By 1945, Stern reported,
reading patterns had been long since clearly established.
Best sellers were the ones most read, followed in order by
humor, short stories, Westerns, and mysteries" (Tebbel 32).
In preferring industry bestsellers, the servicemen seemed
to be in step with the domestic bookbuying market. Yet the
specific bestselling titles that the ASE reprinted did not
conform exactly to the U.S. commercial bestseller list. It
is not clear whether this difference indicates Stern's
preferences or the particular tastes of the servicemen, but
in any case the demands from the battlefield had swung the
Editions from the classics to more popular reading.
An overview of the categories of books does give some
general insight into what the servicemen were reading.
Fiction headed the list, with 246 contemporary fiction
titles, 160 westerns, 122 mysteries, and 92 historical
novels. In addition, there were 130 humor titles, 86
biographies, and a smaller number of a variety of other
categories, among them classics, sports, history, and the
arts. Because fiction dominated the lists and because
then-current fiction led all categories, some have inferred
that servicemen read not so much to gain information as to
"escape tedium or loneliness" (Bonn 47). Among those works
read for diversion, of course, there existed a broad range
of seriousness of purpose.
Letters home from servicemen also give some
indications, though unsystematic, about what G.I.s
appreciated most:
I was gratified when I saw a GI lying in the
shade of a bomber reading Huckleberry Finn. . . .
I saw men in chowlines reading worn copies of
Mobv Dick. The Robe. . . . [A] single copy of A
Tree Grows in Brooklyn had passed from hand to
hand. . . . [I]n India, I came upon a bearded
top sergeant, deep in Walter Lippmann's Foreign
Policy, (quoted in Davis 76)
G.I.s also wrote to authors in great numbers, Betty Smith,
author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, receiving the most
letters (Davis 78). H. L. Menken and Katherine Anne Porter
received numerous letters, and James Thurber received a
request asking him to explain his Is Sex Necessary? (Davis
78), a misogynistic book of humor.
As popular titles began to be in great demand, some
were reprinted again. These lists of reprints also give
46
some idea of what this particular market's demands were,
somewhat independently of what Stern and the other
publishers decided to print. First reintroduced on the
eleventh list because of the demand for them on the fourth
list were two novels, both domestic bestsellers in
hardback, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Lloyd
C. Douglas's The Robe. Also repeated were books by
Thurber, Rawlings, London, Steinbeck, Poe, C.S. Forester,
Bram Stoker, Maugham, and Zane Gray, among others (Davis
75). Yet even this list of popular authors may have been
gleaned from a larger list of what was most read. Because
the list was shaped from the top down far more than in
commercial publishing ventures, the list only roughly
reflects the actual tastes of the G.I. Editorial decisions
consistently imposed on the Editions an intentionally wider
variety than general reading habits would have dictated:
"The list was carefully balanced, not only between fiction
and nonfiction but between intellectual and mass tastes.
History, biography, poetry, and other categories had to be
represented as well" (Tebbel 32). This intention to
include variety can be seen as an effort both to provide
something for every taste but even more as a deliberate
attempt to broaden the serviceman's reading interests.
Although the armed services encompassed a great deal
of regional, class, and ethnic diversity, the G.I.s shared
47
in common more than the general populace: they were all
male.4 Selecting titles for such a group, however
otherwise diverse, was easier than for a general or
undefinable market. A large list of male-oriented
materials— adventures, westerns, mysteries, war humor, and
sports— mixed in with the bestseller fiction lists of the
day was more than likely to please most G.I.s. The
military also concentrated together men of certain age
groups, especially 18- to 25-year-olds, further
predisposing this audience to young, male-oriented reading.
Such a population presented forward-looking paperback
publishers such as Stern with a unique opportunity to gain
skills in targeting truly mass audiences, yet with some
definable limitations: it was like target practice for
American publishers. Such wartime marketing experience
would later translate into successful mass audience
targeting for the postwar paperback industry.
A rough estimate shows that the Armed Services
Editions on the average produced ten books for every
soldier, but this cannot be translated into any accurate
estimate of the number of books the average serviceman
actually read, since the figure does not take into account
that every book was read and re-read to the breaking point
of the stapled spine and often beyond. It might be
estimated that most books were read at least a dozen times
before they became too tattered any longer to form a
coherent reading experience. Even then the books may have
served as a kind of fragmented and aimless reading material
to pass the time.
Largely as a result of the success of the Armed
Services Editions, World War II G.I.s became readers. In
only four years, from 1943 to 1947, eleven million American
G.I.s read and passed on to be re-read nearly i22 million
copies of books. They read while they waited, they read in
hospitals, and they even read in battle: "I was thinking
about that book even under pretty intense fire. . . ."
(quoted in Jolles and in Tebbel 32). These men read as
they never had before and most read more than they ever had
before the war: "It is only since I have come overseas and
utilized these editions have I had the opportunity of
reading more books. . ." (G.I. letter quoted in Davis 76).
Of course, just as among the civilian population, there
were avid readers, light readers, and non-readers, but
indications are that in wartime, probably due to isolation,
time on their hands, lack of other media, and a need to
escape from both tension and boredom, even non-readers
began to read: there were numerous "men who had not read a
book since their grammar school days" who began to read
again (Tebbel 32). One officer even called this the
"best-read army in our history" (quoted in Davis 76).
It was not just that these soldiers read books; they
also were becoming accustomed to consuming reading
material— desiring another book as soon as they finished
one- These men began to acquire the consumerist habit (so
prominent in postwar culture) of avidly reading and then
discarding softbound books. Because the books were
paperbound and their readers almost exclusively male, the
Editions created a new and specifically-definable male
consumer market for paperbacks. Over a hundred million
soft-cover books read and reread by over ten million men
forged a pleasant association between inexpensive books and
men's leisure. The Editions rewarded these men with the
pleasures of consuming. Boxes of consumable books— like
packages of cookies from home— arrived in settings where
consumerism was otherwise next to impossible: on ships, in
tanks, in camps, in deserts, in swamps. The association of
paperbacks with consumption reinforced in many men's minds
an idea that would be even further accentuated in the
postwar boom years and the 1950s, that of massive cultural
consumption.
It is also significant that before the war these men
may not have been accustomed to either reading or mass
consumption. Because of the Depression, many had not had
the disposable income to buy books or much of anything else
for pleasure. The Editions helped (re)acquaint them with
50
the pleasures of consuming, and made an association with
reading, a pastime many had foregone before the war. The
Editions "not only greatly stimulated the expansion of
paperback publishing but also developed millions of readers
who previously had seldom looked into a book" (Madison
548). By war's end, the habit of reading and its
association with consumption had been well established for
this group:
By the end of the war, the public had become used
to buying paperbacks. The earlier idea that
'real' literature could only be bought at a
bookshop, and not at a supermarket or a station
kiosk, had disappeared. In America and abroad,
it was clear that there was indeed a mass
audience for paperbacks: publishers had only to
look at the enormous total of almost 123 million
Armed Services Editions in circulation. A seed
had most definitely been planted and, in the late
'4 0s and throughout the '50s, paperback
publishers would eagerly reap the resultant
fruit. (Schreuders 52)
This non-profit publishing venture proved to be invaluable
in the establishment of a new sector of postwar readers
targetable by the publishing industry: "The Armed Services
Editions have made book readers [and book consumers] of
hundreds of thousands of young men who otherwise would have
tasted the pleasures of books seldom and gingerly" (Mott
269) .
51
Chapter One Endnotes
1. Compared to the dime novel of the time, these were
better printed and offered better reading material for
servicemen, "much like the 'Armed Services Editions' during
the Second World War" (Schick 52).
2. This contractual clause could not prevent a booming
postwar European black market in Armed Services Editions
paperbacks.
3. See also Janice Radway's "On the Uses of 'Serious'
Fiction" in Critical Inquiry. Radway describes how Book-
of-the-Month editors "assert their right to choose books
for others" who have "different, less trained tastes" (537-
8). Stern may also have experienced the contradictions
Radway describes between bowing to high culture and
presuming to understand the audience one is catering to.
4. An exception would be the auxiliary women's services.
52
CHAPTER TWO
softcover Fatherhood:
The Redomestication of the Veteran
You can be a warm father and a real man
at the same time.
— Dr. Benjamin Spock,
The Pocket Book of Baby
and Child Care (1946)
That Dr. Spock even needed to insist that a "warm
father" can still be a "real man" hints at a perceived
conflict between the veteran's redomestication and his
masculinity. Whether men can come home from war and play
house without becoming feminized was a question that caused
general cultural anxiety. With the close of the war, the
speed with which the G.I. shifted roles from the
battlefield to the domestic scene, and the sheer numbers of
G.I.s who made this shift, resulted in less stable
definitions of what it was to be manly. Because a
proportion of the paperback's new audience was composed of
these men, their anxiety about becoming domesticated was a
theme for paperbacks to capitalize on, creating a link
53
between paperback publishing and what has been called the
"war generation.1 , 1
Out of 140 million Americans, William O'Neill claims
that one quarter were "young men [and, to a large extent,
their wives] eager to make up for lost time" (9). The war
generation fathered a demographic phenomenon, the baby
boom, also described as "the pig in the python" (Jones 3),
a bulge moving progressively down a tube. The war
generation and its offspring constitute a bulge that can be
traced through the veteran's life course of demobilization,
marriage, fatherhood, college, and an institutional career.
This group's size and accelerated shifts in roles played
havoc with tradition, gender, and the American male's sense
of masculinity.
The war set in motion this demographic event. The
armed forces swelled then shrank not unlike a digesting
python. The years 1941 to 1943 saw yearly doublings,
nearly triplings, of the military. The rate and scope of
mobilization was unprecedented. Sixteen million men
(Census 735)— four times the numbers from World War I— were
mobilized in only seven years. But the reverse process at
the end of the war would occur even faster. Public
impatience to "send the boys home" greatly accelerated the
expected rate of demobilization (Morison 1052): "a military
establishment which had included eleven million men on V-J
54
Day was soon down to about one million" (Goldman 36). Nine
million men came home in less than one year: "It was no
demobilization," General Marshall is quoted as saying, "it
was a rout" (in Morison 1052).
Demobilization was so rapid partly because the
veterans wanted to make up for lost time; U.S. government
films and printed matter had motivated soldiers through
numerous representations of homecoming: "He was told so
many times what he was fighting for— apple pie, the girl
back home, the corner drug store— that he began to have a
real nostalgia for the Better Life he expected to find when
he returned" (Spaulding 345). Homesickness and nostalgia
were used as a national strategy for ending the war
quickly. This had the intended consequence of creating a
highly patriotic and motivated fighting force; it also had
the perhaps unforeseen consequence of raising veterans'
expectations for their return home: "Everybody wanted to
get back to 'normal' conditions" (Goldman 19).
But, partly due to the government's manipulation of
nostalgia, the 'normality' these veterans longed to return
to was not the economically depressed America of 1939 they
had left behind, but an America of "an earlier time, not of
the twenties but even earlier than that" (Filene 159). The
veteran's new conception of himself was based not on the
pre-war American male, but on an earlier, almost mythical
55
past: "Delayed and disrupted by the war, members of this
generation wanted to go back, even beyond their parents, to
a time of secure values and traditional practices" (O'Neill
44) .
Traditional practices, in this case, meant
domesticity, and on a mass scale. Demobilization sent
marriage rates skyrocketing, and veterans found themselves
assuming the new role of husband. Weddings set records
never again to be approached: "It was a marital fever which
expanded the married proportion of the population to
unprecedented size. ..." (Filene 165). A New York Times
headline announced, "Philadelphia license bureau issues 206
applications in single day; sets 6-yr record" (May 12,
1946). The year 1946 saw the peak number of weddings, 2.3
million, and the following year, 1.9 million, was not far
behind (Census 30). The sheer number of wedding ceremonies
threatened already scarce food supplies: "Agricultural
Department starts drive to curb showering of newlyweds with
rice" (New York Times April 4, 1946) . The marriage boom
did not abate until 1957, by which time the proportion of
single males and females had shrunk significantly. High
marriage rates combined with war deaths caused bachelorhood
especially to suffer during the postwar period, dropping
from its more usual twentieth-century norm of above 33
56
percent of the 25- to 30 year-old males to below one
quarter.
The numbers only dimly reflect the profundity of the
change, however. Marriage constituted a major
reorientation from the battlefield. The battlefield and
male homosociality provided a high level of security for
the masculine identity, but it proved a very shortlived
security: Kaja Silverman claims that, "the fiction of a
phallic masculinity generally remains intact only for the
duration of the war" (63).2 The coherence of masculinity
was threatened by the rather sudden switch to
heterosexuality as its central definer: "The returning
veteran was torn from the easy, accepting, one-dimensional,
male camaraderie of the service and set down in the alien,
heterosexual landscape of domesticity. ..." (Graebner
111). To redefine one's masculine identity from warrior to
husband, and from the context of an all-male group to that
of a heterosexual relationship, was bound to temporarily
threaten the security of that identity.
As a masculine definer, the sudden switch to
heterosexuality caused "adjustment problems" for returning
veterans, including an area that very much threatened
masculine self-assurance, sexual adjustment; Elaine
Showalter discusses both the physical and symbolic
impotence of the returning veteran. Various texts were
published to address men's insecurities, including Sex
Problems of the Returned Veteran (1946), was written by
Howard Hitching, an M.D. interested in instructing men
whose marital sex lives had been interrupted by war and who
might therefore face sexual problems, including impotence,
upon resumption of sexual activities. Hitching describes
the principle of psychological regression in which a grown
man separated from normal sexual outlets "adopts an
earlier, more primitive and less satisfactory mode, because
circumstances make it necessary" (51). During separation,
he advises "reasonable acceptance" of the temptation to
masturbate, but with a caveat: "The emphasis is on the word
reasonable" (53). Hitching7s double message of
"acceptance" but only if "reasonable" seemed to promote the
feelings of guilt which he claims are inevitable. He
warned that with war there is "always a lowering of moral
standards. It is impossible to tell men to go and
kill. . . and expect them at the same time all to be
honest, chaste, kind. . ." (56). But he criticizes the
"new psychology of the last forty years" for promoting the
distorted belief that it is "unhealthy to frustrate one's
instincts" (58). Instead, he counsels abstinence until
reunion with one's spouse.
He warns that, because the war has made women more
independent, reunion may be problematic. In the natural
roles of wife and husband, Kitching finds the woman
emotionally and physically unfit to Mgo out and struggle
with the world" and concludes that her "greatest asset is
her weakness and capacity for love" (67) . War, however',
unnaturally forces her into the "role of independence and
mastery" (68) allowing her to acquire "new feelings of
achievement and competence" (71). Although after the war
she can be expected to relinquish her new job in the
munitions plant along with her sense of independence, her
husband may still feel threatened, Kitching warns, by her
new autonomy. The veteran's new insecurity may very well
affect his sexual performance at the time of their reunion.
Kitching offers little in the way of a remedy for
impotence, except that "[t]he best treatment is to ignore
it and wait for it to pass" (110). He prefers to discuss
at length an equally common sexual 'disorder,' women's
frigidity, which can generally be assumed to have been
present even before the war, Kitching says. Men's
"ignorance of technique," he says, is the cause for many
women to view sex not as a pleasure but as an "obligation,"
and even for some to view long separation with "relief"
(74). He sketchily defines for men the woman's erogenous
zones, and assigns men the full responsibility for solving
the problem of the frigid female, only adding more burdens
onto his role. Works such as this one document how
59
widespread was the anxiety about the returning veteran's
adjustment. Compared to war, heterosexuality for married
men— and for the millions of men about to be married— was
becoming even more insecure as a domain in which to define
one's masculinity.
As if readjusting from the homosocial role to
heterosexual union was not enough, there was another major
adjustment for many of these men: to fatherhood. "Marital
fever" soon translated into "fertility fever" (Filene 166),
as these returned veterans fathered the decade-long
phenomenon that still deeply influences American culture
today— the baby boom. Most of these were first births to
war generation newlyweds: "The rate of first births soared
to historic heights in the late 1940s, followed a few years
later by a record rate of second, third, and even fourth
births" (Filene 166).
These men raced home from the battlefield to the altar
and then the delivery room, but soon began to find the
traditional domestic role problematic for their
masculinity, and many began to have "second thoughts" about
male domestication (Filene 173). The term "domestication"
had connotations of the taming, even dephallusizing, of the
wild soldier; if military combat excluded all that was
feminine, on the homefront the feminine held a central
place. As the "domestic mystique" continued unchecked,
"some wondered how far domestication could go before
becoming emasculation" (Filene 173). Widespread male
domesticity led to larger cultural concerns about "the
ineffectual man, the passive man, the man whose masculine
ego had been robbed" (Filene 173). Domesticity seemed to
threaten manhood itself; could the redomesticated American
veteran live up to the expectations of masculinity and
heterosexuality?
Much of this anxiety about the failing heterosexuality
of adult males seemed somehow less directly threatening if
it was quantified by scientists who tended to diminish
these concerns by displacing them onto children. In The
Mvth of Masculinity (1981), Joseph Pleck chronicles the
creation by American psychologists, beginning in 19 3 6 but
with increased fervor throughout the postwar period, of
various masculinity-femininity tests, for all ages, but
especially for children. By 1952, true-false questions
such as "I prefer a shower to a bathtub" (34) were giving
researchers such as H. Gough insight into high school and
college test subjects. (Real men don't take baths.) By
1956, D. Brown's "It Scale for Children" was gathering the
same data from even younger subjects by presenting children
with drawings of pairs of toys, one masculine, one
feminine, such as a knife and a necklace; the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory applies the same
principles to adults. The earliest of these tests, the
Gough Femininity Scale was designed to "differentiate men
from women and sexual deviates from normals" (Gough 427).
Differentiating men from women through psychological tests
seems indirect, at best; the test's real purpose was to
differentiate "sexual deviates [i.e., homosexuals] from
normals." All of the masculinity tests shared certain
features and assumptions. All focused more on males and
were designed for, and first calibrated on, male subjects;
all assume that male sex role identity is more problematic
than female sex role identity; all assume that mothers are
most responsible for male sex role problems; and all assume
that homosexuality is the "worst misfortune that can befall
a man" (Pleck 7). These tests also assume that a high
feminine score for a male accurately predicts a tendency
toward homosexuality, even if only latently. During thirty
years of sex role research, conflating the feminine in men
with homosexuality was taken as a given.3 The
preoccupation by professionals in this period with being
able to measure the femininity in boys to identify
potential homosexuals reflects a more widespread
preoccupation in the culture at large with homosexuality
and the feminization of the American male after the war.
Of course, issues of masculinity did not spring up at
the end of the war without precedent; neither did such
tests. Precursors to the femininity scale were being
developed during the Depression in 1936, during which time
mass unemployment of men raised concerns about how males
would fare if not allowed to fulfill the masculine role of
breadwinner. But the jobs and the masculine roles provided
by the military starting in 1941 temporarily shored up
those fears until demobilization raised the issue again,
this time with a vengeance because of the large numbers
involved. The demographic bulge intensified any
phenomenon, like waves peaking together, and after the war,
the cultural reaction to fears of feminized men became
intense, overt, and widespread.
A bulge in demographics could not help but become a
commercial marketing opportunity, especially for the
fledgling paperback industry which needed a new mass
audience with which to establish itself. The interests of
such a large population group as the returning veterans
were naturally of concern to mass publishers. The return
of eleven million veterans after the war to the altar and
the nursery presented a built-in market opportunity for the
mass publishing industry, not unlike the captive audience
eleven million soldiers had presented in wartime to
publishers of the Armed Services Editions. Because
publishers such as Robert de Graff understood the
importance of the war generation as a market, the company
that capitalized on this marketing opportunity the earliest
and most effectively was the founder of the modern mass
market paperback, Pocket Books. De Graff's publishing
instincts helped launch the last of the three major
American periods in softcover publishing activity which
began with the paperback's emergence in 184 2 and its
revival from 1870 to 1890 (Tebbel 347). As "the man most
responsible for starting the modern paperback book
revolution in America" (Dzwonkoski 293), de Graff had "that
peculiar American genius for combining culture, commerce,
and a little technology" (Davis 12-13).
Back in 1939 when Robert de Graff had first been
proposing a softcover venture, he had received many
late-night phone calls warning him to reconsider (Tebbel
III 509). Back then, hardcover publishers had believed
that no profit could be made at a twenty-five-cent
price— yet they simultaneously had feared the paperback's
impact on the publishing industry. Knowing that all U.S.
paperback ventures had eventually failed, de Graff at that
time had chosen to align himself with powerful business
partners, Simon and Schuster, who had insisted that he
demonstrate that he could both lower costs and increase
volume. To lower costs, he had at once reduced author
royalties from ten to four percent. To increase volume, he
had targeted the largest possible audiences.
Targeting mass audiences meant displaying the books,
not in bookstores, but where this population could find
them. Thus, one of Pocket Books7 most important
contributions to the paperback revolution— and one that
involved linking the soft cover to the war generation
market— was alternative distribution methods. Whereas book
publishers marketed their titles through bookstores, Pocket
Books pioneered the distribution of its titles through a
variety of outlets usually reserved for newsprint:
"magazine and newspaper wholesalers. . .[,] newsstands,
cigar stores, grocery stores, drugstores, and subway, train
and bus stations" (Dzwonkoski 293). If the paperback was
going to reach eleven million veterans and their families,
it needed to be as widely and as easily available to them
as the Armed Services Editions had been in military camps
overseas.
Pocket Books7s real success didn7t come until after
demobilization, partly because government quotas on paper
didn7t ease up until the second half of 1945 (Schick 80).
Equally as important, however, was the return of the
American soldier. Not every ex-soldier read prolifically,
of course, but when veterans did read, because they had
already become accustomed to reading paperbacks in wartime,
they tended to choose paperbacks, making the Armed Services
Editions "the solid foundation on which the postwar boom
65
was built" (Tebbel III 7). The veteran's familiarity with
paperbacks, combined with their large numbers and shared
interests, made the veterans' contribution to the growth of
the paperback quite significant. Rather than publishers
having to define a target audience among the general
population, the G.I. offered, at least in the early postwar
years, an easily identifiable audience.
That the industry catered to or at least was
responsive to the war generation market can be seen in the
publisher-created instant book. One of the most dramatic
illustrations of paperback publishers becoming attuned to
the war generation's demographics can be found in the
example of Pocket Books' editor, Donald Geddes, seeking out
Dr. Benjamin Spock. Of all the softcover books published
by Pocket Books or any other publisher, Dr. Spock's Pocket
Book of Babv and Child Care— one of the first multi-million
paperback sellers— best exemplifies both the process of
targeting the mass market and timing the demographics of
the postwar generation.
Geddes had an instinct for timely books and indeed
wrote or edited many "instant" paperbacks on timely
subjects of interest to a targetable group. Within six
days of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, for instance,
Geddes wrote and published Pocket Books' FDR; A Memorial.
It was the "first true 'instant book,'" and only weeks
after the Hiroshima atomic bomb, Geddes wrote and published
The Atomic Aae Opens. which in four months sold 265,935
copies (Davis 82). Upon the 1948 publication of Kinsey's
report on male sexuality, Geddes edited and wrote the
introduction for the instant paperback, About the Kinsey
Report. which in only one month outsold the original Kinsey
report itself.4 Geddes had an instinct for tapping the
interests of the war generation. Because of the
paperback's necessarily large press-runs of often over a
million, paperback editors like Geddes had to be
exceptionally attuned to mass trends. One of these
predictable trends was mass parenthood; 103,000 first
births in 1946 meant over 200,000 anxious and inexperienced
mothers and fathers with a pressing need for basic advice
about child-raising. In 1944 these 1946 statistics did not
yet exist for Geddes to plan from, of course, but because
he worked for a newly-formed mass market paperback house,
he spent much of his time trying to anticipate the future
interests of large demographic groups such as the returning
veterans.
Rather than waiting for a manuscript on parenting to
be submitted to Pocket Books, Geddes approached young Dr.
Spock, who had turned down a similar invitation by
Doubleday five years previously, because he claimed he was
too inexperienced to be an authority. Geddes reassured the
67
wary Spock that it didn't have to be "a very good book at
twenty-five cents,1 1 and this time, anxious to reach a wide
audience with his ideas, Spock agreed (Davis 4).
Geddes had originally only envisioned softcover
publication, but to get reviewed and to be acquired by
libraries, Spock wanted the text to appear simultaneously
in hardcover. A new publishing house, Duell, Sloan, and
Pearce, agreed to participate in simultaneous publication
with Pocket Books, "a phenomenon unique at the time" (Bloom
115) .
Having made the agreement with Geddes, at first Spock
had expected to finish the manuscript for the book quickly.
He began dictating it to his wife in 1943 at the height of
the war. But because of a wartime shortage of
pediatricians, his practice became ever busier. Then he
was called up for two years of active duty in the navy, not
as a pediatrician, but as a psychiatrist for adult sailors
being discharged; uThe six-month project had soon stretched
into two years and then three" (Davis 5). This delay, and
Spock's duties treating, not babies, but G.I.s, affected
the writing and perhaps the content of the book. As a navy
psychiatrist for adults, Spock's experience discharging
sailors at the end of the war influenced his perceptions.
Spock's patients in the Navy were "guilty of repeated AWOL
offenses" and were therefore being kept in a locked prison
ward while being discharged. Of this Spock writes, "The
typical patient in the prison ward was an impulsive,
irresponsible person who had been deprived of love and care
in early childhood" (in Bloom 106).5 The book's delay gave
Spock the opportunity to observe at close hand troubled
masculinity and the fears associated with it at the end of
the war, especially, one might guess, important as he
composed sections of the manuscript addressed to fathers.
While indexing the book on a cross-continental troop train,
Spock observed his audience-to-be: "the rest of the car's
passengers, GI's scarcely older than the adolescents
discussed in Babv and Child Care, sang, drank beer, and
played poker" (Bloom 112). Scenes like this one suggest
that Spock's wartime experience gave him the chance to know
his adult male readers better before finishing final
revisions of the book, which may have influenced its
writing to make it reflect more of the postwar concerns
about men.
As the book fell behind schedule, its market potential
appeared worse and worse, since the 1945 birth rates fell
to new lows: white births, a main market focus for Pocket
Books, showed a decline for the third straight year. The
young, inexperienced parent, the focus market for Spock's
book, seemed on the verge of becoming uninterested in
procreation just as the book was to come out. Despite such
forecasts, the hardcover edition was released to bookstores
in May 1946 as The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
by Duell, Sloan, and Pearce. Weeks later, the
twenty-five-cent paperback, titled The Pocket Book of Babv
and Child Care, appeared on newsstands and in
drugstores— just in time for the explosion of first births
up from 3 0 to 41 per thousand: "The timing of the book
was. . . perfect" (Davis 8). In only five months, the
first printing of 248,000 copies was sold out; within five
months followed two additional printings of 50,000, soon
after followed by printings of 400,000 and 250,000 (Davis
5-6) .
From then on, sales never slackened; in the first ten
years, the paperback edition went through fifty-nine
printings. Although in pitching the book idea to Spock,
Geddes had 'optimistically' predicted that "at twenty-five
cents a copy, we'll be able to sell a hundred thousand a
year,1 1 in actuality the book "sold about one million copies
every year" (Davis 3). The book's sales exactly matched
the baby boom's peak years, 1946 to 1964. At least twenty
percent of all parents during those years owned the
paperback, and many more consulted it. It "sold 4 million
copies by 1952 and sold at least 1 million a year for
eighteen straight years, reaching 3 0 million copies in 29
languages. . . ," so that "one out of every five babies was
70
a Spock baby" (L. Jones 54). As a result, Dr. Spock's Baby
and Child Care has sold more copies in the U.S. than any
other book except the Bible (Davis 3).
The definition of a bestseller and of a mass audience
changed overnight. Even in 1944 before the postwar
paperback boom, Geddes predicted, "A great American author
will then not just be a person who has been read by one
hundred or two hundred or five hundred thousand or possibly
a million Americans, but one who will have been read by as
many as twenty-five million Americans" (Geddes, also quoted
in Davis 86). In his project with Spock, this then-dubious
prediction was to prove truer than Geddes ever imagined.
Dr. Spock became a household word, and in the fifties even
Lucille Ball, visibly pregnant onscreen and off, frequently
quipped on I Love Lucy. "Well, let's see what Spock says"
(Spock on Soock 137).
In his memoirs, Spock revealed why he felt the book
had sold so well even "without advertising or promotion":
"I think the reasons were that it was cheap, it was
complete, and it dealt with both the psychological and the
physical sides of child care" (Spock on Spock 135). The
psychological, in fact, was at the core of Spock's success.
Spock's text takes seriously the psychological experience
of both the parent and the child. For the parent, Spock's
text repeated almost like a mantra a theme of reassurance:
"I want to urge you not to worry" (Spock 2). Spock's
excesses of reassurance were given in reaction to three
other books that had profoundly altered American
childrearing from a more natural, mother-based system in
the nineteenth century to an expert-oriented, medical-based
system that mistrusted parents' intuition. The most
influential of these had a subtitle that set the tone for
many households, The Care and Feeding of Children: A
Catechism for Mothers and Children's Nurses (1895) by Dr.
Luther Holt. Also influential were Psychological Care of
Infant and Child (1928) by John Watson and a government
publication, Infant Care. These experts were stern
taskmasters and demanded toilet training by two months,
forbade playing with a baby under six months, and advised
forcible weaning. The government manual even forbade
hugging and kissing one's children except for one kiss on
the forehead at bedtime. In all these works, strict
feeding schedules were advised. Such stern advice sold
well before the war, but "the postwar generation wanted to
love. . . . After the grimness and constraint of the
Depression and war years, when children were raised in a
rigidly scheduled fashion reflecting the times, the new
generations were ready for. . . freedom from regimentation
(Bloom 122).
Spock explicitly addresses these childrearing horrors
early in his text: "Up to sixty years ago. . . babies were
fed when they seemed to be hungry. . ." (24). Then Spock
precisely locates the problem: "When medical scientists
began to study the feeding of babies at the end of the last
century. . . , it was natural that these scientists would
set up some kind of system. . .1 1 (26). Spock gently
admonishes these scientists: "It is wrong. . . to try to
fit every baby into the same mold" (24-25). He describes
the extremes to which such advice drove parents: "Mothers
have sometimes been so scared of the schedule that they did
not dare feed a hungry baby one minute early. . . What an
ideal" (25). To dismiss the muddle made by such experts,
Spock conjures up the image of a primitive mother: "Stop
and think of a mother, far away in an 'uncivilized' land,
who has never heard of a schedule, or a pediatrician, or a
cow" (25). In his text, Spock tries to reassure parents
that, like this native, they have no need of artificial,
scientific schedules because they have an inborn intuition
for parenting. It is in reaction to almost fifty years of
so much sternness that Spock adopts a tone of constant
reassurance. Of course, the fact that parents would need
many hundred of pages of reassurance tended to send another
message to parents that there must be a lot to worry about.
The severity of Spock's predecessors is seemingly
supplanted by a calming and reassuring text. But Spock
perpetuates certain types of anxieties, the most prominent
of which concerns the psychological state of boys. This
bias is exacerbated by a generally greater emphasis on boys
in Spock's text. Throughout the text, the baby is referred
to as "him." Although not uncommon for the time, the
explanation Spock gives is telling. Not only does he cite
the awkwardness of alternating "he" and "she," but he says
he has reserved the feminine pronoun for someone else: "I
need 'her' to refer to the mother" (2). Just for
convenience sake, babies are assumed to be male and parents
are assumed to be female. Most parental references are
indeed to the mother, and when the male parent is addressed
at all, a separate paragraph is usually required: "A man,
too, may get the wrong first impression of himself as a
father. . . The poor father is a complete outsider" (13).
Like the pronoun "she," the pronoun "you" is also always
reserved for the mother: "If you begin to feel at all
depressed, try to get some relief. . ." (16).
Thus, the idealized scenario Spock addresses is of a
mother and her baby son. Consistently less frequently
mentioned are the father and the baby girl. Although,
aside from the masculine pronoun, most general references
to babies seem gender neutral, a significant number of
examples that use the pronoun "he" as if in a
gender-neutral sense seem actually to refer specifically to
boys, but without explicitly stating so: a parent may want
to avoid comforting a child so that he will "grow up brave"
rather than become "a sissy" (24 6). Likewise, except for
the pronoun, Spock's discussion of violent toys does not
single out boys: "He points his pretend gun and says,
'Bang! I'm shooting you dead'" (241). But Spock's
affirmation of the positive value of aggressive behavior
belies the section's gender neutrality: years later when
the grown child "takes a job, he still needs his aggressive
instincts" to "compet[e] for a better position in the
organization. . . On a farm he fights the elements and the
insects, and competes with other farmers at the county
fair" (241). On page two, when Spock warned the reader,
"Everywhere I've called the baby 'him,'" his disclaimer
implied that "him" would refer equally to boys and girls.
It does not; the behavior of boy babies is consistently of
greater interest than that of girls.
This bias toward boys is confirmed in the frequency of
specifically gendered references to boys as opposed to
girls. In the entire text, there are 31 references to boys
and only 19 to girls.6 Further, the references to girls,
although often highly gender specific, rarely have deep
psychological connotations: a father must approve of a
girl's "dress or hair-do, or the cookies she's made" (243).
References to boys, on the other hand, consistently deal
not only with issues of masculine development, but
specifically with questions of male psychological anxiety.
This trend begins in a three-page section on circumcision
and its possible psychological harm, "which is greatest
between 1 and 6 years" (18). Other examples of boys that
concern psychological issues include the curbing of
masturbation (18); whether a boy who cries will "grow up
manly" (243); boys who begin to masturbate before puberty
(289); boys who are made overly scared of venereal disease,
excessive masturbation, or sexuality in general (296); boys
and stealing (309) ; undescended testicles (344-46);
fatherless boys (467); and the shorter than average boy
(with no mention of short girls) (473). In physical and
medical concerns, Spock makes as many references to girls
as to boys, but whenever the psychological development of
children is mentioned, in subtle and not so subtle ways,
boys are singled out as a subject for special concern. The
book's cover claims to "tak[e] into account [all
children's] physical and emotional needs" (2), but the text
most often addresses the emotional needs of boys.
Spock was uniquely qualified to write about the
psychological development of boys as he was one of the few
U.S.-trained pediatricians who had studied Freudian theory;
76
"At the time, he was perhaps the only pediatrician in the
United States, and maybe the world, who had psychiatric and
psychoanalytic experience" (Davis 4). Spock was also one
of the few pediatricians who had himself undergone several
years of analysis by a "disciple of Freud's" (Bloom 71),
although when he largely failed in his first attempts at
analyzing patients, he decided not to become an analyst
himself. Freud was of interest to some Americans, but "had
not permeated popular literature on childrearing until Dr.
Spock first applied it in 1946. . ." (Bloom 127). Spock's
text never mentions Freud by name, and many readers may not
have even known that what they were reading was influenced
by Freudian theory, yet Spock's descriptions of some
childhood stages seem not to come from the doctor's office
at all but directly from psychoanalytic texts.
Spock's use of Freud is, of course, simplified. To
clarify complex psychoanalytic concepts for lay audiences,
Spock describes them in simple language, as in this
description for new parents of a textbook case of the
Oedipal complex:
The boy of 3 1/2 will declare that he is going to
marry his mother when he grows up. He has no
definite idea of what marriage is, but he knows
whom he loves and can't be argued out of it. . .
We realize now that there is an early stirring of
sexual feeling at this period which is an
essential part of normal development. (287)
77
The boy of three and a half is smack in the middle of the
Oedipal stage. That a boy would have incestuous desires
for his mother is made less shocking to a lay audience by
Spock's constant tone of reassurance; such feelings are
reassuringly described as "an essential part of normal
development." For a mass audience that may not yet have
accepted childhood sexuality, Spock's reassuring tone is
ideal for introducing the concept.
Spock's treatment of early developmental sexuality is
markedly different for boys and girls. Castration anxiety,
a strictly male fear, is made much of. The parent's
assistance in overcoming castration anxiety is represented
by Spock as crucial to a boy's healthy sense of
masculinity, which gives the impression that masculine
identity is quite tenuous. For his lay audience, Spock
chooses to translate complex Freudian concepts such as
castration anxiety into vocabulary which sometimes borders
on baby-talk:
Children develop these fears not only about real
injuries. They even get mixed up and worried
about the natural differences between boys and
girls. If a boy around the age of 3 sees a girl
undressed, it may strike him as queer that she
hasn't got a penis like his. He's apt to say,
"Where is her wee wee?" (285)
The parent is warned of the consequences of not adequately
addressing the boy's sudden fears: "If he doesn't receive a
satisfactory answer right away, he may jump to the
conclusion that some accident has happened to her. . . .
[N]ext comes the anxious thought, 'That might happen to me,
too7" (285). Embedded in a text designed to reassure
parents is a stern warning to parents about the parent's
crucial role in reassuring anxious sons. A parent's
failure to do so may have the unwanted consequence of
increased childhood anxiety about castration and sexual
difference.
Girls' psychosexual development is addressed much
differently in Spock. He uses the same plain talk to
describe how the young girl's observations produce penis
envy: "The same misunderstanding may worry the little girl
when she first realizes that boys are made differently.
First she asks, "What's that?" Then she wants to know
anxiously, 'Why don't I have one. What happened to it?'"
(285). But comparatively little space is devoted to the
resulting questions and fears that might be raised for a
girl. Spock's suggested reply seems less stern, more
matter of fact, than for boys: "Don't think of [your
child's questions] as an unwholesome interest in sex. . .
You try to make it clear, in a matter-of-fact cheerful
tone, that girls and women are made different from boys and
men; they are meant to be that way" (emphasis in original,
286). Spock's relative lack of interest in girls'
development might have come directly from Freud's Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in which
sexuality "takes place in little girls earlier and in the
face of less resistance than in boys" (Freud 85).
Sexuality develops to adult 'maturity7 with less resistance
and with more reliability in females than in males, and
male sexuality is consistently perceived as more
problematic. The occasional slow-developing pubescent girl
will feel different. At one point, Spock does in fact
admit that late-pubescing girls experience some anxiety
about slow development: "The 13-year-old who has as yet
shown no signs of puberty development has seen practically
all her classmates grow rapidly taller and develop into
women. . . She thinks that she must be abnormal. She
needs to be reassured. . . ." (342) . But compared to male
development, and aside from this one reference to an
undeveloped thirteen-year-old, problems of female growth
are not much dwelt on by Spock. Boys, on the other hand,
are at great risk of feeling insecure about their
masculinity, and Spock consistently privileges the drama of
male sexual development. The late-blooming male
constitutes a real problem. According to Spock, the
slow-maturing male suffers from a far greater insecurity
about his masculinity than a female does about her
womanhood: "The boy who is on a slow timetable of
80
development. . . needs reassurance even more than the
slow-developing girl1 ' (345) .
In stating that girls are "made different" and are
"meant to be that way," Spock, not surprisingly for the
time, does not deal with the fact that in addition to
girls' anatomical difference from boys there is also a
hierarchical social difference. Feminist theory has
politicized psychoanalytic theory by introducing into the
Oedipal drama the concept of gendered power. In
Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Juliet Mitchell concludes that
every subject, boy or girl, in the midst of trying to
resolve the Oedipal dilemma has a "wish for [its
resolution] not to be the feminine place" which is the only
"alternative to where anyone really wants to be— in the
male position. . (Mitchell 51). Even Freud's own
protege, Adler, noted that both the devaluation of
femininity in Western culture and "the excessive
pre-eminence of manliness" affected the dynamics of the
Oedipal drama, making the preferred outcome always the
male's: "All children who have been in doubt about their
sexual role exaggerate the traits which they consider
masculine. ..." (Adler in Connell 199). Feminist theory
claims that penis envy is actually envy, not of the organ
itself, but of the male power associated with the penis:
"in 'penis-envy' we are talking not about an anatomical
81
organ, but about the ideas of it that people hold and live
by within the general culture" (Mitchell in Barrett 54).
Likewise, castration anxiety is really the fear of the loss
of that power. The penis is attractive to children of both
sexes not because of its biologic function,,but because of
its high value in the culture and its association with
power.
Spock, of course, is a writer of his time and so
participates in valuing masculinity. Through his
preoccupation with boys' feeling of awkwardness and
self-doubt and his discounting of girls' developmental
fears, Spock merely goes along with the accepted cultural
fixation on boys. His authority as expert and his enormous
audience only further reinforce the impact of this view. A
picture of troubled male development emerges in Spock, a
representation of strong masculine adult men who must first
pass through a very tenuous and fragile masculinity in
youth. For a male, psychic injury to manliness is
perceived as far more injurious to a boy's sense of
manliness than could be any physical 'male trouble'; far
more serious than, say, a boy's undescended testicles, was
the father's reaction to it. All manner of parental caution
was needed not to yoke the boy for life with masculine
self-doubt, which would last long after the medical
condition had been corrected:
82
If your child appears to have undescended
testicles, don't worry yourself and don't worry
him. It is important that the child should not
be made self-conscious by anxious looks and
frequent examinations. It is really harmful to a
boy's emotional development to get the idea that
he is not formed properly. If glandular
injections are recommended, this treatment should
be spoken of casually by the parents, in a way
that will raise the least doubts in the boy's
mind. (364)
Parents' fears about unmanliness are "really harmful to a
boy's emotional development." The reassurance not to
"worry yourself" is superseded by the warning not to "worry
him"— or you will "raise. . . doubt in the boy's mind."
The emphasis is on psychological injuries to boys,
even when Spock purports to be discussing physical
conditions. For instance, at one point a male's
masculinity seems to be less secure because it is based on
external criteria, such as the body: "Size and physique. .
. count for a lot." But one gathers that it is less
physical size than the labels applied by other boys that
most injure the psyche of "[t]he boy who is on a slow
timetable of development, who is still a 'shrimp' at 15
when most of his friends have turned into grown men. . ."
(327). The word "shrimp," a taunt used to belittle
undersized males, indicates Spock's sensitivity to a boy's
fears. The anxieties boys experience gain Spock's deepest
sympathy because of his perception of the precarious state
of youthful masculinity.
Children conveniently function as the repository for
larger cultural fears, essentially a cultural projection of
men's concerns onto their male children in whom those
concerns can be observed at a less threatening distance.
As men were undergoing rapid role shifts and as they began
to feel uneasy about their own manliness, they could not
express that fear openly, but only in indirect expressions
of concern about the manliness of their sons. Because of
the masculine taboo against discussing male weakness, men
could not discuss how they felt threatened by the economic
and occupational landscape they returned to, by women's
gains, or of the loss of the homosocial bonds of war. A
discussion, instead, about the problems boys faced in
reaching manhood provided a safe distance from these adult
fears. This disavowal appears to be one of the strategies
employed in many of the popular mass texts that
investigated postwar manliness. Direct discussions were
rare, but displaced discussions that could be disavowed
sold millions.
Ironically, displacing one's fears onto another group
is ineffective, since fathers' concerns about their own
manliness and about their sons' eventually become linked.
Spock repeatedly warns both parents, but especially
fathers, not to act worried in front of their sons. They
must show "a natural, easy confidence in themselves1 ' (4),
and, despite their own anxiety, speak as "casually" as
possible about their sons7 failures to develop into men.
Parents must learn to communicate with their sons "in a way
that will raise the least doubts in the boy's mind1 ' (346) .
According to this model, the more parents do not have "a
natural self-confidence in themselves," the more uncertain
they become, the more they undermine their child's
self-confidence. Since a boy's uncertainty might be traced
to nothing more overt than a father's underlying
uncertainty, the only remedy, which Spock seems to promote,
is for fathers to cover up their internal fears with an
external, tight-lipped show of confidence. In an effort to
counteract the contamination of the boy's confidence by the
father's insecurity, the doctor actually prescribes male
inexpressiveness, and without allowing the father the
escape route of abandoning the childrearing process.
Fathers (and to some extent both parents) must repress
their own anxiety in order to diminish their son's anxiety:
"What happens sometimes is that the boy, instead of being
reassured [about his masculinity]. . . is taken by his
worried parents on a hunt for a doctor who will give gland
treatment [for his undescended testicle]. This helps to
convince him that something is really wrong with him"
(Spock 3 27-8). Doubts create more doubts in a
self-fulfilling cycle of fear: "parents' most widespread
85
problem was their own uncertainty. . . It's pathetic, and
children can get pesky when they sense their parents'
uncertainty" (Spock on Spock 134).
In reading Spock, fathers faced a Catch-22. Their own
uncertainty was likely to damage their sons' confidence,
but in case uncertain fathers therefore felt tempted to
withdraw, Spock warns that this would lead to even more
undesirable effects. Spock's prescription for fathers not
to absent themselves was partly influenced by his own
experiences as a father before he wrote the book:
Barred from the labor room at New York Hospital,
he hoped for a closer look at the baby in the
nursery. . . [T]he head nurse met him, hissing,
"You can't come in here! You're not Doctor Spock
now, you're just a father. Get out!" So he
slunk out, separated from his child by an
impenetrable glass window and a century of
tradition. (Bloom 106)
This event seems to have influenced Spock's advice to
fathers: "We know that the father's closeness and
friendliness to his children will have a vital effect on
their spirits and characters for the rest of their lives.
So the time for him to begin being a real father is right .
at the start" (Spock 14). Some fathers responded eagerly
to this advice; in fact, his first fan letter was from a
father who felt Spock's book played a role in making him
feel less left out: "all of the [grandmothers and aunts in
my family]. . . . know just about everything there is to
know in this world about bringing up babies. . . You may
86
imagine to what depths of abysmal ignorance I was
relegated. . . but I had Spock" (in Bloom 129).
Less willing fathers, however, needed to be coerced
before they would participate. Spock began with gentle
persuasion: "many fathers are just a little bashful. They
just need encouragement" (15). But "there are some fathers
that get goose flesh at the very idea of helping to take
care of a baby, and there's no good to be gained by trying
to force them" (15); when gentle encouragement is
insufficient, don't use force. Somewhere between
encouragement and force, Spock finds an incentive to gain
these father's compliance: the postwar culture's gravest
threat, unmanliness. The boy with an absent father might
grow up "effeminate": "A boy doesn't grow spiritually to be
a man just because he's born with a male body. The thing
that makes him feel and act like a man is being able to
copy, to pattern himself after men and older boys with whom
he feels friendly" (243) . Unlike the way that a girl's
femaleness was seen to make her grow indisputably into a
woman, a boy's maleness was not seen as a guarantee of
manhood: a "male body" doesn't necessarily make a boy a
man. This perilous developmental male journey required
that fathers not be too distant. With such dire warnings
of male effeminacy, even the most reluctant fathers were
frightened into at least some token participation in
87
childrearing, fearing their complete absence might trigger
the consequence they feared most: effeminacy.
Only once does Spock explicitly address the underlying
issue of the father's masculinity, which in every other
case Spock displaces onto the boy and his development. Men
fearful of their manliness saw caring for children as
feminizing, and Spock acknowledges this by trying to
reassure anxious fathers that fathering is not unmanly. In
a section subtitled "The father's part" Spock directly
addresses, not the son's, but the father's fears about
whether he himself is a "real man": "Some fathers have been
brought up to think that the care of babies and children is
the mother's job entirely. This is the wrong idea. You
can be a warm father and a real man at the same time"
(Spock 14). Because it is not acceptable for adult male
fears about masculinity to be directly discussed, they are,
except in rare instances like this, disavowed.
In addition to the father's masculinity, rarely
addressed, there is one other topic that must be discussed
only with the utmost delicacy: the topic of homosexuality.
The fear of homosexuality underlies many of Spock's
concerns about boys' development. Pleck writes, "In most
popular discussion about insecure or inadequate sex role
identity, concern about homosexuality is not far below the
surface. When traditionalists argue against various
88
childrearing. . . practices. . ., homosexuality is usually
what is really meant" (73). Much of the writing in popular
books on childrearing, including in Spock, can be included
in this observation. Spock's preoccupation with boys is
generally a preoccupation with assuring the heterosexual
development of boys.
Before examining how fear of homosexuality is a
subtext in Spock, we will briefly turn to the same topic in
another advice book from one of Spock's competitors. Eight
years after Pocket Books' success with Spock, Popular
Library contracted a marriage and family counselor, Dr.
Evelyn Duvall, to write Facts of Life and Love for
Teen-Agers in an attempt to keep step with the war
generation's topical preoccupations, which, it turned out,
could still create a bestseller: the book quickly sold a
million and a half copies.7 Duvall's bestseller not only
paralleled Spock's book in matching the needs of the war
generation, but also paralleled the postwar generation's
anxieties about masculinity that Spock had tapped eight
years previously. The titles of Duvall's chapters reveal
the same perceived discrepancy as Spock in the maturing of
boys as opposed to girls: "Chapter 1. When Girls Mature" as
opposed to "Chapter 2. How Boys Become Men" (5); girls just
grow up, but boys must continue to worry about the elusive
secret of 'becoming' men. Whereas Spock minimized the
anxiety a late-maturing girl might feel, Duvall seems to
discount that a girl might even feel anxious about
achieving womanhood at all: "The late maturing girl finds
that many of her classmates are already dating when she
begins to be interested in boys. She may or may not find
this an advantage, depending largely upon how she feels
about it. . . .1 1 (14) . Achieving womanhood is not viewed
as a necessarily perilous proposition; it depends "on how
she feels." Achieving manhood, on the other hand, just as
in Spock, is perilous and full of anxiety for boys: "Most
fellows do a lot of wondering about what happens" (Duvall
29). As in Spock, a picture of troubled boyhood emerges.
But Duvall tries to discourage boys' fearfulness about
manhood by consistently minimizing the importance of male's
feelings of inadequacy: "boys who are slow in developing in
their early teens may be unduly worried. . . ." (33). The
word "unduly" is an attempt to brush aside an issue that
Duvall elsewhere takes very seriously. Like Spock's
reassurances, Duvall's seem to indicate an underlying depth
of concern about masculinity and the greater worry,
homosexuality. She again attempts to reassure boys that
they can indeed achieve manhood when she announces that she
will next review "what a boy can do to assure his emerging
into full manhood. . . ." (30). That one must "assure"
one's own manhood, however, creates a whole new area for
male performance anxiety. (Duvall's prescriptions are not
to worry that virginity, penis shape, or loss of semen
through nocturnal emissions will cause a lessening of
manhood.) In a description patently absent in the girl's
chapter, Duvall describes to the boy the early formation of
a man: "Your father's sperm cast the deciding vote that
made you a boy, with all the potentialities of becoming a
man" (30); the word "potentialities" too causes anxiety, as
manhood seems only a possibility, not by any means assured.
While "Girls are just born female," Duvall makes a boy
worry that even if he attains manhood, he may not be able
to "keep" it; she does this when she describes the "male
hormones that make and keep a man, a man" (31). But what
if only half the hormones are produced, as when one
testicle does not descend? Spock had warned parents
against overreacting for fear of "really" harming the boy's
sense of masculinity. Duvall tries to deny any
implications of an undescended testicle to the boy's
feelings of manliness: "This does not mean that the boy is
any less a male, but simply that his testes have not come
to their proper place within the scrotum" (32). Duvall
devalues the importance of the boy's possible response:
"The boy with one undescended testis is not affected
adversely except perhaps in the way he feels about it"
(32). Duvall seems to attach just as much importance to
91
issues of manliness as Spock does, but, perhaps to reassure
boys, she tries to downplay the importance of a boy's
feelings of inadequacy, as in her phrase "except perhaps in
the way he feels about it." Her repeated denial of these
fears seems to be an attempt to protect the teenage boy
from a belief that he may not be "normal," but this
repetition betrays how concerned she really is about a
boy's turning out to be masculine.
Only near the end of the book does Duvall finally make
explicit this underlying concern. In a section titled
"Same Sex, Same Age," Duvall states,
you quite possibly had a very close buddy or pal
of your own sex to whom you were devoted. . .
They often carry over to the more mature
friendships of later years and are, indeed, a
precious heritage. An attachment to members of
one's own sex in preference to persons of the
opposite sex is called homosexual (same sex).
This is normal during certain periods of
childhood, and even for a while in early
adolescence. Later it may become a cause for
concern. . . . (emphasis in original, 173-4)
The one overt use of the word "homosexual" is underlined
and glossed. But even here Duvall downplays the shock of
the reference by mentioning that later in life it "may"
become, not a sign of deviance, but a mere "cause for
concern." The delicacy with which the topic must be
pursued is a sign of its explosiveness. After this, the
subject of homosexuality is never mentioned by Duvall
again, although it is implicit in much of the rest of the
92
text. The allusion and ensuing silence only emphasize how
central the threat of homosexuality really was perceived to
be.
Spock's Babv and Child Care text also delicately
dances around the topic of male homosexuality, but never
quite so explicitly. Underlying much of Spock's discussion
about boys was the real topic of concern: boys and
homosexuality. Because Spock writes in such a veiled way
about homosexuality, however, the references to it must be
teased out. At the most tangential level are Spock's
frequent warnings to fathers not to mar a son's
self-confidence in his heterosexuality. If a father
commits the error of urging moderation in a boy's sexual
impulses, he risks the boy's becoming "worried about his
sexuality" and fearful of being "different" or "abnormal":
Fathers. . . sometimes tell the boy that these
things [nocturnal emissions and "a strong urge to
masturbate"] are not harmful if they don't happen
too often. I think it's a mistake for a parent
to set a limit, even though it may sound
sensible. The trouble is that an adolescent
easily becomes worried about his sexuality,
easily imagines he is "different" or abnormal.
(295)
An adolescent's heterosexuality is so precarious, in this
cultural view, that one misstep by the father may result in
either an undermining of the boy's heterosexuality or at
least great anxiety about becoming "different." In Spock's
text the specter of failed heterosexuality is never very
93
far from the father's concerns for his boy: "The danger of
scaring a sensitive child about sex is partly that you make
him tense and apprehensive at this time, partly that you
may destroy his or her ability to adjust to marriage later"
(296). "Marriage" is a code word for heterosexuality. The
father is warned that, in his actions and attitudes in
dealing with his son's sexuality, he might "destroy" the
child's chance to succeed in adjusting to the chief
institution of heterosexuality, marriage.
Momentarily abandoning his usually reassuring tone,
Spock warns parents that the greatest risk of their boy's
becoming homosexual is the boy's overidentification with
the mother and, exacerbating that problem, the absence of
the father. If the father must be away, as during war, at
least the boy can be around other men to mitigate the risk
of the mother's strong influence: the boy "needs to be
friendly with other men if the father is not there" (467).
Surrogate father-figures help dilute the excessive
influence of the mother: "a good deal is accomplished if
[the boy] can just be reminded frequently that there are
such creatures as agreeable men, with lower voices,
different clothes, and different manners than women" (467).
Echoing popular beliefs, Spock warns that a father or
his facsimile is essential to avoid the boy's
overidentification with the mother: "A kindly grocer or
milkman who just grins" (467). Here, it seems to me, Spock
departs from Freud, who wrote that "affection shown [boys]
by their mother. . . contributes powerfully to directing
their choice towards women. ..." (Freud 95). A close
mother-son relationship, in Freud's view, does not seem
worrisome, whereas in Spock's twentieth-century view, boys
are at great risk unless channelled away from their
mother's feminine interests: "The boy without a father
particularly needs opportunity and encouragement to play
with other boys, every day if possible, by the age of 2,
and to be mainly occupied with boyish pursuits" (467).
Note the ultimate, and until now only implicit, danger to
the boy:
The temptation of the mother who has no other
equally strong ties is to make him her closest
spiritual companion, getting him interested in
clothes and interior decoration, in her opinions
and feelings about people, in the books and other
recreations she enjoys. If she succeeds in
making her world more appealing to him, easier to
get along in, than the world of boys (where he
has to make his own way), then he may grow up
precocious and effeminate. (467)
Here Spock abandons Freud, adopting instead a common view
even further popularized by Philip Wylie in A Generation of
Vipers. that mothers are to blame for the effeminization of
sons. Although fathers are partially implicated in the
son's failure due to either their absence or their insecure
manner, mothers come in for an even greater share of the
blame. In fact, the discussions about fathers are less
concerned with blaming fathers than with the father's own
anxieties about masculinity. Although the father may bear
some responsibility for an effeminate son, he also has the
author's sympathy. The mother, on the other hand, has
fallen to ’ 'temptation" when she makes her son into a
'mama's boy.' In actual cases of the failure to instill a
heterosexual orientation, the overprotective mother
remained the culture's favorite and most convenient
scapegoat.
Finally, influenced as much by his own times as by his
alliance with Freud, Spock shows that he has his finger on
the pulse of American insecurities about heterosexuality.
He, along with most Americans, tended to blame the mother
for the general perception that boys were going soft.
Spock's reference to a boy's misdirected interest in
1 1 interior decoration" is a code word, one not at all
difficult for Spock's readers to translate: it is a
euphemism.for homosexuality. As Pleck observes, the
literature on children is filled with "pseudoscientific
euphemisms for homosexuality" (73) , and Spock's text is no
exception. "Interior decoration," especially when
accompanied by the word "effeminate," functions as a barely
veiled threat to those who dare to ignore Spock's warnings
about the "temptation of the mother." Spock's penchant to
reassure and be permissive can be mistaken for a spirit of
96
pure tolerance that is not always deserved. Regarding
masculinity and its supposed failure, Spock is no longer
talking baby talk; he is deadly serious. And so are his
readers, who, from the same cultural time, share his
anxiety about overprotective mothers and their sons'
resulting desire to "decorate."
Nor is Spock kidding about the importance of male
role-models for young boys, who, if raised only by women,
he believes, turn out like girls: "Parents sometimes are
worried because a boy around 2 won't make the change to
urinating standing up. Don't make an issue of this. He'll
get the idea sooner or later, if he has a chance to see his
father and other boys" (emphasis added, 192). Presumably,
if the son does not have a male to imitate, however, he
will continue indefinitely to urinate in a seated
position— just like a girl. Up until the time when the
adult first makes a scene over seated urination, of course,
the boy remains entirely innocent of any of the cultural
taboos against girlishness or homosexuality. Armed with
Spock's text, however, the adult is authorized by the
doctor to impose the adult preoccupation with manly
heterosexuality onto the child's world, perhaps shaming the
child into the socialization process.
In American culture, heterosexuality has been
consistently privileged, but the dread of homosexuality
intensifies in certain historical periods such as the late
1940s and 1950s. Why particularly after World War II was
homophobia so prominently expressed (albeit in repressed
forms) in the culture? One answer seems to be that
masculinity and its privileges seemed on the verge of being
undermined. It was not all masculinities, of course, but
hegemonic masculinity especially that appeared to be in
trouble. The group of men that felt most threatened by a
possible shifting of the status quo was primarily middle
class, white, and heterosexual. When masculinity is under
fire, it seems the possible cultural reactions to regain
the place of hegemonic masculine power are misogyny,
homophobia, or, in many cases, since they are at root
related, both. In Gender and Power (1987), Robert Connell
has described hegemonic masculinity as "always constructed
in relation to various subordinated masculinities as well
as in relation to women" (183). In Between Men (1985), Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that the oppression of homosexual
and effeminate males is closely related to the oppression
of women (20). Thus, the oppression of women and the
oppression of non-heterosexual men have the same root and
both are in response to threats to the power of hegemonic
masculinity.
Spock/s text privileges males over females and
denigrates homosexuality, both which were entirely
congruent with cultural responses of the time. Spock might
have taken as his main concern from Freud any number of
concepts besides the fragility of masculine development,
but he drew from Freud what was the primary concern of his
own culture at that historical moment: insecure
masculinity. The anxiety at the end of the war about
anything homosexual or feminine influenced Spock's readings
of Freud's writings. Where Spock departs from Freud, such
as warning of the feminizing effect of the overprotective
mother, he ends up siding with the popular myths of his
time. Spock's work must be seen in its historical context
in order to be able to understand its preoccupation with
masculine heterosexual failure. In the end, this
preoccupation must be seen as participating in the
maintenance of masculine power.
Spock's specific medium was a text about childraising,
a very influential contribution to the culture. Spock can
be credited with fostering a new awareness of the
psychological aspects of child development, and he went a
long way toward reassuring parents that there was much they
intuitively already knew about childraising. Through
Spock, however, child psychology entered mass culture by
raising the specter of masculine 'abnormality' and
heterosexual failure. So much reassurance, especially
about male children, paradoxically sent a double message:
99
there must be a lot to worry about. While girls'
development merited little concern, growing from boyhood to
manhood came to be seen as a tenuous proposition.
Spock's view of tenuous male development, wittingly or
not, functions to aid males in maintaining the national
spotlight. While girls and women could be ignored by the
culture because their biology assured their femininity,
boys and men, on the other hand, required more of the
culture's attention and resources. During a period of
intense social upheaval when changes in the social
construction of masculinity and femininity seemed real
possibilities, hegemonic masculinity managed to command a
disproportionate share of the culture's attention— just by
appearing insecure.
Penis envy, it has been pointed out, can be seen as a
childhood drama about masculine power. Not dissimilarly,
postwar anxiety about masculinity had the effect of
reconsolidating hegemonic male power. This agentless
reestablishing of power was disguised beneath a
disingenuous cloak of apparent weakness and masculine
insecurity. Because the issue of identity appears to be
only a individual issue, the larger pattern that identity
issues played in reenforcing cultural attention on men was
obscured; male insecurity appears to concern not issues of
power, but mere issues of gender, further obscuring that a
play for power was involved. The net effect was that
dominant males, under the guise of 'falling apart,' without
apparently conspiring to do so, commanded the cultural
resources and attention that might otherwise have been
available to women or marginalized masculinities. The
preoccupation with manliness contributed to the downplaying
of minority concerns, at least until toward the end of the
fifties. Spock unwittingly sided with the apparently
'endangered' masculine male, but without ever seeming to
have taken sides. Spock's text— with its preoccupation
with male effeminacy and the underlying issue of
homosexuality— is representative of postwar texts and their
treatment of masculinity. That this text sold more than
any other is further evidence that it tapped into
widespread cultural fears about men displaced onto concerns
about male children. That it appeared in paperback was
central to the book's success and influence. The themes of
the postwar rise of the paperback and the postwar fear of
unmanliness come together in this one text, which can
therefore serve as a touchstone as we investigate others.
101
Chapter Two Endnotes
1. The "war generation" is a useful label from William
O'Neill's American High (1986).
2. In "Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity" in Male
Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), Kaja Silverman explores
the preoccupation with male lack in three 1940's films and
how the war broke apart the dominant (phallic) fiction of
the masculine version of social reality. My purpose is
less to apply the psychoanalytic theory of castration
anxiety to men of a historical period— although such
analysis seems valid— as to explore how postwar male
anxiety about masculinity and sexuality in more general
terms can be traced in one form of the popular press. For
a detailed cultural/psychoanalytic analysis of the 1940s,
Silverman is invaluable. She writes "the forces of
destruction and dissolution [of World War II] got out of
the control of those attempting to orchestrate the war, and
served to annihilate less the enemy than the positivities
of the masculine 'self'" (64-65). This claim helps
corroborate my contention that postwar masculinity was
being undermined. I claim further, however, that such a
'crisis' may have been merely a convenient way to refocus
cultural attention on the problem of propping up male power
at a time of great shifts in society when other minority
groups and women might otherwise have been empowered
sooner.
3. Kaja Silverman complicates this issue of the feminine
and homosexuality by deriving from Freud three models of
male homosexuality.
4. Instant books later became less common not because they
were "forgotten," as has been claimed, but partly because
the favorable mass postwar audience was no longer as
predictable after the fifties; instant books succeeded not
just because of their timeliness but also because they
targeted a large, predictable audience conveniently and
abundantly supplied by the returning G.I.s.
5. From this quotation we see that Spock interpreted his
experience with adults through his interest in children.
6. The 31 references to boys; pages 18, 191-2, 238, 241-3,
262, 285-7, 289, 290, 294, 295-6, 309, 311-2, 326-9, 344-6,
413, 467, 468, 4 69, 473. The 19 references to girls; pages
152, 243, 262, 268, 280, 285-6, 294-6, 311, 319, 323-5,
412, 414-5.
102
7. Two decades after Babv and Child Care. Spock was asked
by Pocket Books to write an advice book for and about
teens, A Teenager7s Guide to Life and Love, but because it
was morally too conservative it never enjoyed anywhere near
the popularity of his first book or of Dr. Evelyn Duvall's
book.
103
CHAPTER THREE
Men's Worst Fears:
Exploring the Feminine and Hypermasculine
in Mickey Spillane
There's something a woman does without
words that makes a man feel like a man.
— Mickey Spillane,
One Lonely Night (1951)
[M]asculinity is essentially a
structure of power, and therefore for
many as much a source of anxiety as
security. . . .
— Lynne Segal,
Slow Motion (1990)
Despite a shoring up of masculine confidence during
World War II, previously eroded because of the Depression,
with the armistice men faced a transformed postwar economy
with inflation, increased educational requirements, and the
rise of large corporations, offering them opportunities but
also threatening their roles. Women had become more
independent because they had either successfully managed
households alone during the war or had assumed jobs vacated
104
by men— or both. World War II marked not only an increase
of women in employment, but especially the unprecedented
entrance of women into well-paid industrial jobs (Anderson
106); the physical and mental ability to perform such
'masculine' jobs could no longer be claimed to be
exclusively male. With men's loss of the
battlefield--their built-in proving ground for
masculinity— and with the altered domestic and occupational
landscape, new avenues quickly emerged for exploring and
affirming manliness, many of these in popular culture, and,
of particular note, the lurid mass paperback novel.
Issues of masculinity in popular texts are being
increasingly taken into account by scholars. Peter Filene
frequently cites popular culture in his examination of
men's issues. James Riemer claims that a rereading of
American literature from the perspective offered by men's
studies allows us to trace the historical variances of
masculinity.
Harry Brod lists what might emerge as men's studies
canonical literature, including a preponderance of works
from the fifties, such as William Whyte's The Organization
Man. C. Wright Mills's White Collar, and Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman. Many texts previously dismissed by
scholars as escapist pulp are now being re-examined in
light of recent scholarship in men's studies and gender
105
studies to reveal a playing out in mass culture of men's
psychic concerns. From this new critical perspective, I
claim that a popular culture industry such as mass
paperback publishing, at least as it first emerged after
the war, can now be seen to have been influenced by postwar
issues of masculinity. Because these cultural objects were
consumed and discarded during a definable historical period
often of only a few years, and especially because most of
these titles (Spillane excluded) did not even remain in
print for more than a short time, issues of masculinity can
be examined in their detailed and time-specific context.
The modern mass paperback industry began with the
founding of Pocket Books in 19 39, but the paperback's real
impact was not felt until right after the war with the
removal of government wartime paper rationing. The free
wartime distribution to G.I.s of the Armed Services
Editions created one of the paperback's first, largest, and
most influential postwar audiences: male veterans. As a
primary target audience, these men found their foremost
personal concerns becoming themes for the most successful
paperbacks, thereby shaping how the postwar paperback
industry evolved.
Right after the war, issues of masculinity were more
directly addressed in paperback than in other media, partly
because paperbacks were increasingly becoming so ephemeral.
After the war, because of continuing paper shortages, paper
manufacturers used ground-wood pulp, resulting in paper so
acidic it became embrittled and disintegrated in a
relatively short time. Even when paperbacks were brand
new, a few readings were usually sufficient to break the
unsewn binding. The paperback, "as disposable as a
Kleenex" (O'Brien 47), was predisposed to becoming a
vehicle for exploring topical concerns about masculinity.
The paperback's very impermanence allowed a degree of
freedom of exploration. Ephemeral paperbacks did not run
into the demand for literary standards by hardback
reviewers or the demand for constraint by the film boards.
However sleazy the portrayals, the evidence of the furtive
voyeurisms elicited by the paperbacks would soon be
destroyed by handling or acid degradation. The covers
acted to protect readers from material not suited to their
tastes. The colorful and increasingly explicit paperback
cover art announced the work's specific intended masculine
audience, warning away those offended by the frankness that
the postwar male reader soon came to expect. The lurid
scenes of violence and sex in postwar paperback cover art
attracted its appropriate audience with an immediacy that
radio and film could not. Until 1952, paperbacks were
allowed to play out male fantasies with a freedom no other
medium could approach:
107
the returning GIs of the 194 0s craved stronger
stuff than Betty Grable pinups. . . With all the
energy of an industry undergoing rapid
development, the paperbacks— free of the
constraints that hampered movies and
radio— resolutely pushed back the limits.
(O'Brien 38)
The boundaries were eventually exceeded to the extent that
Congress initiated an investigation of the paperback and
lurid paperback covers in 1952 (discussed in Chapter 4).
Literary analysis of these texts cannot be attempted
without first noting their most immediate context, the
advertising that the text came wrapped in, which helped
define the work's importance to a man's sense of masculine
identity. Cover art is an important aspect of the
paperback as a medium overall, but especially concerning
its relationship to masculine issues. In examining the
paperback medium, we must understand how cover art
contributed both to the meaning of the text and to the
product's value for the male reader. From 194 5 to 1952
especially, sensationalist paperback cover art depicting
sex and violence flourished. In addition to helping male
readers select their books, these images also served to
reassure male readers and those around them of their own
interest in manly topics. Such art also affected how the
buyer approached the reading of the text. Influenced by
the lurid suggestiveness of the cover, the consumer
approached and read the text quite differently than if the
108
same text had been published in hardcover. Because of the
cover, the audience read the text with an eye for its
heterosexual encounters and for confirmations of the hero's
manliness as proved through sex and violence. Since many
covers falsified the book's content, readers tended to find
fewer of those (hetero)sexual encounters than they had been
led to expect by the cover, but they would still tend to
seek these out while reading the text.
Lou Kimmel was the artist who illustrated Mickey
Spillane's paperbacks. Kimmel was a skilled, experienced,
and well-trained artist who lists Andrew Wyeth as one of
his most important influences (Schreuders 134). Kimmel
worked for most of the paperback publishers and for
magazines such as Woman's Day and The Saturday Evening
Post. His training and experience taught Kimmel how to
adjust his style to the needs of the market. As soon as he
arrived at Signet, Kimmel adopted the "dark and brooding"
Signet paperback look that lent itself to depictions of
troubled masculinity. In addition, Kimmel seemed to
understand that an exploration of hypermasculinity would
require a certain crudeness in its representation. Kimmel
already had experience with portraying violent all-male
scenes, since much of his career was spent illustrating
gun-play scenes for westerns, but in approaching the
Spillane covers, Kimmel varied his motifs significantly,
109
making instead violent eroticism the central theme of every
one of his illustrations for Spillane. On most of his
covers for Spillane, Kimmel featured a woman in the act of
undressing and a crudely-drawn man with his face partially
obscured staring (along with the buyer) at the woman.
Although the drawings were crude, Kimmel reserved his
clearest and most realistic detail for the half-dressed
woman, while he depicted the man in a cartoonish and
misshapen manner. The setting for these characters was
often barely suggested or badly drawn. Because of his
training, we know that Kimmel created this rough look not
from inability but from choice. The crudeness, especially
of the male, corresponds to the hidden and ill-defined
voyeuristic position occupied by both the reader and the
figure with whom he was encouraged to identify, the shadowy
protagonist. The women Kimmel depicted are the object of
the male gaze; they show emotion, vulnerability, and
exposed flesh, and range in pose from a sexual come-on to
limp open-mouthed unconsciousness. When men's faces are
visible at all, they are wooden-faced: "the man is usually
a passive observer. . . ." (O'Brien 39). The male figures
always remain in shadows and give away nothing.
One blatant example of such cover art voyeurism seems
almost to tease the buyer into entering a peep show. On
the cover for One Lonely Night. Spillane's fourth novel,
110
the female figure, just as the text describes her, is
completely undressed and is shown limply hanging from her
bound wrists. The cover coyly conceals the woman's frontal
nudity from the reader by turning the woman's back to the
viewer, but the flesh that is concealed is promised to the
buyer if he can put himself in the protagonist's place.
The male figure on the cover, presumably Spillane's
protagonist, Mike Hammer, is depicted entering the alley
(or roughly-drawn room) through a doorway directly facing
the woman's nude body. This gives the "observer" on the
cover a full view of the nakedness denied the buyer. The
reader, accustomed to identifying with Hammer, seems to be
promised the full view through Hammer's eyes that the cover
denies, but only if he will buy the book, identify with
this character, and peek at the woman through the window
provided by the text.
Closely examining covers such as those for Spillane's
novels reveals how they may have functioned for the reader
in terms of his fears about masculinity. Barbara
Ehrenreich in The Hearts of Men has put forth a view of
commercialized sexuality which might profitably be applied
to paperbacks. The immediate success of Playboy magazine
in 1954 was frequently explained by the fact that 'sex
sells,' but Ehrenreich claims that "the critics have
misunderstood Playboy's historical role. ..." (51).
Ill
Another more complex dynamic may have been at work as well.
Ehrenreich establishes that, in the postwar period, males
who remained unmarried too long were pressured to marry by
being called, not only rebellious, but latently homosexual.
With the advent of Plavbov. Ehrenreich argues, female
nakedness served as proof that unmarried men were not
’ ’failed heterosexual[s]” (26). Plavbov. beyond selling men
nude female images, actually functioned in the culture to
separate prolonged bachelorhood from the automatic innuendo
of homosexuality.
This approach gives us further insight into Kimmel's
selection of scenes from Spillane's texts. Although,
unlike the readership of Playboy, Spillane's audience may
not have been predominantly bachelors, readers attracted to
a protagonist as insecure about his masculinity as Mike
Hammer would likely welcome any evidence to themselves or
others of their own unassailable heterosexual manliness.
The promise in each of Spillane's covers of
partially-clothed women might be seen to serve the same
function as the centerfolds that Ehrenreich analyzes. The
popularity of Spillane's novels was not driven only by
salaciousness but also by the general insecurity many men
felt after the war: "The real message was not eroticism"
(Ehrenreich 51), but masculine reassurance; to prove these
men were heterosexual, "the breasts and bottoms were
necessary" (51); "the Marilyn Monroe centerfold, . . let
you know there was nothing queer. . . ." (51). Likewise,
the paperback cover reassured the buyer, whatever his
masculine insecurities, that he was "still within the
bounds of heterosexuality" (51). Lurid paperback cover art
could help dismiss any question about the reader's full
heterosexuality. Like the sex, the sadistic element in
Spillane's covers and texts may have been not only a
reflection of actual sadistic tendencies, but also the
intersection of two physical proofs of
masculinity— violence and sex. The combination of violence
and half-dressed women was not just sadistic but comprised
in one image two accepted ways of proving manliness, and
therefore provided men the quickest and most complete route
to a denial of heterosexual failure. These sensational
paperback covers were proof to a man's own insecure ego and
to others that, rather than being homosexual, he was "even
compulsively heterosexual" (Ehrenreich 50). To seventeen
million men in a time of great masculine insecurity, this
alone was obviously worth a quarter.
The covers did not solely reassure, however, since one
of men's worst fears, the deadly female, is often portrayed
there. If her state of undress assured the reader of his
own heterosexuality, her frequently threatening posture and
weapon aggravated other insecurities. If the covers served
113
as alibis for insecure males, at the same time the artwork
reflected their preoccupation with one of the perceived
sources of emasculation, the threat of the feminine. Cover
art of these paperback novels repeatedly uses this theme of
the perceived threat of women. Covers only selectively
represented the texts they were supposed to be depicting,
and usually highlight the one scene from each book in which
a woman is either in danger, or, more often, actually
posing a danger to a man; such scenes from the text are
grossly over-represented on covers. Male encounters with
males, on the other hand, though far more common in the
text, are never depicted by Kimmel on Spillane7s covers,
because, to make the sale, danger was coupled with the
threatening presence of a woman, man's worst fear. On the
cover of Kiss Me Deadly. Spillane7s seventh novel, the
woman, in the act of disrobing, holds a gun pointed at the
male figure (Spillane 1952 cover). Here, this male fear,
being played out in fantasy7s extreme, shows the man
crawling forward toward the threatening woman on his hands
and knees, hurt and begging for his life. One critic is
surprised: "A final and surprisingly frequent motif is that
of a woman holding a gun, usually. . . to threaten a
man. . ." (07Brien 39). Without the understanding provided
by recent studies in masculinity, such a motif tends to
mystify.1
Like paperback cover art in general, our understanding
of the novels of Mickey Spillane also benefits from a
rereading through the lens of masculinity. Spillane
actually got his start in slick magazines, then moved to
pulp, and finally wrote for comic books such as Captain
Marvell, Captain America, and Plastic Man (Van Dover 93),
grounding him solidly in the mainstream of the largest mass
audiences of popular culture. As evidenced by his novels'
sales figures, Spillane clearly knew his audience and its
concerns; by 1953, only six years into the Spillane
phenomenon, Signet had sold seventeen million copies of his
first six titles. Yet these sales figures represent only a
portion of Spillane's total readership, since his books
were among the most frequently borrowed and passed around;
"Throughout the fifties, Signet editions of Mickey Spillane
passed from hand to hand in every army barracks, college
dormitory, and. . . locker room in the country" (Bonn
Traffic 2 05). These institutions— barracks, dorms, and
locker rooms— correspond exactly to the population that was
most attracted to Spillane: all-male groups with shared
concerns about masculinity and fears of emasculation, and
to a large extent composed of war veterans.
It is no coincidence that Spillane's protagonist is
himself a World War II veteran: "With their M-ls, the GIs
had conquered the definite evi>s of the world. . . [I]n
civilian life, they eagerly identified with the tough, ugly
GI who returned. . . to conquer definite evils [at home]"
(Van Dover 139). Veterans identified not only with
Hammer's toughness, however, but also with his difficulty
and insecurity in readjusting to non-military life. As a
veteran trying his best to readjust to the stresses of
being manly in peacetime, Mike Hammer quintessentially
represented the concerns and insecurities of eleven million
returned G.I.s. The nation perceived that men had become
more violent since going through battle— a condition called
'war neurosis'— an assumption that the best soldiers might
make the worst civilians. Kaja Silverman notes that the
apocalyptic violence of war, still visible in the veteran
in both his scars and his war-making skills, are the
"traces of a force totally incompatible with postwar
America" (69); the veteran has been "contaminated" by a
force at odds with the domesticity Americans sought (74).
In line with this general perception, Spillane shows
Hammer's hard, violent edge as deriving from experiences in
the war where "it got to be fun" (Spillane Night 160).
Hammer is not only violent, however; he also shares with
other veterans a sense of masculine insecurity, which, far
from being derided by readers, instead only increased his
appeal.
116
At the forefront of the insecurities shared by
Spillane, his readers, and the nation in general was
whether the American male since the war had become soft,
less solid, less manly. In One Lonely Night. Hammer
explains a string of murders by Communists thus: "[These
things] happen because we're soft" (Spillane Night 93). In
the Cold War, the softness of America's men was tantamount
to a matter of national security; Hammer declares that
Communists were bold enough to infiltrate the U.S. only
because "they never thought that there were people like me
in this country. They figure us all to be soft as horse
manure. . . ." (171). As Hammer crushes the Communist
infiltrators throat, he laughs and predicts the Kremlin
will have to think twice next time (174-76).
Re-examined in the light of postwar masculinity
issues, Spillane's works appear to be more than mere
escapist fantasies? they did not sell millions of copies
merely because they were sensationalist. With increased
anxiety about masculinity, male readers found these books
personally relevant. Anxiety might or might not be reduced
by reading fantasies of hypermasculinity, but certainly
readers could identify with this confused male veteran
struggling to fit back into peacetime society, thereby
validating their own experiences. Stephen Whitfield in The
Culture and the Cold War dismisses Spillane's importance
117
because he is "at the murkier edges of popular sensibility"
(34), meaning that Spillane is not particularly relevant.
I argue, however, that, seen in this new light as capturing
the essence of men's concerns about themselves, Spillane is
not at the "edges" but actually in the mainstream of
popular sensibility.
Spillane, is the all-time bestseller in the detective
genre. I. the Jury is the eighteenth best-selling book in
America. But what of Spillane's antecedents and the
treatment of masculinity in those works? Before the rise
of the paperback, in the 1920s and 193 0s, other authors,
especially Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, were
re-establishing and refining the genre and its conventions.
Raymond Chandler himself has identified two strands of the
modern detective novel, the puzzle tradition, an example
being Arthur Conan Doyle, and the "realist tradition," an
example being himself. Critic Richard Slotkin insists that
the detective novel's realism is a "hard-boiled realism,"
which "embodies a view of social life from the perspective
of the underworld" (91). This realist strand of the genre
de-emphasizes the Sherlock-like intellectual intricacies in
favor of an exploration of a realistic social environment.
What puzzle remains to be solved is "complicated. . . by
the cross-conflicts born of family psychology, urban life,
social divisions. . . and power politics at both the street
and board room level'1 (91) . Included in the "power
politics" that complicate the focus of these works are not
only class politics, but also, some would argue, gender
politics, the social struggle of defining masculinity and
femininity in a teeming, decaying, class-conscious urban
social environment. Set in the inner city, the realist
strand of the detective genre lowered the private eye to
the class of people he dealt with daily. British authors
had tended to create higher class crime-solvers such as
Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes. American detectives
seemed more closely associated with the underworld,
although Pinkerton agents, both in reality and in fiction,
were supposed to be of high moral character. In general,
however, the modern American private eye formed alliances
with the criminal class that tended, with exceptions, to
lump him (or occasionally her) with that class. Dashiell
Hammett, once a Pinkerton agent himself, borrowed the
"vaguely populist style and ethic of the frontier
outlaw-hero," reversing the Pinkerton scenario in order to
"restore justice from the bottom up" (Slotkin 99). In The
Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade is treated much like a criminal
by the police, while he ends up helping to enforce the law.
Yet in Hammett there is still a moral soundness that in his
imitators by the end of World War II is scarcely present.
Leslie Fiedler calls Sam Spade an "honest proletarian" and
119
describes the private eye as "the cowboy adapted to life on
the city streets, the embodiment of innocence moving
untouched through universal guilt" (499). Yet Fiedler
credits the earlier detectives with this "innocence" more
than he does their descendants. Fiedler traces the urban
mystery story from Hemingway "via Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler to Mickey Spillane," whose style Fiedler
calls "one of the great artificial styles of our time, the
sophisticated counterfeit of simplicity turned cliche"
(499). Various critics seem to find a decay in the genre
itself, as if in the form's (de)evolution, the corruption
of the city had begun to infect the "heroes"— a word now
used only in quotes (Knight 26). The pre-World War II
"tough guys" by the end of the war had turned "supertough,
that is, inclined to gratuitous violence. . . By now the
sleuth is no better than the murderer he is chasing. He is
simply covering the opposite job" (Tani 25).
In this view, Spillane is either a corruption of or
the logical extension of the detective genre. Fiedler uses
the word "descended" to describe the "long way from Sam
Spade to Mike Hammer" (499). This descent is not a descent
in popularity; Spillane commands the largest audience of
any author. Despite Fiedler's calling Spillane's books
"cruder" (499), his claiming that they have lost the
"righteous middlebrow audience" (500), appealing instead
only to the "lower-middlebrow" (499), must the descent
necessarily be seen as a devaluing? Mike Hammer seems
anxious to locate himself somewhere beneath the middle
level of American sensibility, rejecting as too esoteric
what Pat Chambers, his wartime buddy turned professional
police officer, describes as the modern method of crime
detection: "we have every scientific facility at our
disposal and. . . [wje're not short on brains either" (Jury
11). Hammer juxtaposes his own "practical" (i.e. working
class) approach to this elite corps of brainy
professionals: "cops can't break a man's arm to make him
talk. . . My staff is strictly ex officio, but very
practical" (11). The "descent" of the genre is not
necessarily one of social class, as fictional private eyes
from various decades have sprung from the milieu in which
they practice their profession. Mike Hammer does, however,
represent the antithesis of the white collar worker.
Rejecting Pat Chamber's organization and every other
institution, Hammer becomes the "anti-organization man"
(Van Dover 97). Class may indeed become more of an issue
in Spillane, especially as the class issue is expressed in
relation to the postwar rise of the large bureaucratic
corporation and government institution. In the context of
the organization, class issues intersect in important ways
with gender issues: "Mike Hammer assures his readers that a
121
triumphant system need not necessarily overwhelm a man"
(Van Dover 92). Hammer's rejection of Pat's organization
and its methods is an important attempt to preserve
masculinity and its independence from the organizational
machine.
The detective genre from its inception, especially as
it took root in America, has dealt not only with issues of
class, but also with issues of gender. The display of
masculine physical and intellectual prowess and its
contrast with various forms of femininity characterize the
genre. But issues of masculinity in Spillane, however much
they follow a tradition, are greatly intensified. The
"descent" described might well be the descent of
masculinity.
As mentioned, issues of masculinity do not begin ob
ovo with Spillane but are present in important ways in his
predecessors too. Some critics discuss the "sexual anxiety
[in] Chandler" (Knight 158), his propensity to describe
effeminate men in "absorbing detail," and the curious
trustworthiness only of "reduced sex-drive" women (Knight
157). Even before Spillane, some characters in the
detective genre exhibited what has been called "nervous
masculinity" (Knight 163). The sexuality of some male
figures is subdued, even reluctant. Knight sums up in two
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words Chandler's hero's "disinclination to share his
sexuality" (161): "private dick" (160).
Spillane takes "disinclination" another giant step
further, however. Mike Hammer becomes extremely agitated
when presented with sexual opportunities. At times he
acquiesces to a sexual invitation, but less often than many
of his readers may believe he does. More often he rejects
sexual union: "Her breasts were pulsating with passion. . .
I pushed her away and picked up my hat. . . 'Please,
Mike.' 'No.'" (Jury 130). Sexual union is "too much" for
a man like Hammer: "I tasted the hunger in her until the
fury of it was too much and I let her go" (Kiss 99). Far
more often, Hammer's ultimate union with women comes
through blasting them with his revolver— as Fiedler puts
it, "making the only penetration possible to the cripple of
love" (348) .
If issues of class can be found throughout the lineage
of the detective genre, but are found in Spillane in new
ways having to do with the expansion of the white collar
class after World War II, the same can be said about issues
of masculinity, which can be found in various authors
before World War II, especially in Chandler, but which take
on new dimensions after the war in the novels of Spillane.
In Spillane especially, these two issues of class and
masculinity intersect, as Hammer resists becoming part of
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any emasculating organization like the other "neutered
organization men who do 'obey the rule'1 1 (Van Dover 105).
These organization men, according to one of Hammer's
not-quite lovers, are "such little men. . .; well, when you
constantly see men with their masculinity gone. . . you get
so you actually search for a real man" (Jury 56).
"Thanks," Hammer replies, knowing he is the "real man"
being referred to, because, instead of compromising his
masculinity in order to conform to an organization, he can
"make life obey the rules he set down" (Jury 56).
Because of increased anxiety about masculinity after
World War II, Spillane's novels show both a continuity in
their treatment of masculinity issues and a qualitative
difference from his predecessors. Many postwar readers
anxious about their own masculinity sought in Spillane
reassurances. Some critics claim that one of the
attractions of the detective novel is not so much escape
from the "banalities" of daily life but from its moral
uncertainty. The genre's "unequivocal judgment of action"
provides an "escape from ambiguity," making reassurance the
genre's "primary function" (Van Dover 9).
But Hammer's relationship to moral rectitude is
problematic. Although he seeks out killers, he frequently
beats or kills those who later prove to be innocent:
"You're a killer, Mike," one woman concludes. "You're
4
124
dirty, nasty and you don't care how you do it. . .1 1 (Kiss
101) . In One Lonely Nicrht. with a "loathing louder than
words," a judge declares Hammer to be an unrepentant
"murderer by definition" (6). Hammer seems depressed by
this pronouncement and admits to himself that in the war he
had "gotten a taste of death and found it [so] palatable"
that he could "never again eat the fruits of normal
civilization" (6). Often foregrounding moral ambiguity
despite the recurrent ritual cleansing in showers of
bullets of the city streets, Spillane's novels seem to
reassure readers, but somewhat differently. If the
detective genre as a whole provides readers unambiguous
moral reassurance, the genre in Spillane's hands might
instead be said to function to provide readers with mostly
unambiguous gender reassurance.
Issues of class and gender are heightened upon the
veterans' return to an altered domestic landscape. Many
veterans could identify with Hammer's insecurity about
women who took so many of men's jobs while they were away.
In Vengeance Is Mine. Hammer is stripped by the D.A. of two
kingpins of his masculinity, his private investigator's
license (his job) and his gun (his phallic symbol of
power). To avoid closing his doors, he is forced to have
his gun-toting secretary, Velda, take over his business.
But he makes uneasy jokes about it: "Maybe she was out
hiring a sign-painter to change the name on the door" (22).
He admits to her that he is "afraid of that rod you use for
ballast in your handbag" (17). That Spillane would depict
such a scenario reveals that uncertain masculinity was a
central topic of these novels. Velda has usurped the
symbols of masculinity, and Hammer feels increasingly
insecure. As a result, he has a dream that he is back in
the war in a foxhole, but he can't find his rifle (28).
However much readers find they can identify with this
sequence of extreme male insecurity, at some point it
becomes too anxiety producing, too feminizing, and a page
or so of hypermasculine display is needed to demonstrate
that Hammer is not too soft. But his personal insecurity
about his unemployment is made even more explicit: while
spending the night with Connie, one of the murder suspects,
he asks her why, when she could have "ten other guys," she
would make "a pass at a guy who hasn't even got a job"
(40). Violence and sex are the quickest antidotes to
emasculation. Connie slugs Hammer so he bleeds and says
that unlike him, "ten other guys wouldn't make one man put
together" (41). She strips, he smacks her "across the
mouth as hard as I could," and then they have sex; perhaps
because of Connie's violent approach, perhaps because of
his insecurity about being unemployed, Hammer consents to
going all the way. Hammer's masculine insecurities are
126
first explored and then his manhood is quickly
re-established.
Consistently, there is this curious contradiction in
Spillane: his works exhibit both an unmistakable uneasiness
about manhood and, in the form of hypermasculinity, a
violent denial that any such problem exists. The
co-existence and alternation of the uncertainty and the
denial of uncertainty is important to analyze. That these
contradictory impulses co-exist illustrates one of the ways
narrative tends to deal with issues of emasculation and
masculinity, by including all of the contradictory messages
about masculinity without resolving them. The
hypermasculine and intense male insecurity could co-exist
side by side in such texts without any apparent objection
by the reader.
It is, of course, not at all new to claim that
Spillane7s characters, principally Hammer, used
hypermasculinity to overcompensate for feelings of
masculine inadequacy. Spillane's own contemporary, Theodor
Adorno, addressed this issue in his 1950 The Authoritarian
Personality, which concluded that hypermasculinity was a
male's defense against underlying passivity and femininity
(Adorno 476). Even Spillane's publisher was aware of
Hammer's fear of his underlying femininity; he describes
Hammer as an "over-compensated effeminate character" and
127
desires that the next detective fiction character that he
signs "must be absolutely certain of his identification
with the male role" (Bonn Traffic 90).
Although many critics have commented on Hammer's
hypermasculinity as compensation for an underlying
insecurity, few have investigated the pattern in Spillane's
texts of alternation between insecurity and
hypermasculinity. It is not just hypermasculinity but
instead the repeated and periodic alternation in Spillane's
texts between fears of male emasculation and the
compensatory explosions of masculine sex and violence that
most characterized the masculine content of Spillane's
works, a formula that set Spillane's works apart from
others of the same genre.
But while Rambo-like displays of hypermasculinity can
be intuitively understood to reassure and therefore appeal
to the insecure male, what could it be about explorations
of male weaknesses that attract such readers? The
insecurities about manliness that men felt after the war
had no outlet through which to be explored or expressed.
Masculine weakness was of national concern, but individual
males felt it was forbidden to discuss. They needed
another forum in which to examine their fear of
emasculation. To speak about male weakness was taboo, but
to read about it in a private, impersonal format which was
128
clearly heterosexual, even hyper-heterosexual, was the only
safe place for men to examine their own worst fears. In
such a culturally acceptable vehicle as a Spillane
paperback, with its compulsively heterosexual covers, even
the representation of a he-man crying was possible. For
instance, when Hammer's secretary has been tied up,
stripped, and beaten, Hammer shows a moment of male
vulnerability: "I cut her down carefully, dressed her,
cradled her in my arms like a baby and knew that I was
crying. Me. I could still do that" (Spillane Night 166).
The representation of a man like Hammer weeping was
possible only because of his hypermasculine and often
violent nature. In this form, even the taboo on men's
tears was possible to contemplate. The key to Spillane is
that overt hypermasculinity makes it permissible to view
even the most insecure and soft masculinities.
The greatest insecurity for men always involves some
aspect of the feminine. Crying is a weakness in men
because it is seen as 'feminine,' and men's worst fears are
always of being threatened by the feminine or of becoming
feminine. In fact, Mike Hammer's masculinity is usually
called into question only in his dealings with women. Dana
Polan identifies one of the chief social problems dealt
with in narratives of the forties as "the perceived threat
of femininity in masculine postwar America" (12). In
129
Polan's view, film and literature create imaginary
solutions to such problems. For him, such solutions
represent an "ideological strategy" (12), affirming the
political aspect of fantasy. Polan's identifying the
"threat" of femininity as one of the social moment's chief
concerns tends not only to support this study's premise
that male insecurity was a key issue of this time period,
but also to alert us to the significance of the feminine in
these paperbacks. In Spillane, men are frequently
represented as feeling threatened by women, a scenario
which almost always alternates with men then exhibiting
hypermasculine aggression. Dana Polan has noted the
alternation in Spillane's texts of "brutish[ness]" with an
"intense fear of femininity" (14). These two extremes
represent the two postwar impulses of Polan's 1986 title,
Power and Paranoia. But this doesn't, I believe, explain
the whole story behind this pattern of alternation in
Spillane.
Such patterns always begin with male insecurity,
especially that caused by fear of women. In one scene in
One Lonely Night. Hammer makes a proposal of marriage to
his secretary, Velda: "My fingers felt big and clumsy when
I took [the ring] out and slipped it over her finger"
(Spillane 104). No matter how big and strong a man is,
women are still threatening. In this same scene Hammer
describes his fiancee as deadly: "a great big, luxurious
cat leaning against the desk. . . . [with] a hidden body of
smooth skin that covered a wealth of rippling, deadly
muscles that were poised for the kill. The desk light made
her teeth an even row of merciless ivory, ready to rip and
tear" (104). This male weakness must then alternate with
displays of strength in order to reassure the reader. The
compensatory cure for such a fear is, of course, the
unprovoked and excessive use of force. The threat posed by
a "merciless" woman to a man's masculinity seems best
countered with "crushing" physicality; at once Hammer
pitches forceful woo by kissing Velda's "warm mouth with
full, ripe lips that burned into my soul as they fused with
mine. I tasted the love she offered and gave it back with
all I had to give, crushing her until her breath came in
short, quick jerks" (104). It remains ambiguous in the
text whether Velda's ragged breathing is meant to represent
near suffocation from Hammer cruelly "crushing her" or
instead is due to sexual arousal from Hammer's violent
lovemaking. Perhaps both interpretations are supposed to
be compatible: the image of the male suddenly overpowering
any woman he feels threatened by— physically and
sexually— is common in Spillane's novels. Physically, even
sadistically, dominating the perceived threat posed by a
woman temporarily empowers Hammer.
131
The pattern of alternation emerges in all of
Spillane's novels. One moment Mike Hammer feels unsure of
himself— once again, in the face of the feminine, and, in
compensation, the next he is talking tougher than ever.
In Spillane's 1947 I. the Jury, Hammer must face a
woman psychiatrist named Charlotte Manning; her profession
is threatening to his male status, and her last name—
"Manning"— seems to indicate her ability to unman Hammer.
A female psychiatrist epitomizes the usurpation of the male
role. In studying 700 feature films of the time, Dana
Polan rarely found a female psychoanalyst (183). But in
paperback, especially in Spillane, this figure naturally
appears because she represents Hammer's two worst fears;
she is a person who not only can psychoanalyze his psyche
and uncover all of his repressed fears and weaknesses, but
also, as a woman, is, able with her sexuality to tempts
"Hammer to go all the way and reveal what he is made of"
(Polan 242). Despite Hammer's pose of "forceful male
sexuality," he is terrified of the self-revelation involved
in intercourse, preferring to desire women from a distance,
the voyeuristic "safe gaze" (Polan 242) . This voyeuristic
"observer" position parallels the reader's; the paperback,
with its cover art as spectacle, allows one to look but not
touch, increasing desire, but turning it into, in Polan's
132
word, an "asexual" desire (302), seeking to avoid any
actual physical contact.
At one point in I. the Jury, Hammer's worst fears are
about to be realized. Charlotte Manning begins to probe
Hammer's psyche while also aggressively offering him her
body. Despite his outward bravado at being propositioned
by a woman, Hammer's inward thoughts reveal another story:
"I felt like a school kid" (95). A woman with higher
professional status than himself first not only usurps a
masculine occupation but then also usurps the man's role as
sexual initiator. Hammer no longer feels like a man, but
like a kid; the male reader who is anxious about his own
masculine status can easily identify. To explore men's
worst fears for too long, however, though perhaps
fascinating, is overly threatening to the reader. Only the
pattern of alternation makes it tolerable. To compensate
for such a large dose of male vulnerability, the cycle's
second phase immediately ensues so that the reader can feel
reassured. Just a few pages later, Hammer describes to
Charlotte how he will shoot a bullet in a brutal revenge he
is planning: "It'll go in neat, right in the soft part of
the belly" (98). Charlotte is shocked at this sudden
transformation: "Have you been like that just since the
war? So hard, I mean" (98).
133
Although Hammer feels threatened by women, at times he
flirts with the possibility of marriage. Velda is
continually trying to get a commitment from him, and at one
point receives an engagement ring, but it is Charlotte
Manning who gets his wholehearted marriage promise: "Oh,
how I hated to tell Velda about Charlotte. . .! Velda just
missed. If Charlotte hadn't come along I would have tied
up with her" (Jury 132). But Hammer never does get "tied
up," viewing the marrying type of woman as too controlling
and threatening: "[Velda] clamped onto my arm ready to
march me to the nearest justice of the peace" (17).
Hammer's response to perceived threats from both Velda
and Charlotte is aggression. In the case of Velda, who is
his subordinate, his aggression is directed at the woman
herself. In the case of Charlotte, who is his intellectual
superior, his aggression is temporarily redirected at a
male. Male-male interactions don't generate the same
feelings of masculine insecurity in Hammer, even when they
present a much greater actual danger to his life. As in
wartime, these male-male encounters have a tendency to
affirm rather than threaten masculinity, whereas relations
with women tend to undermine masculinity. Nevertheless,
Hammer's insecurity dictates that his aggression must
eventually be directed at Charlotte Manning herself, which
is indeed the last scene of the book.
It has been stated earlier that women in Spillane are
always the source of men's greatest insecurity. Now we are
at a point from which to refine this view by examining the
premise that the threat of a woman is only an
externalization of what men perceive to be the real threat
to their own sense of masculine security, not an embodied
feminine other, but the feminine they fear may dwell within
themselves. Current feminist theory holds that
"masculinity is a structure of power" (Segal 127). Such
hierarchical power by definition contains the possibility
of the loss of power; as Kaja Silverman puts it, "male
mastery rests upon an abyss" (65). This creates from the
inception of masculinity a built-in insecurity. Because of
this "possibility of the loss of power," Segal explains,
masculinity is "as much a source of anxiety as security"
(127). This means that men's fears have an institutional
component that must not be overlooked. The recurring theme
of masculine fear and insecurity, I and others argue,
should not be seen as a symptom of weakness, but, when
examined in the light of the gender hierarchy, should be
seen as an attempt to reconsolidate male power. Polan
reminds us that paranoia is perhaps a symptom not of
powerlessness but instead of attempts to maintain power, a
"retreat. . . to a hoped-for position of security and
re-established authority" (15).
The perceived threat of femininity to men can best be
explained in this context of gender and power. Spillane's
unending representations of men as feeling threatened by
women reflect this imbalance of male-female power
relations. In this structure of power, masculinity
appropriates the feminine in order to define itself. It
does this by naming masculinity as everything femininity is
not. Defining masculinity by what it is not— not feminine,
not soft, not devalued— creates at the Core of masculinity
an instability (which is not the same as powerlessness):
'•masculinity cannot be asserted except in relation to what
is defined as its opposite. It depends upon the perpetual
renunciation of 'femininity'" (Segal 114). This power
relationship explains why a woman is needed to make a "man
feel like a man" (Spillane Night) .2 In Simone de
Beauvoir's view, what men are is defined in opposition to
the feminine "other" on which they project their
undesirable characteristics. The feminine is assigned by
patriarchy to be the repository of men's undesirable and
devalued qualities— anything negative, weak, unmasculine,
or soft; women become the "symbolic representatives of
various disavowed, warded off, unacceptable aspects of men"
(Gerald Fogel in Segal 75). Forced to embody all that men
disavow in themselves, the feminine symbolically becomes
136
for men a threatening potential in themselves, their
greatest fear.
It is the repressed aspects of masculinity as
constructed in modern times that represent the real source
of men's anxieties— but also of their fascination, since
men are curious about what they have repressed. Men fear
the feminine partly because they also dread the aspects of
the feminine that they know to dwell within themselves, but
they also seek a means of exploring it. When being
confronted by representations of threatening women, men are
symbolically also confronting their own disavowed qualities
banished to the nondominant gender. For men to explore the
threat of femininity in paperback is also indirectly for
men to explore their worst fears about themselves.
One way these dynamics of masculinity play out in
popular culture is that men utilize women as a symbol
through which, in fantasy and fiction, they can examine
their own psychic fears. In paperback novels the reader
can examine his own disavowed qualities at a safe distance,
by projecting these dreaded, dark, and vulnerable qualities
onto representations of women. Thus, it is no surprise
that in I. the Jury. Charlotte Manning must first serve the
male's purpose of embodying his worst fears about the
feminine— that women emasculate men-— and necessarily by the
end of the novel, having served as a vehicle for men to
137
examine their fears, she must be disposed of. As a
psychiatrist, Manning's crime is that she has "seen and
revealed the feminine within [men]" (Graebner 107). As she
undresses in the last scene in an attempt to seduce (and
probably destroy) Hammer, he shoots and kills her, a deadly
act of penetration.
Hypermasculinity functions to insist that none of
those feminine qualities, even in trace quantities, were
present in men. Because many men in the postwar period
felt insecure about their masculinity, successful mass
paperbacks of the time are filled with images of
hypermasculinity, not only in hard-boiled detective novels,
but in much of the sensationalist paperback fiction.
Although hypermasculinity was quite common in paperback
novels of the fifties, however, I contend that Spillane's
enormous popularity— selling five million copies per
title— is evidence that hypermasculinity functioned in
Spillane's novels in an exceptional way: to make
permissible an exploration of male insecurity by
simultaneously allowing the denial of insecurity. Having
perfected this formula, Spillane safely portrayed the most
taboo of subjects: male inadequacy and softness. The
reader was allowed not only a private arena, the book,
through which to approach a taboo subject, but also the
reassurance that the form, the cheap paperback, was both
138
temporal and merely escapist. In addition, the cover which
the product came wrapped in, adorned with heterosexual,
hypermasculine images, insistently proclaimed there was
nothing bookish or remotely 'queer' about the man making
the purchase.
Drawing on feminist theory and men's studies to
re-evaluate popular texts like Spillane's helps highlight
aspects of the text previously assumed as self-evident but
usually only discussed in passing. Spillane offered men,
otherwise tight-lipped on the subject of male insecurity, a
forum in which to safely explore their innermost fear: that
their psyches might somehow include what they most
devalued, the feminine. The other side of that fear may
have been a male fascination not only with the threat of
the externalized feminine but also with those hidden
'feminine' parts of himself grown mysterious by being
repressed,3
In the end, Spillane's novels may prove most
interesting to critics not for their comic-book characters
with cartoonish behaviors, but instead for mapping out
Hammer's internal landscapes and, to an extent, those of
the millions of readers that found him fascinating.
Hammer's erratic swings from insecurity to aggression
reflect, or more likely exaggerate, the perceived moods and
fears of many male readers. To the male readers, however,
139
these paperback novels were important because they allowed
them, through fantasy, to explore the consequences of, and
the buried potential within, their disavowed selves as
collected symbolically in the dreaded feminine. This
exploration could take place while still permitting these
men to disavow the very qualities they were exploring.
Through such fiction, men could ensure that the male-female
hierarchy was maintained— in fact, strengthened— while
still poking around in the unstable underside of
masculinity and its contradictions.
Because neither the text nor the reader ever
questioned the devaluation of the feminine, however, the
apparent potential for men fascinated by the feminine to
actually explore genuine change in their definition of
their own masculinity was never realizable. The pattern of
alternation in Spillane allowed only a glimpse of male
softness, and then slammed the door shut in its face with
hypermasculine overcompensation, assuring the continued and
violent repression of any 'feminine' interests. Men's
unwillingness to expand the definition of masculinity and
their unwillingness to cede power to oppressed
masculinities or women finally made such exploration not a
vehicle for change or even self-understanding, but a mere
fleeting act of disavowable self-voyeurism. Given how
threatened men felt, even this brief peek within might have
140
been a heroic journey were it not for the reluctance, for
at least another decade, to begin to alter the terms of
masculinity and femininity.
141
Chapter Three Endnotes
1. See Kaja Silverman's work in Masculinity at the Margins
on male masochism.
2. Still, women are not sufficient in themselves; men are
also needed to make a man feel like a man. Eve Sedgwick
analyzes the irony of the effeminizing potential of being
with women and the masculinizing potential of being with
men, but the latter of which then arouses fear of
homosexuality.
3. In postwar films, Kaja Silverman analyzes the male
fantasy of assuming the passive feminine role. In The Best
Years of Our Lives. Homer's two amputated hands will make
him the passive partner in lovemaking. Silverman quotes a
1947 essay that claims "it will be her hands that must be
used in making love. . .; he must be passive; therefore he
can be passive without guilt" (Silverman 71). For
Silverman, such a fantasy constitutes one of the
"alternative ways of inhabiting a morphologically masculine
body" and is a "'denormalization' of male subjectivity. . .
that refuses to write 'lack' at the site of the female
body" (388).
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CHAPTER FOUR
Policing Masculinity:
The congressional Investigation
of the Lurid Paperback
When liberty degenerates to license. .
. the end is. . . the policing of
thought.
— Representative St.
George, Gathings
Committee member (1952)
[YJou take homosexuality; there is a
tendency to expatiate on that. . . in
the general run of pocket-size books.
— Representative Burton,
Gathings Committee
General Counsel (1952)
The postwar period saw the rise of the lurid
paperback. From the time the war ended, the paperback
industry took more and more liberties with the content and
covers of their books until in 1952, alarmed by this trend,
Congress launched an investigation of the paperback. In a
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typical moment during those Congressional hearings, Robert
Daigh, editor of Fawcett/Gold Medal Books, was being
cross-examined about a homosexual scene in one of his
company's most successful paperbacks, Women 's Barracks. In
a barracks in wartime London, while "[o]utdoors, the
antiaircraft guns continued their booming,” Ursula, a
healthy heterosexual young woman, is being initiated into
the practices of lesbianism (Torres 46). Her more
experienced female lover, Claude, "invented these strange
caresses," caresses that are, however, never described for
the reader; nor is her climax described, except that "[a]11
at once, her insignificant and monotonous life had become
full, rich, and marvelous" (46). However vague the sex
scenes, Women's Barracks had crossed a line in representing
any lovemaking other than heterosexual union.
A unique opportunity to see how the lurid paperback,
its cover, and its representations of gender were
officially viewed by the U.S. government presents itself in
the complete transcripts of the 1952 Congressional
investigation of the lurid paperback.1 What these hearings
help establish is not only an official body's concern about
the sudden rise of the paperback, but also that body's
alarm at how masculinity was being represented. In some
sense, the paperback was merely the vehicle through which
the committee went about examining its growing concerns
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about less-than-heterosexual representations of masculinity
and their presumed effect on a growing nation of readers.
During the course of its investigation, the Congressional
committee became preoccupied not only with a particular
paperback, Women’s Barracks. and with the paperback in
general, but also with the topic of homosexuality.
In May 1952, a Democratic Congressman from Arkansas,
Ezekiel Candler Gathings, seized the opportunity to
investigate the lurid paperback publicly. Gathings claimed
he was "not a crusader, goodness alive," but Newsweek
described him as "a lean, serious, pale man, a Baptist. . .
who has long been concerned about the erotic covers and
contents of 25-cent books" ("No Witch Hunt" 80).2 In fact,
Gathings was one of the first paperback collectors in the
sense that every time he went to the drugstore to purchase
cigars "there would be a long line. . . looking at the lewd
[paperback] covers" (80). Alarmed, Gathings "began
collecting the questionable volumes" (80)— long before an
investigation was even dreamed of. Soon thereafter,
Gathings conducted a Congressional inquiry into radio and
television, much to the amusement of the press, which
ridiculed with "wisecracks" his admitted inability to
distinguish good from bad programming (80). Then, in 1952,
at Gathings's initiative, the House of Representatives
passed the Gathings resolutions, which created a select
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committee to investigate magazines, comics, and, most of
all, paperbacks. In June, House Speaker Sam Rayburn— from
the House at large, the Post Office Committee, and the
Judiciary Committee— appointed the nine committee members,
which included two women and what Newsweek called "some
first-rate members" (80). Within an hour and a half of
their appointment, these nine members joined Gathings in
his office to begin examining his extensive collection of
lurid paperbacks "locked up in his walnut wall cabinet"
(80). Soon, this collection of "sex-and-sadism" shockers
was "daily being enlarged with volunteer contributions"
(80). With an increasingly large body of works to examine,
delays were inevitable. The ensuing six months of
extensive preparation, during which staff members marked
passages in countless paperbacks, ended up delaying the
actual hearings until the first five days of December 1952.
After extensive research, the hearings finally opened,
and Representative Gathings announced that the committee
would be uncovering paperbacks which "plac[ed] improper
advertising emphasis on crime, violence, and
corruption. ..." He said that "the most offensive
infractions of the moral code were found to be contained in
the low-cost, paper-bound publications known as pocket-size
books. . . ." (Investigation 1). This statement led
witness Alfred Black to complain later that the committee
had "reached firm conclusions in advance of the hearings"
(Investigation 383) . The committee's alleged prejudice
seems to have been borne out in its list of witnesses: the
Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, the
National Council of Catholic Men, the National Organization
for Decent Literature, the Methodist Church Board of
Temperance, and the National Woman's Christian Temperance
Union. Although a handful of representatives from the
publishing industry were also included in the list of
witnesses, most were denied the opportunity to testify,
instead only being allowed to submit written statements
afterwards. Of the six publishers eventually permitted to
testify publicly, most were not publishers of paperbacks at
all, but small, unknown hardback publishers, such as Arco
Publishing, makers of Civil Service Exam practice tests,
Cadillac Publishing, and Eugenics Publishing. These
relatively obscure publishers were to represent all of the
publishing industry, despite the fact that several
important publishers and editors from softcover publishing
houses were present at the hearings and eager to testify,
among them representatives from Avon and New American
Library, both denied a chance to speak. Of the six
publishers allowed to testify publicly, only two, Fawcett
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and Bantam, even published paperbacks, the chief target of
the inquiry.
Although spokespersons for the paperback were scantily
represented among the witnesses, paperbacks themselves were
far and away the best represented among the subjects of
inquiry. Despite the committee7s official name, the
"Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials," it
was apparently formed neither to investigate "pornography"
nor a wide range of printed "materials." The committee
made its choices of what to examine not so much based on
pornographic qualities but primarily based on form: any
publication bound in low-cost paper covers, and excluding
any publication bound in hardcovers, or, at the opposite
extreme, in plain brown paper. While higher-priced
hardbacks were excluded because of form, so also were
lower-end pornographic materials; Gathings had set his
sights firmly in the middle and on only one type of
package. He chose to investigate books "sold openly"
rather than surreptitiously, thus making a distinction
between paperbacks and pornographic materials that were
either wrapped in brown paper or kept discreetly under the
counter: "the worst of [the obscene matter] is usually sold
under-cover, and the committee is understood to have
decided that this is a matter primarily for local police"
("House" 77). The committee sought "softcover," not
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"undercover,1 1 works. Such distinctions use not a textual
but a physical criterion. Gathings chose to focus his
attention more on the form of publication— specifically
books bound in soft covers and even of a particular
dimension, 'pocket size'— rather than on genre, category,
pornographic interest, or specific content.
Hardcover works were likewise exempt. Because many
paperbacks were merely reprinted hardback texts, this led
to a double standard, not unlike that of many city
ordinances of the fifties, which were:
not concerned with hardbound books. . . [T]he
original clothbound edition of a book may be
freely obtained in a book store and possibly in
most libraries, but not in the paperbound format
at newsstands, in drug stores or railroad
stations. . . [Thus] inexpensive paperbacks of
identical content are made subject to different
treatment. (Schick 110)
To no avail, publishers testifying before the Gathings
committee objected to this double standard between hard and
soft cover morality. New American Library publisher,
Victor Weybright, pointed out in his written statement, "If
abuses exist in the content of books which the reprinters
publish, they exist no less in the more expensive editions
from which they are reproduced" (375). Douglas Black of
the American Book Publishers Council feared that the
committee's nearly exclusive obsession with the pocket-size
form might "erroneously suggest that the problem to which
the committee addresses itself is concerned only with
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paper-bound books” (382). The committee was nonplussed by
such arguments, failing to recognize that many
highly-acclaimed, literary novels were reprinted with lurid
artwork in softcover. Gathings made a false distinction
when he claimed he didn't want his investigation to affect
"legitimate" authors— "[ojnly what's available at the
corner drugstore" ("No Witch" 80). Like many a reader, the
committee seemed willing to judge a book by its cover.
Between the extremes of the brown wrapper and the
hardback were a wide variety of mid-level, openly-sold
publications, but the committee invariably preferred to
discuss the lurid paperback novel. Before the hearings,
the New York Times reported that "the main target of the
inquiry will be the thousands of alleged smutty books,
comics and magazines sold openly on newsstands and drug
store book racks throughout the country" ("House" 77).
Although magazines and comics were formally included in the
investigation, Gathings's own remarks made clear that the
real target was the pocket book: "Magazines will be
singled out only when their literary or photographic
content is believed to be subversive. . . and comics only
when their content is believed to exercise a debasing and
degrading influence on susceptible youth" I Investigation
2). In the end, magazines and comics were largely ignored,
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and "pocket-sized books of sexy or obscene content" became
the committee's chief focus ("House" 77).
On the morning of the opening day of the hearings,
General Counsel Burton called Fawcett/Gold Medal editor,
Ralph Daigh, to the witness stand and spread out before him
a number of paperbacks: "Do you think that many of these
pocket-size books— and I am going to show you some of
them— do you think that they have sufficient literary value
to overcome the obscene parts of the books?" (Investigation
24) .3 Daigh responded that if the public "buys a product
in the multimillion lots that is an endorsement connot[ing]
that that is a good book" (9). Asked to name the title of
such a "good book," Daigh immediately volunteered his
firm's book, Women's Barracks. Although this was how the
title was introduced into the hearings, previously the
committee staff, in its months of research, had also
examined the book closely; Women's Barracks was a natural
for such an investigation, partly because of its homosexual
theme and partly because of its million-plus sales.
Women's Barracks, by a woman, Tereska Torres, was
published in 1950, not as a reprint but as an original
paperback, a thirty-five-cent Gold Medal Giant.4 Its
homosexual theme is vaguely hinted at in the blurb on the
back cover, which roughly paraphrases the "Translator's
Preface": "This is the story of what happens when scores of
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young girls live intimately together in a French military
barracks. Many of these girls, utterly innocent and
inexperienced, met other women who had lived every type of
experience." These "other women" turn out to be both "true
lesbians" and also older, sexually-experimental
heterosexual women. The back cover promises that the book
will chronicle the "temptations. . . faced by all women who
are forced to live together without normal emotional
outlets." The words "without normal" seem to promise the
reader detailed descriptions of abnormal sexual behavior
between women, a promise not to be fully delivered.
Slightly more explicit than the back cover blurb, the
preface promises a description of "young girls, many of
them utterly innocent when they entered the service, where
they were to encounter jaded women who had lived through
every type of experience" (5). The "jaded" corrupt the
"utterly innocent," it is promised, for the reader's
combined horror and delight.
The cover illustration by Bayre Phillips shows three
women in a locker room in various states of undress. This
is typical of the "lurid" covers of the period— what the
committee referred to as "come-on covers," and the New York
Times described as "featuring scantily-clad women or other
suggestive pictures" ("House" 77).5 Like the covers for
Mickey Spillane novels, these covers were designed more to
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appeal to heterosexual male readers such as the veteran
than to minority sexual groups, such as a to lesbian
audience.6 Makers of pornography know well that male
heterosexuals are fascinated by lesbian scenes, especially
those involving "utterly innocent" heterosexual women.
If the primary audience for such a work is
heterosexual, however, what could the Congressional
committee have objected to so vehemently? Part of the
answer seems to lie in the implicit threat lesbianism was
seen to pose to male heterosexuality, especially after
years of war during which women got along at home just fine
without the men, who thereby became "superfluous"
(Silverman 107). Adrienne Rich claims men's fear of women
derives from finding "that women could be indifferent to
them altogether" (43) . There is a subversive quality in
the representation of female desire fulfilled without the
presence of men, since, in "Western metaphysics, the 'true'
or 'right' is heterosexual penetration" (Silverman 185).
This representation of women being satisfied without
heterosexual penetration seemed further to undermine the
male role already under siege. Aside from the lesbianism,
the committee's disapproval might also be traced to the
proportionately fewer references in Women's Barracks to
male sexuality. Also, the heterosexuality that is
portrayed is not sexually very potent. In one of the rare
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heterosexual unions in the text, a mistress reveals that
her male lover has almost no sex drive left: "Long
afterward, [Jacqueline] told me that their sexual contacts
were quite rare. John didn't seem to feel frequent sexual
needs. . ." (153). Also threatening to Congress might have
been the few passing references made in the text to male
homosexuality. But I argue that most threatening to the
committee was the reason finally given in the text for the
breakdown of heterosexual norms: it was not just that the
war had created a kind of situational homosexuality, but,
more disturbing to some, that the absence of virulent
heterosexual masculinity in the men these women wanted to
love drove the women into each other's arms. The theme of
unmanliness is once again at the heart of the matter, and
this time it is not only undermining heterosexuality but
also is leading women to assume the active sexual role.
Women's Barracks is about a group of French women,
expatriates in London during the Nazi occupation of France
during World War II. These women are all volunteers in the
Free French Forces and live together in and out of uniform
in London in a women's barracks. The text describes the
chief initiator of new female recruits into lesbianism as
an attractive forty-year-old married woman named Claude.
Unlike the few "true lesbians" in the barracks, Claude is
not at all "masculine," except as she assumes the male
role. Sex with women is not "an absolute physical
necessity" for her (Torres 82), because she is not
homosexual in her nature. Far from being her fault,
Claude's deviance is seen as a symptom of how she has been
victimized by men; if only her husband had been an adequate
masculine male, Claude "could have lived a normal life as
wife and mother" (82) . Claude's object of desire has
always been and continues to be her husband, but he can't
satisfy her longing; "My only love was always my husband,
but. . . he's a fairy, damn him!" (32). Claude's marriage
to a man living a homosexual life in London seemed to
others to explain so much about Claude's transitory affairs
with women: "Ursula couldn't get over her astonishment at
this woman who adored her homosexual husband. . ." (32).
As a result of her husband's heterosexual failure, Claude
has found no solace but to lead a lesbian life,
'corrupting' other innocent women like young Ursula. The
prospect of unmasculine males causing women to abandon
heterosexuality certainly dismayed the committee, but that
these women would then come to assume masculine roles was
completely daunting. Aside from the exceptional cases of
Ann and Petit, the two "true lesbians," it was only the
lack of manliness in men that had 'depraved and corrupted'
these otherwise 'healthy' women. The view in Women's
Barracks of unmanliness as the true cause of the breakup of
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the heterosexual social fabric seems to have been too much
of a concern for Congress to overlook. As a consequence,
Women's Barracks became the most hated and condemned text
among all those paperbacks discussed in five days of
Congressional hearings.
Women's Barracks might just as appropriately have been
titled "The Temptation and Redemption of Ursula Martin,"
since, while still an inexperienced virgin, Ursula is
seduced by Claude and won over to a lesbian orientation.
She is courted by a quiet man, Michel, but has become so
alienated from both men and the possibility of heterosexual
passion that the romance fails. But when Ursula is
rejected by Claude, a "longing rose in her for the calm
voice of a man" (87). Ursula attempts to "get out of her
[homosexual] difficulty" by offering to have sex with a
French officer, Philippe, who promises her, "Afterward you
will be a woman" (106). She fears that if she misses this
"last chance" she will "never be able to accept intimacy
with a man" (108). But when at last she feels his naked,
masculine body against hers, she sobs uncontrollably with
fright and "resistance" (112). With this failure to
couple, she feels "doomed to solitude all her life, like
Ann, like Petit" (108).
Only Michel's return at the end of the book seems to
begin to heal the heterosexual deficit not only in Ursula
but also in her entire community of husband-less women:
"Now we became a group of close [women] comrades revolving
around Michel" (160). Ursula even confesses "not being
normal" (165) to Michel, who generously "reassured" her, as
he "navigated in Ann's Lesbian circles with composure and
naturalness" (161). In a heterosexual act of healing,
Michel and Ursula apply for permission to marry, and
afterward they proceed to make love, a scene described in
the text's usual vague manner: "It was still rather awkward
and slow. . . [b]ut everything was so normal, so
wonderfully and utterly normal. . ." (167).
Heterosexuality thoroughly transforms Ursula, who is soon
"seized with a desire. . . to read, to study. . . and with
a kind of optimism" (17 0). But when Michel is soon
afterwards killed in the invasion of Normandy, Ursula's
tenuous hold on normality (i.e. heterosexuality) slips.
Devastated as much by the prospect of a return to
'deviancy' as by Michel's death, she swallows two bottles
of sleeping pills: "Her life had begun with Michel, and now
she was ending it with him" (18 0). Claude wept bitterly at
Ursula's death, feeling "remorse over having initiated
Ursula to a vice for which there was no true natural
leaning in the girl" (118-19). On the final page of the
book, a German V-2 rocket destroys the women's barracks and
most of those who have strayed irredeemably from
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heterosexuality. The text closes with one more example of
deficient manhood. As the women's barracks lie smoldering
in ruins, the last image in the book is of a male
homosexual foreigner watching on: the Ambassador of Peru
was "gazing, with a very thin smile, scarcely perceptible,
on his overred lips" (189). As the final image, such a
man, able to find amusement in woman's destruction,
represents what had driven these women into each other's
arms and what had forced them to become "more like men"
(126) .
Although the committee did not seem to make a
distinction between male homosexuality and lesbianism, the
central focus of Torres's book is certainly lesbianism.
Women's Barracks includes important references to male
homosexuality in the guise of Claude's husband and in the
final scene leaving the reader with the image of the
Ambassador of Peru. It is likely that the focus on female
homosexuality is a displacement from the real concerns that
centered on masculinity; a genuine reluctance to discuss
male-male homosexuality may have induced committee members
to discuss instead a different configuration of it,
lesbianism. Also, since much of the impetus for fearing
emasculation comes from women's wartime empowerment, it is
not surprising that a text about masculinized women and
emasculated men would command the Committee's scrutiny.
Ralph Daigh came to the first day of the Congressional
hearings specifically prepared to defend both Women's
Barracks and the appropriateness of its theme. One defense
he tried had to do with another set of hearings besides the
Gathings investigation, those far more publicized
investigations by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Although the
two committees investigated different phenomena— one
political, one cultural— they nevertheless shared certain
concerns. First, they coexisted during the same political
climate— although HUAC spanned several years, while the
Gathings committee held hearings for only five days.
Furthermore, although Gathings did not delve into suspected
Communist writings and McCarthy did not quote from
paperbacks, still, in the theme of homosexuality, their
inquiries at times nearly intersected.7 The two
investigations shared the same national impulse— "The
national hunt for [moral perverts]. . ." (O'Brien 42)— and
arose from the same "new spirit of repression and
censorship" (O'Brien 39).
Like Ezekiel Gathings, Joseph McCarthy seemed bent on
rooting out homosexuality. Many of McCarthy's attacks on
allegedly disloyal citizens included innuendos about their
homosexuality— enough so that the hearings have been
labeled as "the McCarthy witch-hunts against Communists and
homosexuals" (Segal 17). Many extreme McCarthyites joined
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together aspersions of Communism with those of
homosexuality: "Get rid of the communist professors— who
are all homosexuals and New Dealers anyway— and everything
will be all right once more" (De Voto in Goldman 7).
David Caute, who has written extensively about the
history of McCarthy, notes at least three instances of
HUAC's use of the nation's fear of homosexuality to
discredit its enemies. First, Franklin Roosevelt's State
Department was imputed to be "a veritable nest of
communists, fellow travelers, homosexuals, effete Ivy
League intellectuals and traitors" (Caute 303). Second,
accusations of homosexuality in the Foreign Service were
routine during McCarthy's tenure: "the Foreign Service has
been accorded little support or respect, with its
members. . . depicted as homosexuals. . . and Communists"
(Caute 3 08). Third, a naturalized citizen, Gustavo Duran,
was hounded throughout years of trying to clear his name,
not only with accusations of being Red, but, without real
substantiation, and only with the intention of compounding
the accused's shame, of homosexuality as well: "Senator
[McCarthy] claimed that it was to Moscow that Duran had
repaired at the end of the [Spanish] Civil War, throwing in
for good measure imputations of a dissolute youth and
homosexuality" (Caute 335). With McCarthy's continuing use
of homosexuality to discredit witnesses, Congress began to
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take such accusations as more than mere name calling,
becoming concerned about the vulnerability to blackmail of
homosexuals in high-level positions. To protect against
this, Congress passed legislation that, among other things,
viewed homosexuals as security risks. For a time, the
homosexual scare became second only to the Communist scare.
At the time, Leslie Fiedler wrote that, for McCarthy,
homosexuality is "the only other unforgivable sin besides
being a Communist. The definition of the Enemy is
complete— opposite in all respects to the American
Ideal. . . [which is] loyal, and one-hundred-percent male.
Such an Enemy need not be proven guilty; he is guilty by
definition" (Innocence 77).8 Given that national attention
had become focused on the issue of homosexuality, it is not
surprising that it would also surface as a key issue in a
1952 investigation of popular culture.
Ralph Daigh's most topical and political attempt to
defend the theme of homosexuality in Women's Barracks was
the least well received by the Gathings committee. He used
the highly publicized discussions of homosexuality in the
McCarthy Hearings to claim the topic's legitimacy: "All of
you and all of us are familiar with the homosexual
inquiries into the State Department and other governmental
agencies. It made headlines all over the world" (32). He
argued that because of the curiosity that the McCarthy
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hearings had created in the general reading public,
homosexuality was a natural topic of current interest, not
merely in Congress, in the newspapers, and in the American
living room, but also in books. For a publisher to print
materials satisfying the public's curiosity about that
topic, he argued, was a legitimate public service:
these books, as any literary property which
depends on purchase by the public, must reflect
the world, must reflect what is happening today.
. . [McCarthy's homosexual inquiries] aroused a
curiosity which these books almost unconsciously
then recognized as a trend of knowledge in which
the public was interested, and that investigation
and the publicity that accrued is in a great
sense responsible for the emphasis currently on
homosexuality in all books, not pocket books
alone. . . . (3 2)9
General Counsel Burton was angered by this defense of
the book: "Do you feel then that it is commendable to
utilize the McCarthy inquiry. . .?" (32), he asked. Daigh
was being downright aggressive to make a comparison with
Gathings's better-known Communist-seeking counterpart,
McCarthy, who daily was accorded high status by the press,
whereas the press had become increasingly critical of the
Gathings committee. One Gathings committee member even
apologized to a witness for taking offense so easily to a
remark, explaining the humiliation the Gathings committee
was experiencing daily at the hands of the press: "This
committee, in trying to do a job, has suffered
embarrassment. . ." (260).10 Further, Daigh had dared to
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call attention to the obsessive— even
irresponsible— quality of the investigation of
homosexuality in the McCarthy hearings, which Life found
"reckless with accusations and careless with truth" ("That
Campus Witch Hunt" 30). Daigh had also reminded the
committee of the public's growing perception, true or not,
that the U.S. government was riddled with homosexuals. In
the political climate of the day, to accuse was often
sufficient to damage the reputation of, and if there were
homosexuals in the State Department, why not in the House
of Representatives? Who could be sure that the committee
itself was completely above suspicion? In fact, some
observers must have wondered whether it was entirely
innocent that a significant proportion of Ezekiel
Gathings's privately collected paperbacks was "homosexual
novels and literary sex shockers by the dozens" (emphasis
added, "No Witch" 80).
The effect of bringing the subject of homosexuality
out into the open so early in the hearings was to make
homosexuality and concerns about masculinity a kind of
subtext underneath all the committee's other inquiries
about details, such as cost, quantities, and distribution.
This is clearly demonstrated in the numerous cases in which
the topic surfaced again and again, however briefly,
throughout the next five days of hearings. Committee
members would frequently list homosexuality as one of their
chief concerns about the paperback, as, for example, when
Burton summarized the results of his staff's study of
pocket-size books: "We find a number of [works] on
homosexuality; we find one even on advocating polygamy; and
we find a number of perversion subjects, such as
lesbianism. . . ." (89). Even as the hearings eventually
drew to a close, Daigh's early defense of the homosexuality
in Women7s Barracks continued to agitate the committee. On
the last day, while interviewing the superintendent of
Washington D.C. schools, committee member Kearns asked:
"Did you ever read a book named 'Women's Barracks,' Mr.
superintendent? Dr. Corning: No, sir; I am afraid I have
not. Would you recommend it?" (259). Kearns interpreted
this response as disrespectful: "No, I wouldn't. If you
want to get that way, I'll get that way, too. . . ." (259).
Despite homosexuality becoming a subtext for the
hearings, the committee members had some difficulty
actually saying the word; in attempting to articulate to
Daigh what was most objectionable to them about Women's
Barracks. the committee found the embarrassing nature of
the problem made it difficult to specify. At first they
could only accuse Daigh of using sex in general to sell
books, but Daigh responded that, even before the war,
sexual relations had been a common theme in popular books:
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"books that deal with men and women and sex relations will
have had good sales, whether you are talking about Gone
With the Wind, or whether you are talking about Women's
Barracks. It is a legitimate literary device. . . " (29).
Daigh was right, of course; it was not just any type of
sexuality that Burton wanted to speak about. He had to
make his objections less general, however difficult.
Burton eventually found himself unable to proceed without
actually speaking the word, in however embarrassed and
round-about a syntax: "Well, the thing that strikes me is
that you take homosexuality; there is a tendency to
expatiate on that. . . in the general run of pocket-size
books" (31).
At last a committee member had said the word
"homosexuality." Why was there such reluctance even to
speak the word? Had the committee perused the June 1948
Partisan Review, they would have run across the essay "Come
Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey" in which Leslie Fiedler
gives one explanation for that reluctance:
The existence of overt homosexuality threatens to
compromise an essential aspect of American
sentimental life: the camaraderie of the locker
room and ball park, the good fellowship of the
poker game and fishing trip, a kind of
passionless passion. . . possessing an innocence
above suspicion. To doubt for a moment this
innocence. . . would destroy our stubborn belief
in a relationship........... immune to lust
(Innocence 143).
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Eve Sedgwick maintains that male bonding is "characterized
by intense. . . fear and hatred of homosexuality" (1). The
reluctance to speak the word and the intense reaction to
Daigh's doing so represented an overall insistence on the
innocence in male "camaraderie" and "fellowship"— an
insistence harder to maintain in the face of Daigh's
testimony and McCarthy's accusations.
Besides arguing that the McCarthy hearings made
homosexuality a legitimate topic, Daigh had two other
defenses of the homosexual theme in Women's Barracks: a
comparison with homosexuality in classic literature and an
argument that such works help expose homosexuality for what
it is. Daigh produced a letter he had come prepared to
read aloud to the committee, written by a literary critic
and defending the work's homosexual theme by favorable
comparisons with homosexuality in classic literature:
Even the one or two homosexual scenes in Women's
Barracks are milder than similar scenes in
Plato's Symposium, Christopher Marlowe's Hero and
Leander, or Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage. In
Women's Barracks the subject is definitely
treated as evil and unattractive, which is more
than can be said for Sappho's famous Ode to
Anactoria. . . . (12)
The critic's argument was that Torres's scenes of
homosexuality were not only tamer but also less favorably
portrayed than in similar scenes in classic Greek and
English literature. In general, they were, but the
committee was horrified by the comparison. Enraged, one
166
member tried to push Daigh even further: "Rees. You think
the book in question compares favorably with Shakespeare's
books?" (14). The committee's reaction was so vehement
because Daigh had confronted them with the fact that
homosexuality was a theme not isolated to a handful of
novels published after the war, but which had long and deep
roots in Western culture, especially American culture. In
fact, Fiedler has argued that American literature's
"failure. . . to deal with adult heterosexual love" has
created an "obsession [in its fiction] with. . . innocent
homosexuality" (Love 12).
In the end, Daigh's loyalty lay with the books he
published, not with the rights of homosexuals, and this
unequal loyalty eventually showed through. When Daigh
characterized Women's Barracks as part of a useful national
campaign to uncover homosexuality, he was abandoning his
earlier anti-censorship stance. When he boasted, by
reading his critic's letter, that homosexuality was
"treated as evil and unattractive," he was acquiescing to
the homophobic attitudes of the committee and claiming to
share their views. As the committee hammered away at his
arguments, Daigh ceased defending homosexuality, instead
choosing to imply that homosexuality is a social problem
that needs to be uncovered in paperbacks. The homophobia
in this defense can also be detected in his response to a
committee question in which he described the book as an
"expose"; in this response, Daigh referred, not
unfavorably, to the national campaign against
homosexuality, "such as this homosexual expose7 was" (33).
We can't know if he shared with the committee its
discomfort with homosexuality or if he was merely defending
the contents of his book by whatever means— attacking
homosexuality to save the book. He began his testimony by
defending his right to publish books that "reflect the
world. . . [and] what is happening today," but in the end
he unwittingly caved into the committee's agenda to enforce
heterosexual values. After the formal hearings were over,
Daigh appended the transcripts with a letter written by a
priest to the book's author: "When Ursula has found the
magnificent love of Michel. . . who is a true man, [it] is
like a revelation of the true meaning of love between a man
and a woman, after the picture of possible deviations"
(31). Homosexuality is finally viewed, even by the book's
publisher, as the "deviation" which proves that
conventional heterosexuality is preferable.
With the subtext of homosexuality firmly established
on the first day by the inquiry into Women's Barracks. the
committee proceeded to look into many of the technical
aspects of the paperback industry, but always viewing each
detail in light of what they objected to most in softcover:
portrayals of unpreferred types of masculinity, especially
homosexuality. The Gathings committee transcripts give us
the chance to compare the government's attitude toward mass
publishing with the Armed Services Editions at the
beginning of the paperback revolution in 1942 and again ten
years later during the hearings in 1952. During the war,
the notion of creating softcover reading materials for 13
million men was not in the least threatening to official
notions of masculinity, partly because these men would be
reading their softcover novels in the heat of battle, the
wartime proving ground for masculinity. Ten years later,
however, millions of men sitting around reading soft-bound
books was less than reassuring to the nation's leaders. In
wartime, books boosted morale; in peacetime they lowered
morality. In war, masculinity remained unthreatened by
soft books; in domesticity, such books seemed to undermine
manhood.
Underneath these polar opposites lie the same basic
assumptions about reading materials: that books profoundly
influence the morals, mental state, and gender identity of
millions of readers, and so can be both useful to state
goals, but, just as easily, subversive. If, in the hands
of the state, books had become effective weapons, then in
the hands of the unscrupulous they could create anarchy.
When in 1942 the government had eagerly agreed to fund the
production of wartime paperbacks, moral necessity had been
the theme: the country had been at war. Ten years later,
when the government reviewed the monster it had helped
create, the theme was one of excess. In wartime, the
government helped create a new industry, failing to
anticipate that industry's enormous growth and blatant
disregard for dominant (heterosexual) values. There was an
official sense of surprise; how could an industry created
for a soldier's morale have become so immoral? Again and
again Gathings Committee members seemed astonished by the
vastness of the capitalistic machine they had helped to
create. The sheer size and rapid growth of the paperback
industry overwhelmed those in Congress more used to dealing
with industries such as manufacturing or agriculture. The
exponentially rising paperback sales figures from the end
of the war into the early 1950s made the industry seem
beyond the reach of any official governing body.
The very strengths of postwar paperback publishing,
those qualities that had promoted more book buying and
literacy— qualities such as form, shape, size, and
cost— were also the very qualities that, Congress felt,
constituted the paperback's greatest danger to society and
which caused the paperback to be singled out for
investigation. What had been considered virtues in 194 2
ten years later had become sins. In 1942, the books' low
170
cost of only several cents per copy had been one of the
primary attractions of the Armed Services Editions; in
1952, on the other hand, with the advent of nonstandard
masculinities in softcover, the low cost became a continual
sore point for committee members. At these prices, who
couldn't have access to these portrayals of masculinity?
Publishers seemed naively unaware of this attitude
among Congressional members. When Ralph Daigh first
introduced his firm to the committee, he called
Fawcett/Gold Medal "the largest publishers and distributors
of magazines and books in the world" (4). For him this may
have been something to be proud of, but in a climate of
suspicion about how vast the softcover industry's influence
had become, this fact was already counted as one strike
against him. Not just the homosexual theme of Women's
Barracks. but also its huge sales brought out the
committee's ire. Every day of the hearings, the committee
raised concerns about the overwhelming numbers of
paperbacks being sold. The committee calculated that
Bantam had sold a million copies among the seven books
displayed as evidence before them. Bantam publisher John
O 'Connor asked,
O'Connor: Do you think that is bad, Mr. Rees?
Rees: Yes, I think so.
O'Connor: Well, that is just a difference of
opinion between us as to whether these books
should be circulated or not. The quantity really
has nothing to do with it, has it?
171
Rees: It is a bad thing. The more of it there
is, the worse it gets. . . . (302)
By the time of the hearings in December 1952, Women7s
Barracks had sold 1.4 million copies. But Daigh operated
under a fundamentally different assumption from the
committee: "A book is usually a good book if the public
buys it in quantity" (9). The committee couldn7t have
disagreed with him more; Women7s Barracks7s transgression
was not only its content but also its wide readership. One
committee member, Mrs. Bosone, made explicit her belief
that a work7s harm is not alone in its content, but in its
being widely read. Referring to Daigh7s comparison of the
homosexuality in Women7s Barracks to that in Plato,
Marlowe, and Sappho, Mrs. Bosone replied, "all the books
mentioned in the letter are not generally read; they are
classics, but they are not generally distributed and read
as this type of book is" (14). Works printed as "classics"
were innocuous, no matter how racy their themes, because
they remained on dusty shelves. The mass modern paperback
industry, on the other hand, was by its very definition a
threat. General Counsel Burton echoed this objection to
vast quantities:
Is it not, as a matter of fact, Mr. Daigh, simply
a sordid situation existing within the women7s
barracks. . . ? Haven7t they picked out just
particular episodes and put them in a book, and
then printed that book in tremendous quantities,
such as can be done with the potentialities of
the modern press, and distributed, not for
172
specialized readers, but on the thousands of
newsstands where it is accessible to young
people? (12)
Burton's statement reveals that Congress felt threatened,
more than anything, by "the potentialities of the modern
press"— especially given that the press had the power to
influence millions of readers' conceptions of gender. The
committee seemed frightened of what could happen if freedom
of the press were taken to its technological extreme
through mass publishing. Books targeted at small groups of
"specialized readers" seemed safe enough, no matter what
their content, but a vast audience for a book changed the
rules of the game.
Burton also had alluded to "thousands of newsstands";
paperbacks reached so many readers primarily because of
postwar innovations in distribution. As much as anything,
distribution had been Ezekiel Gathings's original objection
to the paperback: "I thought, what is this country coming
to, if we are distributing this type of thing. . ." ("No
Witch" 80). Victor Weybright essentially admitted to the
committee that New American Library, as a reprint house,
had made its primary innovations in this area: "our
contribution has been fundamentally not in creation but in
distribution" (375). Although Weybright may have seen this
as a proud accomplishment, a Catholic priest cited
distribution as the heart of the industry's crime: "all I
173
can say is that this material is available to them at every
newsstand and drug store in every neighborhood, United
States of America; put it that way" (81). At one point,
Daigh was confronted with a book on nymphomania and was
told that it was on "newsstands all over the country" (28).
Displayed on newsstands, in train stations, and on
drugstore racks, the paperback could catch the eye of
virtually every American; such universal distribution made
the modern press a public menace.
The "potentialities of the modern press" meant that
such works, once universally distributed, were also readily
affordable to all. As Representative Kearns remarked,
"anyone has access to them in the racks, anyone with a
quarter can buy them" (255). Again and again, as in this
exchange with a police inspector, the matter of cost was
cited as one of the chief problems:
Burton. Why do you feel these publications that
you have been discussing, such as the pocket-size
books. . . present such a problem?
Case. Well, we have two or three specific reasons
for that. First of all, it is a low price. A
few years back you had your average hard-cover
book which sold at anywhere from $2 on up. . .
Now, it is out in the 25-cent book. (122)
For the committee, as made apparent in the questioning
of Ralph Daigh, the low price of Women's Barracks seemed to
be a condemnation of its worth in and of itself— without
need of further evidence. As often occurred, Chairman
Gathings would interrupt a line of questioning to remind
174
everyone of the cost issue. In response to the earlier
comparison of Women's Barracks with Shakespeare, Daigh
answered, "I think both are eminently entitled to
publication, exposure to the public.1 1 Chairman Gathings
angrily interrupted, "And the book sells for a quarter?"
(14). Bewildered by the repeated references to low cost,
Daigh confronted the committee on their assumptions: "I
don't see that the price, which, I have gathered an
inference here, that the price has something to do with it.
I can't believe that you can put price as a censor" (29).
This allowed Burton to clarify what the committee had been
implying all along: "the price of 25 cents makes it that
much more available" (29). This annoyed Daigh sufficiently
that he later felt compelled to address it in his closing
statement: "The fact that our books are sold at a price the
public is willing and can afford to pay, 25 cents and 35
cents, is in no respect a condemnation of the product"
(34) .
Given the committee's assumptions, testimonies as to
how the mass paperback was encouraging mass literacy
weren't applauded either; this was because the paperback
industry's ability to reach so many was what was most
threatening to the committee. For the committee, the
widespread reach of the paperback industry not only made
the problem worse, but was actually the problem. Victor
175
Weybright showed that he failed to understand this when, in
his written statement, he claimed to have created millions
of readers by making available books that, as he put it,
were formerly "available only to the well-to-do. . .
[Reprints] have performed a notable public service by
turning into regular readers, and hence better-educated
citizens, countless millions who had little or no previous
access to books. . . (374-5). Weybright's miscalculation
was in claiming to have reached "countless millions"; this
in large part was what worried the committee.
The "countless millions," however, were held largely
blameless, as committee member Mrs. St. George observed:
I think the people who have been doing the
selling have had more freedom and more advantages
than the people who are doing the buying, because
we have had this stuff thrust on us,
unquestionably, and turned out in such vast
quantities that it has been very hard in some
instances to resist. . . . (357)11
More evidence of the committee's fear of the size of
the modern press came from a naive suggestion by
Representative Kearns that a panel should be created to
read every book and magazine before it was sold. Witness
Black, however, who knew the business from the inside,
replied to him: "Do you realize the tens and tens and tens
of thousands of books and magazines that go out weekly?"
(55). Completely overwhelmed, Mr. Kearns's nearly helpless
response is emblematic of the committee's chief reaction to
176
the softcover press: "It is out of control. There is no
question about it; it is out of control. How are you going
to get it back into control. . . .?" (55). How, indeed?
Congress was desperate to find a way to make the vastness
of modern mass publishing less threatening, less "out of
control.1,12
Partly underpinning the committee's panic about
distribution, low cost, and mass literacy, of course, was
the widespread representation of unmanliness and
homosexuality. As in Spock, there was a tendency in the
Gathings hearings to disavow concern about adult male
unmanliness and instead refocus that concern on the
corruption of children. Witness John O'Connor of Bantam
recalled that school boys had only a few years earlier been
able to pool their money to afford hardbound editions of
the 1948 Kinsey Report: "I remember when the Kinsey reports
were published. . . and it was common knowledge in the
publishing business that around high schools the youngsters
would get together and gather the $6 to buy the Kinsey
Report" (303).13 Cross-examining O'Connor, Representative
Rees responded:
Rees: Would you approve of youngsters getting
together and buying this stuff?
O'Connor: Well, they don't have to because this
is only a quarter.
Rees: Which makes it still worse.
O'Connor: Well, from your viewpoint. (303)
But in actuality, the softcover market appears not to have
included very many children. Still, the committee firmly
insisted that since children were able to afford these
paperbacks, they must therefore be buying them, despite
testimony to the contrary. Witness Hobart Corning,
Superintendent of Schools for the District of Columbia,
testified that there was almost no problem with such
materials in the schools: "This problem is not an acute one
in the schools. We do, on rather rare occasions, find
children in possession of literature that is pretty
obscene, but those instances are pretty infrequent" (255).
Completely dissatisfied with this remark, Chairman Gathings
went back to the issue of low cost: "Is a 25-cent piece a
lot of money for a child in this day and age to have on his
person?" (255). Ralph Daigh, too, was disbelieved when he
dismissed children as a market for Women's Barracks in
response to this remark: "Burton: [There] does not seem to
me to be a good reason for publishing it in million
quantities, and distributing it all over the United States
where children can read it" (14). Fed up with attempts to
depict the paperback as corrupting children, Daigh finally
reacted:
I am not aware of any considerable purchase of
these books, which apparently your committee
objects to, as being purchased by children. . .
We do not recognize children as a profitable or
even potential audience for pocket books. . . I
assure you that if there were a trend of
178
juveniles purchasing these books, I would know
about it. (14-15)
Daigh's argument did not persuade the committee, although
it was indeed his job to know buying tends; had children
been interested, Daigh likely would have been one of the
first to know. Perhaps the committee inferred from Daigh's
words— "I assure you. . . I would know"— that if Women's
Barracks had been selling to juveniles, he would not only
have known about it but would have pursued that market.
Daigh did not discourage this inference when he was asked
point blank, "You think children in high school should read
fWomen's Barracks1. then?" (10). Representative Kearns
replied to Daigh's affirmative answer, "Well, any
superintendent of schools who would have this book in the
school library. . . would not be worthy of the position of
trust. . ." (11).
The committee finally found in Mrs. Banning, author
and anti-porn crusader, a witness who took seriously its
concerns about the influence on young children of
representations of unmanliness in paperbacks. Mrs. Banning
also was useful in helping the committee establish that the
shift in morals was a recent occurrence, since just after
the war: "The realistic attitude which follows wars is
partly responsible. In the armed services, sexual interest
and desire are bound to be released, in talk and pictures
largely, and habits are formed which carry over and spread
179
in times of peace. . ." (155). Committee member, Mrs. St.
George, responded, "Mrs Banning, is it not a fact that that
has happened within practically the last 10 years; that it
is almost a complete change in our mores or ways of
thinking?" (162). Mrs. Banning agreed: "I think
myself. . . that it is a postwar development. . . " (162).
The key indication that traditional values were being
rapidly altered in the postwar period, Mrs. Banning
testified, was the negative portrayal of traditional
heterosexual relationships:
I have never found a reference to a wife who
wasn't pictured as a shrew trying to deprive her
husband of fun with other girls and women.
[They] portray women as being only sex
instruments and not even fertile ones. . ., never
admit[ting] that family life exists except as a
snare. (158)
The paperback was seen as contributing to a breakdown of
heterosexual values. Above all, it was determined that
young boys were the children most at risk. Negative
portrayals of heterosexuality in mass publications harmed
young boys' 'normal' development; as a result, these young
readers might not only fail to become procreatively
heterosexual, but, even more to be feared, fail to become
heterosexual at all.
In its concern with the dangers to youth, especially
to boys, the committee shared with Spock the assumption
that the process of the development of a boy's
180
heterosexuality was fragile and easily influenced by adults
and adult culture. But witness Louis Roos of the NYPD
warned that controlling boys/ use of such materials,
although necessary, would be difficult if not impossible:
"I mean, boys are boys" (272). Bantam publisher O'Connor
objected to the committee's uncorroborated assumption that
such books were bad for boys: "I have not heard of any
testimony before the committee by social scientists as to
the effects of reading and these covers on
adolescents. . ." (310). Yet O'Connor, along with the
police witness, believed boys were reading them:
Rees: Would you say they were good for
adolescents to read?
O'Connor: As a personal opinion I will say I
wouldn't want to give them to adolescents, no;
that is all I would say. . . [but] I don't think
you can keep boys from reading this kind of
thing. (303)
Although it was assumed that it was not possible to prevent
boys from reading, there was great risk involved. A boy's
perceived vulnerability to reading paperbacks, it was
stated, was due to the still unformed nature not only of
his core personality but also of his heterosexual
orientation. According to a judge's testimony during the
course of the hearings, the reading of such books was
highly detrimental to boys because it "unwisely stimulates
and excites the sensual urges of young boys while they are
still in the stage of increased suggestibility" (326). In
181
this susceptible stage, homosexual influences would be hard
for a boy to resist. A Catholic priest also testified
about this vulnerable stage in a boy's life: "the average
youngster, say, between the ages of 13 and 18, [is] at that
very impressionable age. . ." (80). This stage of
adolescent suggestibility puts young boys at risk of being
unduly "damage[d]" at a basic level of personality, as a
New York State Assemblyman explained to the committee:
"[when a youth] sits down alone and starts reading this
kind of trash, there is no way of telling what damage is
done to that individual's personality or what changes are
going to be made in the personality. . . of that
reader. . ." (237). In the committee's view, a boy's
developing propensity for heterosexuality might be easily
damaged at this critical stage when his personality was
just beginning to become fully formed.'
All boys were at risk, but especially, according to
committee member Mrs. Bosone, children without the 'normal'
heterosexual model of the two-parent family:
Now it is not of the youngster from the good home
that we speak of as needing protection primarily
from this type of literature, but rather it's of
the child from the broken home, the child from,
perhaps, the home whose father or mother are dead
. . . [or] the other parent is out working. . .
[T]here are millions in the country today who
have to be protected from this type of thing
because they haven't the proper ideals. . . .
(82)
Spock's warning about the effect on a boy of an absent
father is echoed here. Boys who were not yet certain of
their sexuality, one psychiatrist testified, would be
especially at risk: "Some very young neurotic boys may
'learn' some bad tricks which are reported in. . .
book[s]. . ." (326). Finally, bringing much that was
unspoken out into the open, a case study confirmed for the
committee that such reading could actually undermine a
boy's masculinity. Mother and witness, Rose Hearn,
reported that such reading had undermined the masculine
identity of her son: "We feel that reading the books
started him off. . . At one place Robert worked, he found
out the butcher was having a birthday and he asked if he
could bake a cake. He made it and took it" (371). Such
testimony only further confirmed for the committee that
reading was dangerous to the still-developing manliness of
youth.14 In the view of Congress, the fragility of the
American boy's heterosexuality combined with the
threatening potentialities of the modern press created a
dangerous situation for manliness— creating a national
imperative to put checks on the paperback.
For the careful reader of gender, what unfolds in the
transcripts of these Congressional hearings is the official
view that heterosexuality is very tenuous and fragile and
in need of government protection. But in the end the
committee did not go so far as to legislate censorship;
there were too many books published for any official body
to read them all. In fact, the committee had had
difficulty reading more than a few excerpts from the
paperbacks they had investigated.15 What the committee
chose to do was instead a two-fold action. First, the
publicity of the hearings served to encourage local groups
across the nation to put more pressure on merchants that
sold paperbacks. From the time the hearings began,
pressure groups flourished. In essence, through the
vehicle of the hearings, censorship and religious groups
received government encouragement to become more zealous
and aggressive: "There was no overt censorship, but intense
local pressure more than made up for it" (0/Brien 45).
With the blessing of the Gathings Committee, religious
censorship groups like the National Office for Decent
Literature were able to effectively pressure publishers
without the government ever having to pass a law.16 These
changes were not due only to the actions of the Gathings
Committee? HUAC and the McCarthy hearings also played a
large part in establishing a repressive and unsympathetic
political and cultural climate: "There was a wave of
censorship unparalleled in American history, proceeding on
moral grounds undoubtedly stimulated by the Gathings
Committee and on political grounds due to the efforts of
184
Senator McCarthy. ..." (Schick 86). The combined impact
of these two committees was enough to create restrictions
both from the political and cultural sides: "perhaps the
political pressures were too much, making the trashy
paperback in its full flowering another member of the long
list of Fifties purge victims. . ." (O'Brien 45).
The second approach the committee settled on instead
of direct legislative action was industry self-censorship.
Apparently new to the idea of self-policing, Representative
Kearns was enthusiastic when a witness suggested it: "I
like your suggestion and approach to an idea of censorship
from the publishers' level. I think that is definitely the
most enlightened approach we could make to it. I am rather
amazed that we have not had it before. . . ." (54). This
"enlightened" suggestion resulted in an exhortation for the
industry to police itself, which amounted to, at the same
time, a mandate to self-police images of masculinity as
well; publishers were, in essence, put in charge of
policing cultural representations of masculinity. One
committee member gave the following advice to a publisher:
I would like to see people like yourself who,
after all, do control a very big and a very
important publishing house, just go into it
yourself and cut down a little bit on this. . .
You know when liberty degenerates to license, I
do not care where it is, the end is the police
state or the policing of an industry, or the
policing of thought. . . (307)
185
Some witnesses, such as Black, objected to the whole
concept; " 'self-policing/ within the industry would be an
intolerable denial of freedom of the press. . . and
destruction of the reader's freedom of selection" (383).
Despite such protests, however, after the hearings there
arose a new "self control of the industry [both in the]
book's cover and its contents" (Schick 86), a 'voluntary'
self-policing of softcover representations of gender.
In the end, Congress effected a change in the
paperback industry? the industry's freedom in representing
masculinity in art and text for many years never again
approached that of the period from 1946 to 1952. Just as
the paperback itself had started to become a medium for the
free exploration of postwar concerns about manliness,
Congress's equal concern about masculinity put an end to
such free exploration.
As for Women's Barracks, ironically, the book's
success was its revenge. Its popularity increased due to
so much free national publicity; "Women's Barracks. . .
sales undoubtedly were not harmed by its being a prominent
exhibit of the Gathings Committee" (Bonn Cover 7 0). As the
book's sales increased, the book's character, Claude, in a
sense increasingly had her revenge as well— revenge on all
men who were not masculine. In conducting her homosexual
affairs, Claude "felt that she was revenging herself" on
186
the man she would have preferred to love (82). To the
horror of at least nine members of Congress, in the
representations of one paperback, men continued to pay for
their insufficiency by woman's sexual self-sufficiency.
187
Chapter Four Endnotes
1. The full title of the transcripts is Investigation of
Literature Allegedly Containing Objectionable Material:
Hearings Before the Select Committee on Current
Pornographic Materials. House of Representatives.
Eightv-Second congress. Second Session on H. Res. Nos. 596
and 597. December 1. 2. 3. 4. and 5. 1952. The committee's
final conclusions were contained in Report of the Select
Committee on Current Pornographic Materials. House Report
No. 2510 pursuant to H.R. 596. 82nd Congress, 2nd Session.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952.
2. Curiously, the one source of information about Ezekiel
Gathings is this one-page Newsweek article. It describes
Gathings's paperback 'collection' and the events of the
first meeting of the committee in his office. Apparently
no other mainstream media source covered this initial
meeting. The lack of other sources about Gathings is
curious in itself, indicating a near blindspot in the
national attention.
3. Because Fawcett originated out of sexual sensationalism,
for Fawcett to be put in a position to have to defend the
paperback industry's increasing use of sex was fitting.
Beginning in 192 0, Fawcett's early origins link it to
sexuality for a mass audience: "Wilford H. Fawcett. . .
brought home with him from the First World War a footlocker
filled with jokes. . . and put them in a pamphlet that he
called 'Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang'. . ." (Tebbel IV 386).
During the 192 0s, this pamphlet of jokes gained notoriety,
soon becoming "'a national institution' from which
'millions of American boys learned about sex'" (Tebbel IV
386) .
4. The committee questioned the authenticity and authorship
of the book. Daigh described Women's Barracks to the
committee as "an adaptation of a diary as made by a woman
soldier in the French Army" (9). The committee questioned
him at length for proof that it was a true story. The
committee continually argued that since Daigh did not know
the author personally, but had only met a 'reliable' friend
of the author, that the author's identity was not
verifiable. Although Tereska Torres is credited as the
author, some critics continue to question her authorship
just as the committee did in 1952, claiming instead that
Torres' husband, author Meyer Levin, was largely
responsible for the writing of the book: "One of [Gold
Medal's] biggest and most notorious best sellers was
188
written by a woman— or so it seemed. . . The book was
ostensibly written by Tereska Torres, but Ralph Daigh later
revealed it had been translated by Meyer Levin, not yet
known as a best-selling writer. Levin was also Tereska
Torres's husband" (Davis 155). That the book was
"translated" by Levin still does not discredit Torres as
its original author in French. Contemporary Authors lists
Women's Barracks as authored by Tereska Torres-Levin and
"translated from the original manuscript by husband, Meyer
Levin" (Metzger 432). Whether Levin only translated
Torres's manuscript or had a hand in its creation, as Davis
seems to imply, can only be surmised. It is certainly
plausible that the novel— or diary— is Torres's rather than
Levin's, given her first-hand experience as a teenager in
London when she joined de Gaulle's Free French Forces. As
if to confuse the issue further, the front blurb reads,
"The frank autobiography of a French girl soldier," while
the standard copyright page disclaimer reads "All
characters in this book are fictional." The title page
includes these words, "An Original Gold Medal Novel" (3),
as if the genre distinction were unimportant. In the text
when the narrator hears her name called it is "Tereska"
(151), another detail pointing to either an autobiography
but more likely a fictionalized novel written in
autobiographical form. Finally, the "Translator's Preface"
is signed, not by Meyer Levin, but by George Cummings,
probably another fiction.
5. One underlying assumption about cover art was expressed
by one witness: "With staid jackets, and displayed against
a proper background, many of these books might do no real
harm. In most cases the book's cover will indicate the
publisher's good faith— or lack of it" (366). Witness Mrs.
Banning articulated this view for the committee: "it has
been proven, of course, with the pocket books. . ., even a
serious book, it is necessary to put on a very flashy cover
so the book will be read" (163). In the end, cover art
came in for a large share of the condemnation. The
committee urged the eradication of what were coyly dubbed
"the 3 S's"— i.e., sex, sadism, and the smoking gun. As
the committee put it, "In some cases the outside covers are
more salaciously suggestive than the reading matter
inside."
6. Although these works may have been intended largely for
heterosexual audiences, the documentary on lesbian lives in
the fifties, Forbidden Love, shows such works did have a
large lesbian readership.
7. At times the threats of Communism, homosexuality, and
189
paperbacks became related. Communism was occasionally
imputed as the force behind the influx of so many 'trashy7
paperbacks. One witness testified, "If the communists are
not behind this drive to flood the nation with obscenity,
to weaken the moral fiber of our youth and debauch our
adults, then it is only because the greedy business men are
carrying the ball for them" (in Davis 228). Also, Senator
McCarthy's activities can be directly credited with
inspiring the creation of one of the most lurid of fifties'
paperbacks: "[Spillane] took his plots from the
headlines. . . When Senator McCarthy emerged, Spillane
found himself a new model and a new villain" (Davis 182).
In his 1951 novel, One Lonely Night. Spillane seized on
this new enemy who had been uncovered by McCarthy and gave
Hammer new overwhelming odds to take on single-handedly: "I
had one, good, efficient, enjoyable way of getting rid of
cancerous Commies. I killed them" (Spillane 175).
Although McCarthy did not physically murder suspected
Communists, some historians find his and Hammer's tactics
similar: "Among Hammer's real-life counterparts were
'tail-gunner Joe' McCarthy, the irascible senator from
Wisconsin who waged war on 'Communists' with methods not
unlike those of Spillane's hero" (Graebner 3 6-7). The
connection between one of the most lurid paperback writers
and McCarthy himself illustrates the possible ironies of
the intersection of politics and popular culture. That a
similar committee investigated the paperback, some texts of
which were inspired by a coexisting committee, only
compounds the irony.
Further linking Spillane to the two committees, his
name came out in a McCarthyesque type of cross-examination
of Samuel Black, vice president of Atlantic Coast
Independent Distributors Association, a "flag waving"
witness who documented that he had received endless
complaints about various publications. As the McCarthy
hearings were proceeding in full force across the hall, the
Gathings Hearings did not seem so dissimilar, as when Black
was asked if he would mind "naming the books, for instance,
naming some of the titles. . ." (40). Although essentially
a friendly witness, Black seemed taken aback that he might
have to give specific titles, perhaps getting authors or
publishers into trouble. His reluctance to point a finger
is exhibited in his surprised reaction and repetition of
the question: "Do you want me to name a few names? Is that
what you want me to do?" Reluctantly, he went on to list
some magazines he had refused to distribute, none by major
publishers and most with titles such as Paris Models.
Kevhole. and Peep Show (4 0). But the committee was not
satisfied with these. It was not investigating girlie
magazines: it wanted names of pocket books, the real
190
(pay)dirt. Black was commanded to name some names of
paperbacks; with great hesitation, not unlike a witness in
front of Senator McCarthy, Black singled out several Bantam
and Signet titles. At last, with the greatest of
reluctance, perhaps because of the author's enormous
popularity, he let out one final name: "And we did get
complaints by some of the people, and this might start a
controversy, of I, The Jury, Mickey Spillane's book that
was withdrawn from sale" (41).
8. Even in a Harris Survey in 1965, Americans put
homosexuality among Communists and atheists as doing more
harm than good for America (Lehne 386).
9. For a time, Daigh stayed with his defense of
homosexuality as a popular topic. If homosexuality was
prevalent in the government and widely exposed in the
press, he argued, publishers had, not a right, but a
"responsibility" to meet public demand for more information
about it: "When the public becomes curious about a topic,
and that curiosity is rampant, it is everywhere, it is a
responsibility of a publisher to print meritorious, good
books which relate to that curiosity" (32).
10. Not that the press consistently praised McCarthy, only
that they gave him all the coverage he desired. In an
essay written toward the end of McCarthy's reign, Leslie
Fiedler describes this "paradox": "Between McCarthy and the
press in general there is a state of chronic feud. . . and
yet he has the best press in the country" (Innocence 51).
11. Committee member Mrs. Bosone also expressed her belief
that paperbacks forced themselves on the innocent public
against its will, almost as if the homosexual themes were
seducing readers: "I do not believe that the families and
the homes are asking for the stuff [seen today]. . . I
think it is practically forced upon them by being made
attractive and appealing to sensationalism. . ." (200).
12. Janice Radway in "The Scandal of the Middlebrow"
addresses "the problem of the mass audience in the
twentieth century" and argues that powerful groups like the
editors of book clubs (and here, we see, Congress itself)
had a "fear of the masses" (732).
13. Mentioning the Kinsey report was almost as offensive to
the committee as mentioning rampant homosexuality in the
State department. Critical of the lack of statistical
basis for Freud's generalizations about sex, Kinsey prided
himself on his own statistics (Robinson 47), and he
191
presented statistics showing that "at least 37 per cent of
the male population has some homosexual experience between
the beginning of adolescence and old age" (Kinsey 623).
Kinsey's criteria for "experience" was hardly
all-inclusive: "physical contact to the point of orgasm"
(623). The committee was being confronted with how
widespread homosexuality was, not just in softcover, but in
society at large— even, it might be presumed, among 37
percent of Congresspersons.
14. In the nineteenth century novels were continually
condemned for ruining women. In a sense, men's finding
themselves in a place women were a century before is also
emasculating.
15. Albert Black, a relatively friendly witness, submitted
a somewhat sarcastic statement objecting to the fact that
the committee had not read the entirety of the works being
castigated. He wrote that the American Book Publishers
Council, which he represented,
regrets that the committee adopted the practice of
representing books by excerpts taken out of context.
While we realize how arduous, and perhaps in some
instances unpleasant, it would have been for the
members of the committee and the committee staff to
read each of the books under consideration, it remains
true that there is no short cut to the objective
evaluation of a book. . . (383)
Despite her position on the committee, Mrs. Bosone seemed
to confirm without embarrassment that for her it would
indeed be too "arduous" and "unpleasant" to read such
paperbacks: "I do not read them. I never could read them"
(312). Gathings was, however, the exception to this;
according to Newsweek. "Congressman Gathings and his wife
had plowed through stacks of this sort of stuff. . .
[making Gathings] the worst-read member of Congress" ("No
Witch" 80).
16. Soon after, Victor Weybright wrote in an internal NAL
memo, "Two of our large post-exchange distributors. . . are
now being influenced by the NODL and the Gathings
Committee." To survive in this new, more repressive
cultural climate, Weybright resorted to adding a
Catholic-approved title to his list in order to deflect
further public attacks. Referring to his newly-acquired
religious title, Human Destiny. Weybright wrote:
"Confidentially, of course, the book will afford a certain
amount of protective coloration. . . ." (in Bonn Traffic
149) .
192
CHAPTER FIVE
White Collar Emasculation:
The 6.1. Bill, the Organization, and the Paperback
The thought patterns of the barracks
may not transplant happily to
university halls.
— Walter Spearman,
"When the Veteran Goes
to College" (1946)
Riesman's sweeping characterological
transformation looked like nothing so
much as the feminization of American
men.
— Barbara Ehrenreich,
The Hearts of Men (1983)
In accordance with the Gathings Committee's
perceptions, millions of Americans had come to associate
the paperback book with low price, not quality. But by the
mid-fifties, a new phenomenon was underway, again assisted
by the paperback's earliest and largest reading audience,
World War II G.I.s, especially as many of them entered
193
college and then became white collar workers for large
corporations.
World War II helped spur a tremendous increase in the
size of the federal government; big government in turn
spurred the growth of big business. In the federal
government, civil employees rose in number from 1.4 million
to 3.8 million during the war. Postwar attempts, such as
the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, to dismantle
this unwieldy bureaucracy were largely unsuccessful. The
federal government supported the growth of business during
and after the war by "refraining from bringing anti-trust
suits against even the most blatantly monopolistic
combines" (Snowman 110). Some corporations grew to
enormous proportions— Dow Chemical grew 7 50 percent from
1937 to 1958 (Chafe 113)— and some businesses even began to
resemble "nation states" (Chafe 116). In the heady postwar
economic climate, there were few checks on how big an
organization could become, as society "tended to be
mesmerized by sheer /bigness/" (Snowman 129).
The huge organization became one of two great symbols
of postwar America; the other was the "anonymous executive"
(Snowman 130). The end of the war demarcated a shift in
the center of gravity of the American economy from an
industrial economy to a post-industrial one, with a
resulting increase in the size of the middle class: "As a
194
result of the postwar boom, nearly 60 percent of the
American people had achieved a 'middle-class' standard of
living by the mid-1950s" (Chafe 112).1
Middle class meant far more than merely achieving a
certain threshold of income. Middle class, more and more,
was also beginning to mean white collar; by the mid-fifties
"[m]ore than half the population had reached or was just
about to reach the cherished status of the white collar"
(Goldman 298). At the same time, relative to managerial
positions, fewer workers were required to run an assembly
line: "in the chemical industry, the blue-collar work force
increased by 3 percent between 1947 and 1952, but the
white-collar force increased by 50 percent" (Chafe 116).
By 1956, not only did the middle class outnumber the
working class, white collars also outnumbered blues— a sort
of 'bleaching of America.'
Just as the government had a hand in encouraging the
growth of American corporations, it also contributed to
providing those corporations with an educated work force,
thus indirectly contributing to the rise of the middle
class. Rather than give veterans cash bonuses as had been
the case after previous wars, FDR and Congress, under
pressure from the American Legion, earmarked veteran
compensation for specific purposes: especially, education.
Even before the war was over, the Servicemen's Readjustment
195
Act of 1944, or the "GI Bill of Rights," was influencing
the life course of the G.I.. The federal government in
essence was using its economic resources to help steer a
good portion of returning veterans solidly into the middle
class.
At first it was not clear how many veterans would take
advantage of the educational provisions of the G.I. Bill;
some estimated as few as one percent might enroll (Spearman
31). But by the end of 1945 it was clear that G.I.s were
going back to school in unanticipated numbers, threatening
to overwhelm both the allocated monies and the institutions
themselves. In February 1946 Truman signed a bill
providing an additional $500 million for veterans'
education benefits (New York Times F 15, 1946). Many
colleges saw their enrollments increase by well over 40
percent, greatly taxing their resources. On the most
popular campuses, veterans began to constitute an
overwhelming majority, such as at Columbia University where
8 0 percent of male students were veterans. Many colleges
adopted a double shift or night school to accommodate
veterans. Still, as many as one in five veterans could not
get into the crowded colleges of their choice, and
overcrowded graduate and professional schools especially
had to curb admissions. Many veterans had to compromise
their choice of school or their choice of coursework.
196
Mamie Eisenhower urged more campus expansions to
accommodate this influx of veterans. VA administrators
urged colleges to run three shifts and, if necessary, to
lower standards. Higher education, some criticized, had
become a "production line" for the "mass production of
degrees" (Kinberg 347), or a "postwar experiment in mass
education" (Odegard 478). Citing the "disrupting avalanche
of veteran students" (Wheeler 3 49), critics compared higher
education to the huge postwar manufacturing corporations.
Some questioned the colleges' mission: "The GI invasion has
caused some educators to doubt whether mass higher
education is a feasible ideal" (Burkhardt 479). Still, by
1947, more than four million G.I.s were taking advantage of
.6
the G.I. Bill, a great proportion of whom might never have
otherwise aspired to a college education, thereby altering
the nature of education and swelling the ranks of the
middle class.
Government-supported access to college campuses
encouraged the less privileged to try their hand at middle-
class life, but many of these veterans had trouble
adjusting to college life partly because they were
simultaneously having to adjust from a working-class
background to the middle-class campus milieu. The experts,
the public, and the press commonly overlooked this
difficulty in shifting between classes as an explanation in
197
favor of an apparently simpler one: adjustment from wartime
to peacetime.2 Experts established a "new psychiatric
field" specifically for the purpose of treating veterans'
"adjustment problems" (Deutsch 1). The term "adjustment"
began to take on a negative connotation in the late
forties, and the press sought out the Veterans
Administration concerning the readjustment problem. Some
scoffed at the overemphasis on the G.I.'s maladjustment:
"the idea is absurd that every veteran, merely by virtue of
being a veteran, is psychologically maladjusted" (Spearman
42)— but the same observer felt that college was useful as
a transition from the military: "To many veterans a year at
college, or four years, will provide a period of
readjustment to civilian life" (Spearman 35).
"Adjustment" to postwar American life could not have
been made easier by a shift in social class. Not that all
G.I.s were from working-class backgrounds, but many of
those men whose families had once been middle class had
found the Depression preceding the war economically trying,
in some cases causing downward mobility. Even those men
who had remained solidly in the middle class found
themselves living on subsistence serviceman's wages during
the war and entering a milieu, except perhaps among
officers, that largely approximated working-class values.
198
For these men a return to the States meant some degree of
readjustment to middle-class values.
For more than a third of those who decided to take
advantage of the G.I. Bill's provisions for higher
education, moving "from foxhole to classroom" (Spearman 31)
did prove to be a major readjustment: 35% of all veterans
that started school soon quit, and for some portion of
these the unfamiliarity of the higher social class of the
academic milieu contributed to their discomfort and
subsequent decision to leave. The campus seemed more
foreign to these men than the villages they had recently
occupied overseas. For these veterans, campus society
presented a whole new world to figure out, one that was a
far cry from the camaraderie of the military, where men of
all classes mixed: many "thought of the university as a
preserve of the rich" (Goldman 12), and found the new
environment intimidating. They did not enter that new
society without difficulties; the university community
presupposed a shared social class that many of these G.I.s
were unfamiliar with. For them, the anxiety caused by this
class shift on top of all the other adjustments they were
undergoing proved too much to tolerate. The military was
regarded in the academy as the realm of physical, working-
class approaches to problem solving:
the greatest problem with the returning veteran
is that he will expect so much so immediately.
199
The habit of war encourages direct action to
secure demonstrable physical results. And this
habit the soldier will bring back with him. He
will know how assembling his M-l and practicing
on the range made him a better rifleman. And he
will demand to know what he will. . . "get out
of" a liberal education. (Stauffer 28)
The belief that the G.I. was physically oriented created
skepticism about his willingness to receive a theoretical
education: "Boy Scout training— a Boy Scout knife, for that
matter— is more valued in the field than a dozen college
courses" (Stauffer 33). The "thought patterns of the
barracks" (Spaulding 345) were seen to promote a working-
class approach to problem-solving that was antithetical to
campus life: the veteran "has attained a physical. . .
adulthood without a corresponding growth mentally and
perceptively" (Spaulding 345).
In this view, the G.I. equated higher education with
job training, just as target practice had trained G.I.s for
battle. Postwar economic necessity further increased the
G.I.'s desire for job preparation rather than for a liberal
education, even influencing the G.I.'s choice of courses:
they elect "practical subjects." This has caused
some academic tragedies. While in service,
thousands of veterans gained high manual
dexterity in operating radar, radio and fire
control instruments. In many cases this manual
skill has been mistaken for an intellectual
aptitude, and they have elected and failed in
engineering, mathematics and physics, for which
they had neither natural talent nor adequate
preparation. (Kenny 482)
200
This line of reasoning about the military's
'plowshare' approach to learning anticipates another
criticism: that the military meant conformity and thus a
lack of intellectual curiosity in the veteran student: "The
Army seeks to standardize its products and inevitably tends
to stamp out originality. 'Keep in step!' is the constant
command. A college does its best to encourage original
thinking and individuality. The Army does not want a man
to ask why" (Spearman 32). The Army, then, was held partly
responsible for the trend toward conformity among the war
generation, prefiguring the critiques of social conformity
that emerged in paperback shortly thereafter.
But was the G.I. student really a conformist stumbling
through college in search of a practical vocation? It is
true that 3 5% dropped out— partly, as I have suggested,
because the university community presupposed a shared
social class, the conventions of which many of the working
class G.I.s were unprepared for. It is also true that many
veterans sought practical majors to prepare for careers,
but this may have been because of the economic times.
Still, in contrast to the purely pragmatic view, veterans
might also be credited with approaching college with "a
seriousness never before seen on the American college
campus" (Kenny 482) . Veterans often outranked civilians
scholastically: "the GIs have been, if anything, more
201
serious and more intelligently industrious than their
civilian fellow students" (Odegard 478). Syracuse
University7s chancellor called them "by far the ablest
students American college teachers have been privileged to
instruct" (Tolley 4 79). Nor was it only in the classroom
that the veteran excelled. For some, the veteran's
relative maturity in age was a welcome relief from the
sophomoric antics and disregard for scholarship the younger
students often displayed: "[Veterans] have viewed with
better perspective the adolescent mummery of the social
fraternities. . . and the anti-intellectualism of so much
that in prewar days passed for 'college spirit'" (Odegard
4 77). The class background and the military orientation of
the G.I., far from making him anti-intellectual, made him
all the more eager not to waste his time at college with
the usual undergraduate attitudes: "there is no denying
that the presence of the veterans has quickened the
intellectual life of our colleges" (Tolley 480).
Many veteran students were so serious about their new
intellectual development, in fact, that they actually began
to read books not assigned by their instructors. The
G.I.'s positive wartime experiences with the Armed Services
Editions can be partially credited for the veteran's
interest in recreational reading. Paperbacks had proved a
diversion in battle, and so were naturally what veterans
202
would seek to read as they stretched out on campus lawns in
their leisure time. This habit of reading for pleasure
cultivated in wartime now helped create "a rebellious
minority who were defying campus conventions, reading with
avid excitement the products of the American literary
flowering that accompanied their years in college. . ."
(Goldman 69).
There was a market on campus for the quality paperback
not just as leisure reading, but also as textbooks, an
untapped market "that earlier paperback imprints. . . had
largely ignored" (Bonn Cover 207). College professors
could not routinely assign softcover works as texts,
however, until publishing firms changed some of their
marketing practices. It remained to be seen which
publisher would be innovative enough to succeed with this
market.
First, this publishing firm, unlike the mass paperback
publishers, would have to keep its titles in print longer
than a few months. The emerging postwar college survey
course required, instead of just one large hardbound text,
numerous inexpensive softcover texts:
Paperbacks were originally conceived as books to
be bought on the spur of the moment by individual
customers. After the war, the growing student
population and the teaching trend of stressing
survey courses made increasing use of serious
titles brought out by firms such as Penguin,
Pocket Books and NAL. . . (Schick 117)
203
Because college professors designed courses to be taught
semester after semester, they had little use for the
ephemeral softcover edition of the day that rarely stayed
long in print. Another barrier to teachers assigning
paperbacks as texts was that most paperbacks were
distributed through magazine distributors, hindering access
to such books by campus bookstores. The slim discounts
given on mass paperbacks designed for the newsrack also
made college bookstores reluctant to carry them.
Despite New American Library's apparent advantage in
capturing this new college market, on the whole it failed
to win this market. NAL's Mentor Books was at first
clearly the best contender for the label of quality, with
its "serious works in the fields of science, archeology,
economics, history and philosophy" (Davis 118). In
addition, Mentor Books was already widely known by the
public and thus became the "direct forerunner of the
American trade paperback by attracting a broad spectrum of
readers, especially on campuses. . ." (Bonn Cover 60),
where they "began to gain a toehold" (Davis 207).
But Mentor Books was never perceived as consistently
approaching the level of intellectual seriousness needed to
win the college market. Some of this perception was due to
Mentor's distribution methods and its sales techniques. No
matter how serious a Mentor text, it was still sold cheaply
and printed in high-volume press runs, which meant it had
to be mass marketed. One result was that a serious work
such as Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa had to
include a front cover illustration that would generate
impulse sales. ' Robert Jonas, the most influential
paperback cover artist, depicted a crudely-drawn, bare
chested dancing couple with the woman's breasts only
partially concealed by her arm. The blurb inside the front
cover promised a "frank" book about "pre-marital and post-
marital sex taboos" and a "frank" discussion of primitive
homosexuality (Mead 1). Such a cover made the paperback
edition of Mead's book a fast-mover on the newsrack, but
too risque for the college bookstore. High-volume
publishing required such advertising, but seriously
compromised Mentor's long-term chances with the college
market.
Another approach was required. A young Columbia
graduate, Jason Epstein— like Donald Geddes, Victor
Weybright, Ralph Daigh, and other far-sighted softcover
editors before him— took notice of the demographics of the
war generation, its influx into the university, and its
inability to afford hardback books. Rather than make a
deal with a softcover publisher with his ideas, however,
Epstein approached Doubleday. Tebbel describes Epstein as
"a brilliant, strong-minded young man, regarded as a
205
maverick by his elders, who had a difficult struggle in
convincing Doubleday executives" to finance his plan (IV
114-15). Epstein succeeded only because of the
thoroughness of his preliminary study, which included "an
evaluation of. . . the growing college population. . . as
potential buyers" (Schick 181). Epstein wrote, "We were
trying to reach a much smaller and more specific audience,
mainly academic, literary, highbrow" (in Tebbel IV 3 50).
The first of Epstein's innovations was in
distribution. More than a decade into the softcover
revolution, paperbacks were still excluded from legitimate
book distribution outlets such as bookstores and libraries;
like itinerant wares, they still had to be hawked in the
streets and train stations. Whereas previously mass market
houses offered no more than a 2 0 percent discount, Epstein
proposed the full 4 0 percent discount to which bookstores
were accustomed (Davis 2 09), at last allowing the paperback
access to campus bookstores.
The next Epstein innovation was price. Marketers had
always considered paperbacks a very price-sensitive
commodity; Pocket Books had been considered daring when it
priced Spock's book as high as thirty-five cents. Not
until 1950, when NAL raised the price of some works to 3 5
and 50 cents, was it even possible to publish longer works
without abridgments. But most paperbacks still cost a
2 06
quarter. Epstein went far beyond what mass marketers had
envisioned, planning "titles which would appeal to the
mature and educated adult who could afford to pay from
sixty-five cents to $1.45" (Schick 86-7).
Another hurdle Epstein had to overcome was the
"increasingly shorter life on the racks" of mass paperbacks
(Tebbel IV 350-51). Epstein proposed keeping titles in
print, which would greatly facilitate the college teacher
in designing courses. Further, the books' design,
"specifically tailored for the needs of colleges" (Davis
2 08), would include better paper, durable covers, and
subdued cover art. The college-oriented, quality
paperback, aimed at the market the war generation provided,
was created, not by a softcover publisher, but by
Doubleday; the imprint was called Anchor Books and was
launched in 1953.
Despite skepticism, the new line proved an immediate
success, with 10,000 copies sold in only two weeks and
"with a million copies sold in two years— almost as many to
colleges as to the general public" (Madison 461). This
success not only surprised Doubleday, but also "astounded
the industry" (Tebbel IV 114-15), which in 1954 bestowed
its coveted Carey-Thomas Award for creative publishing for
the first time on a softcover imprint, Anchor Books (Schick
182). Anchor's success had a general influence on what
207
works were reprinted in softcover, causing a "surprising
increase in scholarly and serious softcover publications,"
and with nonfiction increasing "from 18 to 2 8 percent of
the total softcover output in 1955" (Schick 89).
Epstein's brainchild soon caused a major shake-up in the
industry, as Anchor Books was widely imitated— first by
Knopf (who hired Epstein away from Doubleday), then Dutton,
then Viking— until by mid-decade all the important
hardcover publishers had imitated Doubleday's lead, making
the new field increasingly crowded but also stealing back
some of the economic thunder the softcover reprint houses
had until then enjoyed.
David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (hardcover,
Doubleday, 1950) was one of the first titles chosen for the
Anchor Books imprint. Its popularity with the college
reader was seen partly to predict the fate of the venture.
Because The Lonely Crowd was a long work, Anchor would need
to sell 27,000 copies just to break even: "Could Doubleday
really sell twenty-seven thousand copies of The Lonely
Crowd?" (Davis 206). Considering that this was a paperback
to be sold for the then-unheard of price of 9 5 cents, the
prospect seemed dubious; yet, at 60,000 copies, The Lonely
Crowd quickly became Anchor's bestseller. Its uncluttered
cover announced its seriousness with college audiences: on1
its dark blue ground were positioned four shaded pyramids
208
pointing toward the center. Back-cover blurbs further
emphasized its worth; Lionel Trilling is quoted on the
cover as calling it "one of the most important books about
America." Hardly approaching the daring of mass-marketed
Mentor covers, Talcott Parsons is quoted as saying the book
has "raised some eyebrows."
Partly because of the paperback's enthusiastic
reception by college students, Anchor Books had "an early
and durable bestseller" (Bonn Cover 61). Considering that
Riesraan's was essentially a scholarly sociological work
previously published in hardback by Yale University Press,
the work was receiving an uncommonly wide audience, even
making a Time cover story (July 18, 1955). In choosing The
Lonely Crowd as one of Anchor's first titles, Epstein had
created a 'scholarly bestseller,' until then an oxymoron.
Riesman's ideas had great influence on the American public,
and eventually on other writers as well; "Measured by its
influence. . . [it has been called] the major sociological
work of the past twenty-five years" (Trachenberg 13) . . This
book's wide audience and great influence can be attributed
partly to its subject matter but almost equally to its form
of publication. Without Anchor Books, this work's
importance would have been limited to a narrower and more
elite group of hardbound book buyers, and Riesman's impact
on an entire generation would have been greatly diminished.
209
Without the introduction of the 'quality paperback,'
coincidentally at the very time the public was apparently
ready to read Riesman's ideas, this work might never have
influenced the thinking of so many readers.
Epstein's'invention of the serious paperback, along
with the increasingly widespread interest among the war
generation in books, especially sociological works which
examined American values, brought about a new, mid-fifties
publishing phenomenon: a distinct paperback genre of
protest works. Just as Doubleday shortly found its
softcover imprint widely imitated, Riesman too soon found
himself in good company. His inquiry into postwar white-
collar character was soon widely imitated:
The Lonely Crowd spawned a host of works of
popular sociology, such as William Whyte's The
Organization Man (1956) and Vance Packard's The
Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Status Seekers
(1959), works which added catchphrases to the
public vocabulary of self-analysis. (Trachenberg
15) 3
For the rest of the decade, such works complaining about
the loss of the American's individuality flourished.
Although fiction was included, the genre of protest works
appearing at mid-decade generally was nonfiction and tended
to mount direct attacks on the effects the corporate
climate was having on the male personality. Barbara
Ehrenreich labeled this spate of books "the fifties
literature of male protest" (31).
210
The label of this body of works as a "protest1 1 genre
seems justified. William Whyte's work, for instance, has
been described as "part-satirical" and "hortatory," and he
himself has been called a "dissident."'4 All of the authors
were in similar ways critical of what American men were
becoming. Most of the works have coined phrases that live
on in the American vocabulary: "the organization man," "the
man in the gray flannel suit," and "the lonely crowd." The
negative connotations of these phrases illustrate the
critical attitude of the authors.
"[E]ncouraging the few rebels of the oncoming
r~\
'-'generation" (Goldman 3 04) , the "fifties literature of male
protest" was eagerly read by thousands of college students,
especially male veterans, indicating a degree of discontent
not often associated with the decade: "Although not very
many students of the 1950s took to the streets in protest,
they were reading books like David Riesman's The Lonely
Crowd. Erich Fromm's Man for Himself, and William Whyte's
The Organization Man" (Chafe 143). Without marching, this
group of readers was still doing some serious questioning.
Rebelling against the gray flannel suit, even if only
in one's reading, indicated a questioning attitude not
often attributed to the fifties. What was it these
thousands of students in dormitories and libraries found so
fascinating in these softcover works chronicling the
211
changes in male character? Was it that these authors
somehow put into words what many male students were already
anxious about, their own (and in many cases, their sons')
masculinity? Such concerns about masculinity had been
partly articulated by Spock, and even, in his own way, by
Spillane, but middle-class readers were perhaps seeking
new, more theoretical ways to articulate such concerns.
Beyond the mere display of muscles and sadism in works like
Spillane's, thoughtful readers of the middle class sought a
new vocabulary with which to wrestle with the problem of
masculine identity. Sex and violence were one route, but
Riesman and his imitators succeeded in putting these
concerns into new, more abstract vocabulary, not in terms
of muscles, but in terms of "character"; the subtitle of
Riesman's book is "A Study of the Changing American
Character."
The shift from 25-cent novels to one-dollar
sociological treatises and the shift from working-class
criteria for masculine behavior to middle-class concerns is
accompanied by a shift in the types of questions and in the
type of evidence deemed admissible concerning issues of
masculinity. For university and white-collar readers,
fists and sexual encounters gave way to weightier questions
about 'conformity' and the American social character, and
212
'character' became the battleground of many of these
inquiries.
In the view of these works, the tremendous growth in
the size of bureaucracies, in and of itself, was having an
enormous impact on postwar culture and especially making
new demands on individuals and individualism- The
individual personality was being constrained because, in a
large organization, so many people had to get along with
each other. Conformity, whether an actual problem or not,
was perceived as one of the day's most pressing concerns.
Especially among the middle class, conformity was seen as
resulting from the growth of postwar institutions that
demanded progressively less deviance from a narrow range of
the 'normal.'
Why would the organization demand conformity? For
one, after the war,, organizations were absorbing thousands
of individuals, making impossible the recognition of the
individuality of each. Further, the mobility and
transitoriness of postwar American culture, in which
executives were increasingly transferred from city to city,
from corporate branch to branch, were seen to require a
standardization of personalities that could be interchanged
freely with little readjustment. The increase of fellow
executives and also of information itself made self
directed individualists less valuable to a corporation than
213
1
those who were in tune and in step.
Organization men more and more tended to be 'people
people.' Just to get along with so many co-workers
demanded a new, more cooperative male persona, but this was
more than mere pleasantness: "huge corporate enterprises
created a new managerial personality. . . 'The organization
man' was as much involved in mastering the art of
interpersonal relationships as in accomplishing the
professional task before him" (Chafe 116). The new
executive personality, rather than being "inner-directed,"
was labelled by Riesman as "other-directed," allowing him
to "move from group to group in a huge bureaucracy, sensing
at any given moment which exact combination of personality
characteristics and viewpoints would lead to maximum
success" (Chafe 116). Further, the more employees in the
organization, the more middle-level managers were needed,
creating the "emergence of a new managerial class" (Chafe
115) with its new managerial personality and the ability to
manage and get along with an increasing number of workers.
In The Organization Man. William Whyte too was
interested not so much in the "economic and political
consequences of big organization," but more in the
"personal impact that organization life has had on the
individuals within it" (Whyte 4). His book might easily
have been subtitled 'the decline of individuality in
214
corporate males.' Like Riesman, Whyte coins terms for this
shift; American men have moved from the "Protestant Ethic,"
or the self-driven man, to the "Social Ethic" (6), in which
one constantly seeks social adjustment. With the loss of
individuality accompanying the new Social Ethic, Whyte
believed men had become more interested in "adjustment,
rather than change" (Whyte 41). Emphasis on the Social
Ethic promoted "teamwork" at the expense of "the instinct
for individual excellence" (Dubbert 246), and the price of
adjustment was not only a man's individualism, but "his
overall sense of manhood" (Dubbert 246). Although Whyte
makes a "pessimistic forecast" for the "social-adjustment
type," in the end he feels that this is the "kind of man"
the large postwar organization seeks (Whyte 110).
In perhaps the first definition of the 'sensitive
male' (but not in a purely positive sense), Riesman used
the analogies of the internal gyroscope versus the
outwardly-turned radar, which was ever "attuned to the
changing nuances of the external" (Graebner 109). Because
the other-directed type was "more sensitive to peer and
social opinion," he was "better suited. . . to working in
modern bureaucracies" (Graebner 77), institutions which
were at least partly responsible for the new wave of
conformity. 'Conformity' was the code word throughout the
mid-fifties for the loss of men's individuality.
215
Conformity denoted the erosion of a character trait seen as
central to the American way of life. In the grips of the
postwar corporation, men's characters had not only become
sensitive, they had become like putty.
Part of the male's eagerness to fit in was due to
prolonged financial deprivation. Entry into the
organization provided many men, for the first time since
the 1929 Stock Market Crash, with the sense of confidence
that can result from financial well-being. Even military
service, with its assured but meager pay, had not erased
the economic effects on men of the Depression. After the
war, many men were eager to seek out corporate security,
even at the expense of their individuality. Whyte was
critical of this group of men largely for what he perceived
as their "preference for the big corporation. . . on the
ground of security" (Whyte 7 6). Once these young men
reached the corporation, Whyte complained, in the name of
security they only wanted to climb so far up the ladder;
they wanted to be successful, "[b]ut not too successful"
(Whyte 145). "Rather than climb the perilous heights of
occupational mobility, they hoped to go just high enough to
find a secure resting place" (Filene 170), and they were
"primarily seeking security, not achievement, and in the
middle circles of bureaucracy they felt more secure than at
the top" (Filene 171). Whyte quoted the students of the
216
fifties as saying, "You can make a very good living in the
middle levels. . . [enjoying] success without tears" (Whyte
145) .
There was, however, never any real security in the
middle: "There were no plateaus in the white-collar world"
(Filene 170). And as it turned out, increased financial
security had other personal costs. Insecurity about
finances was soon to be replaced by an entirely new set of
insecurities: the uncertainty of not knowing where one
stood, the anxiety of having to survive in an environment
where one's worth was based, not on achievement, but on an
adaptive personality: "'How well do you fit into the
group?'. . . Because the question focused more on
personality (who are you?) than on production (what is your
skill?), employees had to measure themselves by fluid
criteria" (Filene 171). Whyte saw one of the main sources
of anxiety in corporate America as the absence of any
clear-cut criteria against which a man might accurately
judge himself.
Although they never use the term 'masculinity,' the
works of Riesman, Whyte, and the others of this genre
contributed to the growing belief that men had lost their
sense of masculine identity, that using one's "radar" to
discern others' expectations failed to provide legitimate
clues as to how to be a man. Turning outward had instead
217
undermined any sort of manliness that the inner.-directed
man had once possessed. Changes in the American business
climate were seen as putting new and unprecedented burdens
on men to change their personalities to fit the new, more
bureaucratic organizational needs. Riesman's radar
metaphor could easily be compared to 'woman's intuition.'
The organization's need for its employees to conform was
seen as leading to anxiety, insecurity, and, worst of all,
emasculation: "men are now expected to demonstrate the
manipulative skill in interpersonal relations formerly
reserved for women under the heading. . . of intuition"
(Hacker in Carrigan 73).
Being dependent on others' evaluations, white collar
workers learned to manipulate their coworkers by
manipulating their own personalities. This was practicing
what was perceived as a feminine art. The other-directed
man was a feminized man. Although Riesman, as an objective
social scientist, did not call this trend emasculation,
"his imagery hinted, not so subtly, that other-directedness
was somehow less masculine. . . 'limp,' and confront[ing]
only the 'softness' of their fellows" (Ehrenreich 34).
But image-control and mediating the perceptions of
others is indirect and tenuous. There are no objective
proofs; one can only make attempts to manage how others
view oneself. Acting masculine is as close as one can come
218
to being masculine. Without clear guidelines for assessing
themselves, men had nothing to adjust their behavior to.
Whyte asks rhetorically, "Adjustment to what? Nobody
really knows— and the tragedy is that they don't realize
that the so-confident seeming other people don't either"
(Whyte 441). Whyte's vision was of a hierarchy of men all
pretending to be confidently masculine, none letting on how
insecure they really feel. The criteria for judging
masculinity had become so nebulous that everyone was forced
to pretend: "What is normalcy? We practice a great mutual
deception" (Whyte 441). All that men had to go on are the
"efforts of people like themselves to seem as normal as
others" (441). With such indefinite guidelines as these,
it was no wonder that men, fearing extremes, rushed toward
the center in hopes of not appearing deviant.5
With each man faking the look of normality and
thinking everyone but himself was confident, Whyte paints a
portrait of a very insecure group of men indeed. Riesman
too "picks up the sense of anxiety" (Tallack 26) and
insecurity males felt. The other-directed man is by
definition insecure, essentially an "anxious, uncertain
conformist" (Trachenberg 14).
Whether called the "Social Ethic" or "other-
directedness," conformity was seen in this genre of writing
as one of the ways middle-class American masculinity was
being compromised. Conformity was not apparently seen as a
problem affecting working-class masculinity, however, as
borne out by Riesman's decision to focus on white collar
bureaucracies rather than manufacturing-based producers,
"corporations rather than factories" (Tallack 221).
Likewise, Whyte's nostalgia for the Protestant Ethic
"stress[ing] the virtue of work" (Trachenberg 14) embodied
the values of the American working-class among whom
masculinity was presumably still secure. It was "the
elevation of many former workers into the white collar
ranks [that] had contradictory implications for manhood"
(Stearns 132). The blue-collar worker still had tangible
criteria for judging his performance; insecurity was only
an issue for the new white collar worker who accepted the
Social Ethic. The shift from blue-collar worker to white
collar was part of what Riesman and Whyte were in fact
analyzing without necessarily acknowledging. This class
shift had more fundamental implications than just salary or
standard of living, but also included altered criteria for
judging oneself as masculine.
Much more than a change of uniform, the changing of
shirts from blue denim to white button-down involved subtle
implications for manhood. In general, blue collar work
involved the use of a man's muscles and sweat, serving,
much like the battlefield in wartime, to confirm a man's
masculinity through physicality. The white collar, on the
other hand, is pure, pristine, and too easily stained
yellow by the sweat that accompanies vigorous physical work
to take the chance of any undue exertion. The heavily
starched white shirt shows perspiration in the armpit far
too readily to be worn during physical labor; the white
collar is designed to stay dry and be restricted to indoor
(in)activity. Physical exertion is abhorred by the very
fabric of the uniform. Power, no longer muscular, is
exerted not physically but in the abstract. The muscle in
the body had been tangible, but white-collar power rested
on intangibles: hierarchy, promotions, relationships,
status. And like power, the confirmation of masculinity
also had become abstract, harder to ascertain. Where
manual labor had incontrovertibly confirmed masculinity,
the organization could not give this same confirmation,
thus constituting a problem for masculinity on a par with
postwar demobilization and redomestication. To leave
behind the blue-collar conditions validating masculinity
and instead enter this feminized world where strongly
masculine characteristics were deviant was to enter a kind
of limbo, where one's masculine status was largely
unknowable. Riesman and Whyte sensed the implications for
men of this shift from clear-cut physical criteria for
judging men to less clear, interpersonal criteria, and
221
wrote about it using their own terminology and their own
rhetorical strategies.6
Central to the approach of Riesman and Whyte was the
rhetorical use of nostalgia, especially nostalgia for the
character of men from the past to critique the present.
Their explanation of what had happened to American manhood
privileges the construction of a kind of 'paradise lost'
when men were men. Present-day, other-directed men who are
feminized because they are responsive to conditions and
others around them are contrasted unfavorably with the
nineteenth-century inner-directed man, the image of whom
may have been less an accurate portrayal than merely an
American ideal, "cherished as a mythological figure"
(Hofstadter 263). Cutting a fine figure against which to
compare the organization man, the nineteenth-century robber
baron had built "huge industrial combinations, often at the
expense of other men. . . justified by the logic of social
Darwinism. Such men epitomized David Riesman's inner-
directed men. ..." (Dubbert 81). In comparison with the
nineteenth-century, self-made, inner-directed man, the
twentieth-century other-directed man paled— or, more aptly,
blushed.7
Compared to Riesman, Whyte was far "angrier and more
openly nostalgic for competitive capitalism and rugged
individualism" (Ehrenreich 35). Whyte was "not only
222
nostalgic for the old ethic of the rough-and-tumble days
but. . . ideologically committed to it" (Dubbert 245).
Whyte can be criticized for using the past as a mere
rhetorical device, constructing it as less complicated,
idealistic, and'simply more masculine. Because of this,
historian William O'Neill faults Whyte for misusing
historical methodology (O'Neill 27). Riesman's Edenic past
was the nineteenth century, while Whyte is more prone to
use the "previous generation" or America of the 193 0s, as
in 'compared to when I was in college in the thirties.'
Whyte uses his nostalgia for his own past to criticize the
college students of the day— paradoxically his book's most
eager readers: "in comparison with the agitation of the
thirties, there is no real revolution in them" (Whyte 171).
These students, "in contrast to their fellows of twenty
years ago, want 'to be told'" what to do (Whyte 72).
Nostalgia for 'masculinity lost' is partly motivated
by a postwar shift in women's status and a resulting
nostalgia in men for 'femininity lost.' In the fifties,
sociological methodologies had yet to be critiqued for
drawing conclusions about 'people in general' based only on
studies of men. In 1958, Lawrence Kohlberg used male
subjects to set a criteria for human morality which female
subjects fell short of, as Carol Gilligan has shown in In a
Different Voice (1982).8 Male authors such as Riesman and
223
Whyte were so nostalgic not only because men appeared more
feminized, but also because women seemed more masculine.
Although the wartime change in women's status threatened
many men and thus was a subtext underlying much of the
analysis of lost masculinity, the most notable feature of
women in these texts is their absence. This, of course, is
not unusual for works of the fifties— "as with most 1950s
books, there is a blindness to women in The Lonely Crowd"
(Tallack 222)— but the way in which these silences are
played out is telling, and the scant references to women
help confirm how important their altered place in society
is to the works despite their apparent omission.
Tellingly, it is never implied that women have become
more other-centered. Despite Riesman's scrupulous
reference to the other-directed "person" (35, 37, etc.), he
is clearly only concerned about other-directedness in the
American male. Riesman's table of contents— including such
chapter titles as "Men at Work" and "Bringing up Father"— ■
reflect this bias. Until several hundred pages into The
Organization Man. Whyte likewise makes no reference to
women, and then only as a reference to caretakers for the
suburban houses men come home to. When Riesman refers to
women, he objectifies or sexualizes them, as in "Sex: the
Last Frontier" and "Sociability and the Privatization of
Women" (Riesman 7-13). This latter section describes how
224
housewives begin to bore men: "Such women can easily become
so uninteresting that they will remain psychological
prisoners. . . (Riesman 321). Riesman's only response
is that the woman's plight "increases the guilts of
everyone else" (321), and he examines her deprivation only
from its effect on her husband.
If we understand that Riesman's lament is not for
"other-directed persons" but for other-directed males, we
see that the alarm he is sounding for his readers is for
the erosion of traditional masculinity. For "social
character" we might well substitute 'masculine character.'
The malaise Riesman warns about is purely masculine. Since
other-directedness meant the "perpetual alertness to
signals from others" (Ehrenreich 33)— a skill women had
long ago needed to master— a book warning the reader about
other-directed women would have been as "unsurprising as a
book on, say, fair-skinned Anglo-Saxons, because other-
directedness was built into the female social role as wives
and mothers" (Ehrenreich 33). The shock of Riesman's text,
what scandalized the public sufficiently to make "other-
directed" a common phrase, was its subtext, that the
postwar man was becoming more like a woman.
One of the underlying causes of men's emasculation was
women themselves. Women's new sexual liberation has
created new and unwelcome demands on men that undermine a
man's own sense of masculinity. The war, in Riesman's
view, has allowed women certain gains that tend to
compromise men's position: "As with other 'minorities,' the
education and partial emancipation of women puts the
'majority' (in this case the men) in an ambiguous position"
(Riesman 319). Men lament the loss of the old order and
feel their masculinity being undermined by women's new
sexual demands: "[Men] are no longer protected against
women by a rigid etiquette or other formal arrangements"
(319). Using his favorite rhetorical device, Riesman
nostalgically recalls women's former lack of sexual
freedom: "women make sexual demands and offer sexual
potentialities that their mothers would never have dreamed
of" (319). In his nostalgia, Riesman disregards the former
exploitation of women: "the inner-directed man, who could
still patronize women, complained to his mistress that his
wife did not understand him. . ." (319). Women's "partial
[sexual] emancipation," considered only from the male
perspective, places additional burdens on "already anxious"
men who "do not always welcome the 'cooperation' and
companionship from the opposite sex that the dropping of an
older tariff permits and in a way requires" (319). Riesman
admits that men resent women's new "cooperation" (i.e.,
demands for sexual equality) and thereby identifies one of
the motives for works like his own.
226
Riesman has put his finger on the motivation for the
postwar backlash against women's wartime gains and the
pressure for women to return to earlier oppressed roles:
"These uneasinesses among the newly liberated are one
source of the current attempts to re-privatize women by
redefining their role in some comfortably domestic and
traditional way" (320). If men cannot "re-privatize"
women, however, their only other option is to exclude them
from their companionship. All-male groups specifically
excluding women served as convenient male retreats from
women's sexual demands. Riesman's phrasing avoids any
responsibility for choosing to frequent such sanctuaries:
"[men] are hardly able to avoid many stag occasions, into
which some men retreat from the liberations forced on them
by the new intersex ethics" (321). To "retreat," for
Riesman, implies more than a physical retreat, but also an
emotional one, a regressive psychological flight. Women's
sexual demands make men long for childhood when no such
demands could be made of them. In another nostalgic
passage, Riesman writes that as men experience "the limits,
pressures and guilts of emancipation" (321), their own
boyhoods suddenly seem too long ago and far too brief:
As the latency period in childhood gets shorter
and shorter, so that boys can be boys only from
six to ten, adult males try to create or retain
artificial latency periods in which they will not
be under pressure from women— or worse, from male
227
judgments as to how they are succeeding with
women. (321)
Men refuse to grow up into mature heterosexual adulthood,
an escape facilitated by all-male institutions such as the
army or large organizations that help men escape from the
"pressure from women" to be adult partners.
A woman's satisfaction had not generally been so much
of an issue, but after the war, as women began making more
demands of men, chances for male sexual failure increased:
"As [women] become knowing consumers, the anxiety of men
lest they fail to satisfy the women also grows" (Riesman
110). Sexually, the inner-directed male had only his own
pleasure to consider; being other-directed is to suffer
anxiety for another's satisfaction.
The demands being made by women and the bureaucratic
system together were threatening to crack up the American
male. The most extreme scenario included the possibility
of men's -failure to be heterosexual: "David Riesman has
pointed out that college men these days are much more
fearful of possibly being homosexual than they were in
earlier generations; actually, this fear is pervasive in
the middle class generally" (Brenton 162). Whereas the
working-class male was seen to remain secure enough in his
masculinity, sexuality, and heterosexuality, the middle-
class male was perceived to be in deep trouble— on the
verge, according to Riesman, of abandoning heterosexuality
228
altogether. Even the organization recognized this danger
and increasingly demanded proof of its males'
heterosexuality; bachelors were pressured by their
employers into marrying so as not to be labelled homosexual
(Brenton 162). Not coincidentally, Riesman's negative
example of a previous other-directed society was ancient
Greece, "a society that educated readers would associate
with the acceptance of male homosexuality1 1 (Ehrenreich 34).
Increased homosexuality partly resulted from increased
burdens on masculinity— or, in the view of one of Riesman's
contemporaries, "The 'flight from masculinity' evident in
male homosexuality may be. . . one index of the burdens of
masculinity" (Hacker in Carrigan 74).
Among the rhetorical strategies available to alarmists
about American masculinity, the specter of homosexuality is
the most alarming. Because both Riesman and Whyte are
constructing arguments about masculinity, I would like to
suggest that we might view their books neither at face
value nor as accurate studies of diminishing postwar
masculinity and individuality. In light of the whole genre
of the "fifties' literature of male protest," we must probe
beneath the claims of Riesman and Whyte to see what
function a whole class of such emerging works might have
served. With the threat to men of women's wartime economic
empowerment, the portrayal of the male as being besieged by
postwar pressures might indicate another agenda. Books of
this genre constructed a picture of a threatened
masculinity and, through hyperbole, elevated the male
"crisis" to the highest of national concerns; by alarming
the reading public, these books not only sold well, but
also managed to usurp cultural attention to the masculine
cause. These books shifted limited cultural attention away
from other emerging and competing causes, such as women's,
blacks', or homosexuals'.9 We should remain skeptical
about "crises" of masculinity, always considering how they
function to maintain the status quo. We must emphasize the
possibility of the constructedness of the 'beleaguered
male,' whose plight has repeatedly been exaggerated, with
the ensuing alarm having its (intended or unintended)
effect: to draw cultural attention away from women,
working-class, and ethnic minorities for the benefit of
middle-class males. If masculinity is a construct, so too
a "crisis" of masculinity can be a construct. We can read
Riesman's and Whyte's critiques of the corporate male
personality as a polemic that functioned to win sympathy
for the middle-class male's plight. That the alarm about
male conformity became such a widespread national concern,
virtually unopposed, supports the view that such writings
hit a nerve.
230
The influence of David Riesman's perspective, made
widespread by its softcover format, and reiterated by
William Whyte, among others, was soon extended beyond the
realm of nonfiction to fictional works about the
organization man, including Sloan Wilson's The Man in the
Gray Flannel Suit and Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite,
also made into films. Both works seem to bear out the
views of American masculinity held by Riesman and Whyte.
Like the nonfiction, the fiction of the male protest
genre also benefitted from softcover publication.
Published simultaneously in 1953 in hardback (by Houghton
Mifflin) and softcover (as Ballantine's first title),
Executive Suite racked up enviable reviews and an admirable
sales record, in eight months selling 22,000 copies in
hardcover and 475,000 in paperback, "even w[inning] a
favorable nod from the dean of reviewers, Orville Prescott"
of the New York Times (Davis 162). Three years later,
Sloan Wilson's novel was also well-received, partly because
it too took advantage of one of the techniques of paperback
marketing, the movie tie-in. Critics and readers welcomed
the book as typifying middle-class American workers; it was
deemed "accurate" in its account of "a new breed of man,
the well-educated white-collar worker" (Lewis 83). The
Christian Science Monitor felt Wilson's dialogue "could
have been piped from any of thousands of offices" (in Every
231
714). The name of the book alone was enough for some: "The
book's title, in fact, became a catch phrase independent of
its novelistic origins, much like the title of William
Whyte's book The Organization Man" (Long 83). The title
became "part of the American language. . . a metaphor for
middle-class America" (Every 714). The term "organization
man" could be neutral, but "the man in the gray flannel
suit" was clearly pejorative, a "cat-call at the conforming
commuter" (Lewis 28). Perhaps too well, the title said it
all: "Author Wilson has something to say, but his title
sums up his book better than his story does" ("Slipped
Disk" 102).
Both novels seem almost to take Riesman's and Whyte's
arguments as blueprints for their fiction, including the
use of nostalgia. Echoing Riesman, both Wilson and Hawley
include older, more traditional masculine types against
which to compare the young organization man after the
war.10 There are important differences, however, in how
each of these two novels views this older male type and the
degree with which each finally endorses the nostalgic view
of him.
The protagonist of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
Tom Rath, typifies the G.I. of the war generation presented
in this study. Fresh from war with "ten thousand dollars'
worth of GI Life Insurance" (Wilson 12), Rath, like so many
232
other veterans, seeks a return to a normal life and
treasures upwardly-mobile married life in the suburbs.
Only his relationship to the organization is problematic.
The novel critiques the new organization man from two
nostalgic perspectives, that of men in war and that of an
older-style masculine figure.
Flashbacks of Tom Rath's violent war experiences
contrast starkly with his present corporate experiences.
Even as mere memories, war seems more real than the
corporate world's triviality and meaninglessness. It is a
former war buddy, now an elevator operator, who informs
Rath that he has a son in Italy. The war acts as a
touchstone between men and helps them recall their more
masculine days, for example, when Rath's lawyer suddenly
realizes with admiration that Tom had been a paratrooper
(Wilson 54).11 Men in war displayed a vitality now worn
down by the organization and postwar conformity.
When Tom declines a job that would involve a big
change and long hours, his wife, Betsy, criticizes him, the
courageous war hero she had married, for now trying to play
it safe. At the climax of the novel, she confronts him
with his own masculine decline in a chewing-out that
William Whyte might have given the new generation of men if
he had been speaking off the record:
You think you're something special because a hell
of a long while ago you were a good paratrooper.
233
And now all you want is security, and life
insurance, and money in the bank to send the kids
to college twelve or fifteen years from now, and
you're scared because for six months you'll be on
trial on a new job. . . and you've got no autsl
(emphasis in original, Wilson 107)
While Betsy tries to make her husband put his heart into
his work, historian William O'Neill views Tom Rath as a
rebel against a conformist system, and applauds Rath for
repudiating the bankrupt corporate values of moving up the
ladder: "Gray flannel. . . stood for conformity,
acquisitiveness, and selfish ambition. In Wilson's novel
the hero repudiates those traits" (O'Neill 28).
Optimistically, O'Neill sees Rath as typifying a new breed
of men who won't say yes to the system: "Wanting to be a
good husband and father and responsible citizen, [Rath]
turns away from empty careerism. Instead he takes a
modestly paid job. . . outside of the competitive rat
race. . ." (28). O'Neill even applauds The Man in the Gray
Flannel Suit as a "morality play" (28).
But for William Whyte there is no element of rebellion
in Rath, and the claim of "morality" is what incenses him
most. Rath's refusal to run the rat race— "I'm not the
kind of person who can get all wrapped up in a job"— is no
protest at all, according to Whyte, but merely the refusal
of the younger generation to work hard. Whyte detects in
Rath's arguments against overwork a holier-than-thou tone
that particularly irks him: "when the younger men say they
234
don't want to work too hard, they feel that they are making
a positive moral contribution. . .1 1 (Whyte 146). Far from
seeing the man seeking balance between work and family as a
rebel or a nonconformist, Whyte sees him as the very
problem— "the man in the middle" (Whyte 147)— a mediocre
by-product of postwar conformity.12
But Sloan Wilson's fictional portrait of an older
masculinity is not as clear as either O'Neill or Whyte
would like to interpret it. In the character of Ralph
Hopkins the author captures an older-style masculine
corporate magnate against whom to contrast the new man.
Like the mythic inner-directed figure that Riesman
describes, Hopkins works hard, maybe even too hard, but is,
on the whole, admired for it: "He's a regular machine for
work. . . and people like him— he knows how to drive people
and still make them like him" (Wilson 2 6-7). But part of
the ambiguity in such a figure is that he can also be seen
as "an overdriven man whose addiction to work has ruined
his family, but may be necessary for a captain of corporate
enterprise" (Long 88).
Whereas Riesman and Whyte in their nostalgic rhetoric
had unequivocally portrayed the inner-directed man and the
man of the Protestant Ethic as a strong, mythic, admirable
figure, in the fiction of the organization man, these
figures have become more troubled than mythic. The old-
style traditionalist male was beginning to be portrayed as
out of balance, concealing great weaknesses behind a
powerful show of strength. Two contradictory rumors
circulate in the workplace alpout Ralph Hopkins: "Some say
he's got a little blond girl on Park Avenue. . . I've even
heard it said that he's queer" (Wilson 29). Ralph
Hopkins's secret was that his masculinity and
heterosexuality were not absolutely beyond doubt. His
father had been "a cheerful, rather ineffectual man"
(Wilson 156), while his mother had been a somewhat
overbearing "leader" (156), who eventually cut off
heterosexual relations with her husband by "establish[ing]
herself in a separate room" (156). In the coded language
of the fifties, a strong mother and a weak father could
mean only one thing: latent homosexuality. In the novel, a
psychoanalyst confiipms that Hopkins has a complex "based on
a fear of homosexuality" (Wilson 156). To avoid angering
his overbearing wife— although he is not absolutely
convinced of the correctness of the diagnosis— Hopkins
makes a great effort to agree that he is latently
homosexual. Whatever sexual orientation is buried in his
unconscious, Hopkins is emasculated by his wife and by the
labels applied to him by the psychiatrist and by Hopkins's
own employees. In the fiction of the male protest
literature, traditional masculinity is thus simultaneously
236
portrayed as a model against which to contrast the new,
diminished masculinities, but also a type that has outworn
its usefulness.
In Executive Suite, author Cameron Hawley, former
advertising director for Armstrong Cork, creates a similar
mythic figure in the character of Avery Bullard: "They say
he never goes home" (Hawley 31). The problem of the novel
is to find a replacement man enough to take Bullard's place
at the top of the Tredway Corporation when he dies. Like
Hopkins, however, Bullard is later discovered to have
secret weaknesses. His diary, discovered posthumously,
reveals the real person he was: "I know the kind of a man
he must have been to do the things he did— strong,
powerful, the master of his fate. Yet when you read his
diary, you find so many cases where he was so— so lost"
(Hawley 292). It is lonely at the top, and as long as he
lived Bullard never breathed a word of these feelings to
anyone. A traditional-style male such as Bullard may show
up the present-day organization man, but he is also on his
way out the door. Such a type was necessary in the early
stages of capitalism's expansion and growth, but the
postwar economy with its vast bureaucracies requires a
different approach: "a company needs a different management
technique during different stages in its development"
237
(Hawley 11) and, by extension, "a very different type of
man than was required in the past" (Hawley 323).
At this point Wilson's and Hawley's visions of
masculinity diverge. Whereas both create a traditional
male who, although admired, is becoming problematic, the
different resolutions of the two novels imply different
final visions. Rather than being discarded for his
unwillingness to work too hard, Tom Rath is rewarded. In
Executive Suite, on the other hand, the only man who can
replace Bullard is very similar to hard-driving Bullard
himself. One contender for the top spot, Dudley, won't do
because "he hadn't taught himself to hide his feelings"
(Hawley 45). (In the same vein, the elevator operator's
"display of tears" are pathetic.) Alderson, another
contender for president, is, however, "a weakling resorting
to what was always the weakling's last resort. . .
compromise" (246). When Alderson broke down in front of
Don Walling, who will eventually succeed, Walling "squirmed
as he always did when he was confronted with weakness"
(188) .
Yet Don Walling is, like Rath, interested in being a
family man. In The Organization Man. Whyte sarcastically
considers how unrealistic this balanced character is: "In
Walling have been resolved the conflicts of organization
life; he puts everything he has into his work and plays
238
baseball with his boy. . . . [H]e is a loyal subordinate
and gets to be president" (Whyte 84). Whyte finds Walling
much like the old-style traditional masculine type: "He is
not fully the new model— he is too pushy, he plays too
rough. ..." (Whyte 84). In an article for Fortune.
Riesman too finds that Executive Suite "concludes in
reconciliations. . . [that are] contradictory" (Riesman and
Larrabee 108).
Despite the novel's early view that old-style
masculinity is in trouble, the ending of Executive Suite
reads more like a paean to nineteenth-century masculinity,
placing Hawley squarely in Riesman's camp in preferring the
earlier man. In Don Walling's moment of triumph, he
overwhelms his opponents in a boardroom speech that is
described in terms of raw physical and mythic masculinity:
"he rose from his chair and in the act of standing he
seemed a giant breaking shackles that had held him to the
earth. . . He stood alone now. . . free" (Hawley 3 32).
Walling's forceful masculine moment of triumph is silently
celebrated by the two women present, now holding hands in
mutual admiration. The novel's end reads like an ode to
masculinity:
it was a great comfort to know that there were
still men like that being born, that the cult of
mediocrity had not yet sterilized the womb of the
earth. . . that there would always be men like
Avery Bullard and Don Walling and all the others
who were the builders of great companies and
239
great institutions and great nations. ([ellipses
in original] 338)13
The previous century is recalled through the final
patriotic phrases and even a hint of old-style imperialism.
In the end, the victor triumphs, not because he is
different, but because he is like the old-style traditional
male.
The use of past masculinities to critique current ones
is a potent form of rhetoric. The lament for the loss of
the driven and tyrannical nineteenth-century robber baron
type in some form in Riesman, Whyte, Wilson, and Hawley can
be seen as a nearly transparent attack on the men of the
day, but never an actual call for a return to the past.
The rugged individualist of the past, even when
problematized as in the character of Ralph Hopkins, is used
to criticize the conformity of the new type of man, such as
Tom Rath, who laments, "like a half million other guys in
gray flannel suits, I'll always pretend to agree" (Wilson
183). But it must be kept in mind that the word
'conformity' in the fifties had become a code word. The
widespread critique of conformity and the related public
alarm about the deterioration of American masculinity
functioned as a distraction from other barely-emerging
issues. A group of softcover works, enough of a
phenomenon to constitute a genre of "male protest," became
bestsellers by both shaping and riding the wave of this
one-sided debate. No specific action was ever suggested
among the "literature of male protest": "The gray flannel
rebellion was never more than a lament, a critique far too
diffuse to lead to action" (Ehrenreich 40). But while the
issue of conformity among middle-class males held a place
in the national spotlight, it drew attention away from
other concerns. The most privileged group, middle-class,
white-collar men, appeared in need of the nation's most
immediate attention.
241
Chapter Five Endnotes
1. Middle-class here is "defined as incomes of $3,000 to $10,000
in constant dollars." Sixty percent is "in contrast to only 31
percent in the last year of prosperity before the Great
Depression."
2. Moving from war to peace is, of course, an important
adjustment, and has been a central focus of much of this study.
But class issues too need to be considered.
3. Although not a bestseller, another very influential
sociological work was C. Wright Mills's White Collar (1953).
Mills argued that there was a new middle class emerging in
America, different from the middle class usually defined by
Marxists. In the end, Mills largely dismisses this class's power
because of its own lack of self-awareness, but most certainly his
ideas influenced other writers about the organization.
4. Whyte's "How to Cheat on Personality Tests," both an article
in Fortune and an appendix to The Organization Man. is certainly
both cynical and satirical.
5. Men found themselves in a double-bind. To avoid being
'deviant,' they had to choose conformity, but to conform became
unmanly. Men wanted to fit in, but that showed lack of
individuality. Differences raised suspicion, but fitting in
showed spinelessness.
6. Although the shift in the character of the male worker that
Riesman and Whyte analyze largely coincides with the shift of
many male workers from working class to white collar status, not
all white collar organization men had formerly been members of
the working class. As officers, even many of those who had
served in the military during the war had not necessarily
experienced a working-class environment. The shift in character
might have had as much to do with the sudden growth of American
corporations as with the swelling of the ranks of the middle
class, but the two events are not unrelated, and viewing other-
directedness from the perspective of social class is not wholly
uncalled for.
7. While once breadwinning and manhood had been associated with
aggression, this was no more. In the bureaucracy, men must
"practice the prompt repression of resentment and aggression" (C.
Wright Mills in Chafe 116). This is the opposite response to
Mike Hammer's brand of masculinity, although the same issues of
manliness are at stake. At a very great cost to a man's sense of
masculinity, repression of aggressive urges helps him to adjust
to the demands of the organization.
242
8. "Although Kohlberg claims universality for his stage sequence,
those groups not included in his original sample rarely reach his
higher stages. Prominent among those who thus appear to be
deficient in moral development when measured by Kohlberg's scale
are women. ..." (Gilligan 18).
9. Sociologist Michael Kixnmel has written that throughout history
such a male tactic is routinely used, and that a "crisis" of
masculinity is often merely a cultural construction aimed at
other ends. In his 1987 article, "The Contemporary 'Crisis' of
Masculinity in Historical Perspective," Kimmel examines "those
historical moments in-which gender issues assume a prominent
position in the public consciousness" which generally result in
"vigorous reassertion of traditional gender roles against serious
challenges" (Kimmel 123). Although Kimmel puts the word "crisis"
in quotation marks in his title, he does not throughout his
article's text, implying less mistrust of the term as he
proceeds.
10. In an article about the film version of Executive Suite.
Riesman seems able to discern the use of nostalgia which is so
prevalent in his own The Lonely Crowd. the style of which
probably influenced other works of this male protest genre: "the
movie draws on nostalgic longings for a vanished world" (Riesman
and Larrabee 108).
11. In the film version of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
Rath's war experiences come early and in great detail,
emphasizing that his confidence in himself was shattered by
throwing a grenade that killed his war buddy. The film then
becomes more about how Rath (played by Gregory Peck) overcomes
his war trauma and begins to put himself into his work and his
life again, albeit while placing importance on what kind of job
he chooses.
12. Given how vehemently opposed Whyte is to personality testing
(he devotes the book's appendix to blasting it), he should
applaud Tom Rath's rebelliousness in refusing to type a passage
about himself as part of the job application process: "I have
decided that I do not wish to attempt an autobiography as part of
an application for a job" (Wilson 41).
13. For a passage so laden with masculine implications, much of
the imagery is curiously feminine and reproductive: "the cult of
mediocrity had not yet sterilized the womb of the earth." Empire
builders, real men with a mission to complete, come from the
earth's fertile womb, until this triumphant moment, feared to be
sterilized. Great men prove the fertile feminine element lives
on. This seems contradictory until the gender system's
interrelation of and mutual definition of masculine and feminine
is taken into account; extreme masculinity confirms extreme
femininity, and vice versa.
243
CHAPTER SIX
Looking Back at War:
Emasculation and Homosexuality
in Paperback War Novels
The Treatment, apparently, concentrated
all its power on a man's strongest
point— his pride in himself as a man.
Could it be that that was also his
weakest point?
— James Jones,
From Here to Eternity
(1951)
Croft slipped his arm free; he hated to
have anyone touch him.
— Norman Mailer,
The Naked and the Dead
(1948)
This study ends where it began— with visions of men in
war. Whereas the first chapter described military men
reading paperbacks on the battlefield, this chapter
explores civilian men reading about 'real' men in battle.
Nostalgia, examined in the previous chapter as a polemic
device in the works of Riesman, Whyte, and even, in a
sense, in the fiction of Wilson and Hawley, is used for
different ends in war novels. At one level, postwar
readers do peer back at the war years to read about
masculinity when it seemed more secure. At another level,
however, wartime masculinity as portrayed in fiction is
less used rhetorically to critique postwar masculinity than
it is to explore current issues of peacetime insecurity.
The hypermasculinity, violence, and gruffness of characters
in battle allow readers to safely explore, not forties'
issues of America at war, but fifties' issues of
emasculation. Deprived in peacetime of the battlefield—
that convenient proving ground for masculinity— readers
were more wary about studying the feminized man. By
recreating through fiction the lost arena of war as a hedge
against all accusations of softness, however, men could
safely examine the most taboo of topics: 'excess' masculine
expressiveness, the threat of sexual relations with women,
male touch, and even homosexuality.
The paperback war novels examined here are Norman
Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948, Signet paperback
1951), which "sold 137,185 copies [in hardback] in the
stores plus about 60,000 through the Book Find Club"
245
(Hackett 148), and James Jones's From Here to Eternity
(1951, Signet paperback 1953), which "outsold every other
fiction title in the bookstores, reaching a total of
240,000" (Hackett 156).1 Although these novels sold well
in hardcover, the reputations of Mailer and Jones became
much more widespread through phenomenal paperback sales.
Before the war novel could be published in paperback,
however, two major problems had to be resolved: the rising
cost of large author advances and the cost of publishing
works of extreme length.2 These costs could not be
recuperated at the sale price of 25- or 35-cents, yet the
paperback was considered too price-sensitive to exceed this
price. Kurt Enoch and Victor Weybright of New American
Library decided to try to make the price increase more
palatable to the public by printing the longer work as if
it were two works bound into one binding. Pulp-oriented
firms like Ace had pioneered the concept of two novels
printed and sold in one higher-priced paperback volume, now
the most coveted of which is William Burroughs's Junkie
bound with the nonfiction drug expose, Narcotic Agent. To
emphasize that readers were getting double the reading, the
title would be printed on the spine twice. Although
readers would not really be deceived, the higher price of
fifty cents would at least be justified.
246
With such a plan in mind, Victor Weybright wrote to
the hardback publisher soliciting reprint rights for The
Naked and the Dead:
I'm not trying to tell you how to make decisions
at Rinehart— I'm only trying to make it clear
that we have something to offer. . . .
Qualitatively, for example, Mr. Mailer would be
in excellent company on our highly selective
list. This, in turn, means that his book in a
Signet edition would not get lost in a welter of
eight or ten average or mediocre titles each
month, but would be part of a compact,
fast-selling and distinguished line of paper
bound editions. His literary standing, in the
popular market, would be upheld, which in turn
would undoubtedly mean increased sales of his
trade editions. By virtue of having the most
bookish reprint list, we have the most bookish
and most rapidly growing audience. (emphasis in
original, quoted in Bonn Traffic 29)
Signet was offering serious works mass exposure, but at the
same time promising a "special reading public" (28)—
special, presumably, for being willing to tackle a nine-
hundred-page tome. Having just invented the Double Signet
as a vehicle to market big books, Signet needed the rights
to Mailer's book more than ever and offered $35,000— "a
record for the time" (Tebbel 349)— which created media
attention that in turn helped to assure the creation of the
"first literary blockbuster" (Bonn Traffic 29).3
This large advance figure was nearly tripled two years
later in Signet's offer for the rights for From Here to
Eternity.4 Weybright and Enoch first decided to offer an
unheard of figure of $75,000 for the reprint rights to
247
Jones's novel, but then Enoch worriedly wrote in a memo to
Weybright, "We must have the book," and raised the offer to
$101,000.5 They won the bidding and reprinted the book
without abridgment in 19 53 as a seventy-five-cent Signet
Triple Volume. The financial risk of making such high bids
was great, but even the phenomenal break-even figure of 2.2
million copies was exceeded in less than a year and a half.
Although all the Signet Doubles did well, Mailer's was
by far the most successful: "of those first four, The Naked
and the Dead was destined for the greatest success in
paperback. . . [selling] one million copies by the
following October" (Davis 151). Immediately, other
publishers began to imitate Signet, with Bantam Giants and
Pocket Books' Cardinal Giants, spawning the modern day
blockbuster paperback novel. With the blockbuster came
disproportionate wealth and fame for a small number of
authors: "For some there is instant worldwide recognition:
Norman Mailer. . . [and authors like him], by virtue of
their huge bestselling paperbacks, are now pop culture
heroes" (Bonn Cover 19).
And it was a specific genre, the war novel, which
launched the blockbuster paperback. Why were unprecedented
advances offered specifically for novels about the war? By
the early- to mid-fifties, the public was ready to read
"factual or fictional accounts of World War II" (Schick
93). Partly, there was an element of simple nostalgia
involved in the popular success of these war novels, a
chance for readers from the fifties to read about a time of
less troubled masculinity.6 But the portrayal of American
fighting men was not a straightforward nostalgic longing
for the 'good old days,' since soldiers were being
portrayed in these novels in a much less flattering light
than they had ever been during the war in government
propaganda, in fiction, or in cinema. Whereas Riesman and
Whyte nostalgically praised men from the past in order to
critique men of the present, these war novelists presented
a picture of men in the service that was more complicated
and ambiguous. Cowardice, emotional breakdown, even
homosexuality were frankly represented in this crop of war
novels— and not merely as objects of contempt. Some
reviewers saw these portrayals as more realistic attempts
at last to uncover the 'real' U.S. serviceman. In this
view, writers had needed a few years' distance to be honest
about the war; at last they no longer felt it their
patriotic duty to omit the worst behaviors of real
infantrymen. For instance, authors could at last write
frankly about the sexual life of the soldier. The New York
Herald Tribune Weekly compared Mailer's war novel to
another work that shared a place on the 1948 bestseller
249
list: 1 1 fThe Naked and the Dead! is virtually a Kinsey
Report on the sexual behavior of the G.I."7 Mailer's novel
was seen as serving the same function as Kinsey's Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male, as a wake-up call to dispel
romanticized notions about the behavior of American men.
But every novel set in the historical past, however
recent, as much reflects the concerns of the time of its
writing as the time investigated. There was much more
involved than just a stripping away of myths to see World
War II soldiers in a 'true' light. Although the war was
still rather recent in cultural memory, clear differences
existed between wartime America and the postwar America of
1948; by 1951, when the first of these war novels appeared
in soft cover, readers' concerns had shifted even further.
Although The Naked and the Dead describes men in wartime,
it can be argued that both the text and its reading by the
public made it a product, not of wartime, but of the
postwar period. Concerning issues of masculinity, I
believe these war novels reflect less the anxieties about
men that existed during the war than those that arose
afterwards. While Library Journal wrote about the Kinsey
Report, "It is fortunately not, as it purports to be, an
entirely objective report. . . ," neither were the war
novels entirely "objective" accounts of wartime
masculinity; the representations of manliness in these war
250
novels cannot be reconciled in any simple way with the
wartime journalistic accounts that actually came out of the
battlefield. Instead, these portrayals of masculinity were
filtered through postwar cultural fears about men,
especially the question of whether American men were
becoming soft.
These war novels sold phenomenally not merely because
of rekindled interest in the actual events of the forties,
but also because, by the fifties, the war and the warrior
were being embellished with new cultural meanings.
Specifically, the fifties7 view of the forties7 fighting
man was colored by emerging concerns about emasculation and
homosexuality. These later concerns could be worked out in
fiction in an overseas, wartime narrative and safely
examined by readers, who might feel threatened to read
about such frank issues if they were any closer to home,
such as in a contemporary, domestic setting. Even a few
years7 time was enough to create a safe distance from which
readers could observe men under duress straying beyond the
strict boundaries of masculinity. The spectacle of men
exceeding the limits of acceptable male behavior became
popular with readers of a decade in which conformity was
the watchword and in which the issue of masculinity was
becoming a preoccupation.
251
Not only this historical distance, but also the more
secure masculine identity of soldierhood, provided a safe
arena in which to watch men break down, cry, touch one
another. Routinely violent behavior functioned to
establish the basic masculine credentials of these men, no
matter how else they behaved.8 War settings permitted a
violation of behavior norms far too extreme for peacetime
novels. With a baseline level of masculinity taken for
granted because of the battlefield setting, readers could
contemplate a wide variety of 'excessive' male emotional
outpourings which under other circumstances would be
prohibited.
Mailer's writing is justifiably associated with tough
masculinity, yet paradoxically one of the most frequently
recurring images in The Naked and the Dead is men in
tears. Tears seem to be the natural consequence for men
who fail to follow the aesthetic of masculine self-control-
-specifically, control of emotional expression. Such
failure, always ending in tears, evokes feelings of
disgust, if not in the author, at least in his characters.
Emotional expressiveness is described as "unclean” (Mailer
486), "unmanning" (431).
Despite such traditional masculine prohibitions
against male emotion, however, the novel contains an
abundance of blubbering men, from a Japanese prisoner—
"There were a few tears of joy in the Jap/s face. ..."
(Mailer 167)— to Gallagher, who "felt exasperated to the
point of tears" (167), to Hennesey to Martinez to Billings
to Goldstein to Hearn. Only one man, Sam Croft, is able to
control his feelings all of the time, and then only through
the liberal use of domination and violence, which shore up
any vestige of uncertainty that might be lurking within
him. And even a man as masculine as Croft is not
completely immune from buried feelings of personal
insecurity. Croft chiefly uses two methods to hold
repressed feelings in check. One is the domination of
others: "Leading the men was a responsibility he craved; he
felt powerful and certain at such moments" (Mailer 28);
from this can one infer that Croft did not feel "powerful
and certain" at moments when he was not in control of
others? Croft could also banish his feelings through
excessive violence: "Mailer's aggressive men kill to repair
the trauma of their own vulnerability, their own sense of
smallness" (Hendin 245). Croft frequently unleashes his
most violent urges as a way to push back all other emotions
besides the one sadistic sensation that can pass through
his deadened nerves: "On an impulse Croft fired a burst
into [the dead Japanese soldier], and felt the twitch of
pleasure as he saw the body quiver" (Mailer 133).
253
Using such primitive techniques as domination and
violence, Croft has taught himself never to feel, and his
success in this area is contrasted again and again with the
other men who repeatedly fail to hold back their tears:
"Billings was his name I think, and the poor bastard had
just broken down completely. He was crying and moaning and
trying to fire off a flare. . . but he was shaking so much
he couldn't hold the flare gun in his hand" (18).
Billings's blubbering is immediately contrasted with
Croft's exceptional ability never to feel: "'That Croft is
quite a guy,' he said. 'Quite a guy! Listen, he's made of
iron. He's the one man I'd never cross. . . He just
doesn't have any nerves. . . . '1 1 (19). To express feelings
is a failure of masculine will; a seeming paragon of
masculinity, Croft "doesn't have any nerves" with which to
feel.9
Croft's extraordinary abilities to remain unemotional
are continually contrasted with the overly emotional men:
"Goldstein was still quivering. His sense of shame was so
intense that a few tears welled up in his eyes" (111).
Tears are the sign of failure to control overpowering
emotions: "Once again Goldstein was feeling a helpless
anger. A reaction he could not control, his agitation was
even greater than his resentment and choked him so that he
could not speak. A few tears of frustration welled in his
254
eyes. . . ." (120). Pages later, such gushing emotions are
juxtaposed with Croft's ability to sever any connection
from his feeling self: "The rest of the squad, strung out
behind, was experiencing a variety of emotions. . .
[Croft's] muscles were as strained and jaded as any of the
men's, but his mind had excluded his body" (124). If even
a hint of a feeling threatens to pass across his synapses,
Croft uses sadistic violence to replace that emotion with
the 'feeling' that accompanies a rush of adrenalin: "He
hungered for the fast taut pulse he would feel in his
throat after he killed a man" (124).
This is a rather unsympathetic portrayal of the
extreme forms masculinity can take. Croft is not
necessarily portrayed as a model to be emulated, although
he is contrasted repeatedly with men that fail to control
themselves. Those unable to anesthetize their nervousness
are designated by the word "naked" from the book title,
which is used early on in the text: "A shell sighed
overhead, and unconsciously Martinez drew back against a
gunhousing. He felt naked" (25). Croft's judgment of men
who have not anesthetized themselves against feeling fear
is pronounced: "'Chickenshit,' he muttered to himself now.
A man who was afraid to put his neck out on the line was no
damn good" (28).
255
One of the most dramatic examples of emasculation
occurs early in the book. Hennessey, in the first scene on
the island's beach, dies in such a way that he establishes
a benchmark throughout the rest of the action of the worst
fate for any man: he was found "sobbing in the hole. . .
scream[ing] out like a child, 'That's enough, that's
enough!'" (36). In his failure, Hennesey becomes "like a
child," even soiling his pants when he fails to "keep. . .
a tight ass-hole" (36).10 Hennesey's complete and
humiliating emasculation gives Croft a sense of his own
power: "Hennessey's death had opened to Croft vistas of
such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it
directly" (38).
In the end, when Hearn can no longer hold his emotions
in check, and this loss of emotional control is labeled as
emasculation:
Everything in him had come undone. The impulse
to cover his head and wait passively for the
fight to terminate was very powerful. He heard a
sound trickle out of his lips, was dumbly
surprised to know he had made it. With
everything, with the surprising and unmanning
fear was a passionate disgust with himself.
(431)
Not unlike Hennessey's failure to close his sphincter,
Hearn lets escape a sound from "his lips." Both men are
disgusted with themselves for the loss of emotional and
physical control, and both meet a fitting end for such
"unmanning": swift death.
James Jones also portrays the masculine code of
inexpressiveness. In From Here to Eternity, men are stoic
and tight-lipped, and if on occasion they do speak their
minds, they immediately regret it. Warden and Prewitt
share the same code of masculine ethics and abide by it,
with a few notable exceptions. The moment Warden confronts
his lover, Karen, about his fears that she has been
promiscuous in the past, he regrets his momentary 'slip
up': "It spread out across the room like a shell burst and
he could have bitten off the tongue that said it" (Jones
370). When Karen disputes Warden's accusation with the
fact that her husband was the one that had been promiscuous
and had thus given her gonorrhea, he is so abashed that
another uncontrollable display of emotion ensues, one that
he immediately covers up: "'Why, Milt,' she said, 'you're
crying.' 'No I'm not'" (378). This ethic of male
inexpressiveness is among those ideals the characters
pursue that, for one critic, comprise the most hopeful
message of Jones's work: "The affirmative note in the novel
arises from a perversity and sentimentality that are
grounded in the primitive conception of maleness which runs
throughout the book" (Eisinger 43). Like Croft's primitive
techniques for repressing emotion, Jones's characters
pursue a "primitive" ideal of male inexpressiveness.
257
Although Prewitt finds it "hard to say these things,
without feeling foolish" (Jones 282), at one point in the
brothel he waxes eloquent about his feelings. He guickly
regrets the sentimentality of his monologue and feels
ashamed for having violated the male taboo against
expressiveness: "In the dim halflight he could see her
looking at him, very surprised, and he shut it off, the
little opening that was his mouth from which this torrent
he did not know was there had leaped out at her" (283).
Despite the prostitute's sudden willingness to make Prewitt
"one of my specials," he is only filled with
self-retribution: "Prew shook his head. . . and closed it
up again with his tongue, the little hole, the little leak,
the small Achilles heel" (283) . To speak risks one's
masculine identity, so the mouth, even more than the groin,
represents the most vulnerable male body part, the
"Achilles heel."
At first glance, Mailer and Jones seem to honor the
code of male inexpressiveness, yet their characters violate
the taboo against expression so frequently that one
suspects the rough external behavior of such characters is
designed to mask the real subject of inquiry, males losing
emotional control. The reader's fears can thus be examined
at a safe historical distance and with the soldier's gruff
258
behavior lending a protective coloration to the novel's
continual depiction of unmanliness.
For a man, crying or blubbering out one's emotions is
to act too much like a woman. Still, the gender system as
constituted in Western culture is predicated on the
opposition of masculine and feminine traits and behaviors.
Men's tears threaten to smudge the line between genders.
For some readers, what is exhilarating about the war novel
is less the masculine bloodshed than this violation of
gender restrictions.
One of the ways men punctuate their difference from
the 'opposite sex' is through sexual relations with women
which confirm their sexual difference. Men's failure to
perform the sexual act, therefore, is as threatening to
masculine identity as is crying or the uncontrolled
outburst of emotion. Women, and their potential for sexual
reaffirmation of a man's masculinity, are sought out as a
resource by men and at the same time feared as a threat to
men's masculinity. Thus, men's behavior in a woman's
presence can prove especially humiliating, whether in
conversation or in bed. These war narratives, exploring as
they do the limitations of masculinity, steer directly into
this uncomfortable territory.
The frailty and failure of men in the presence of
women is even given a name by Warden in the last pages of
From Here to Eternity; such a man is "an American male,”
whereas a man who has conquered his fear of unmanliness
receives a different label, "a man of the world." The
progression from "male" to "man" transforms one from
biological identity to culturally defined gender identity.
Warden's terminology is explained in a sexual setting, a
brothel, in which impotence is most threatening to a man's
personal sense of manliness. In the brothel, Stark
confesses to Warden that, except when severely inebriated,
he had been plagued throughout his adult life by impotence.
In this moment of euphoria at the novel's end, however, as
the two men await the prostitutes the madam has gone to
fetch, Stark gushes out, "'Something's happened to me. I'm
not drunk at all, I used to have to be drunk as hell. I'm
changed'" (Jones 942). Warden then issues his
pronouncement: "'You used to be an American male,' Warden
said. 'Now you're a man of the world, like me'" (942).
Using the "American" label to denote masculine insecurity,
like Warden's claim that a European film cured him forever
from being "an American male," implies that male insecurity
is primarily an American phenomenon: "'Its the same thing
as going to Europe and seeing the uncerisored movies before
they cut them in this country. You're never the same
again'" (942).
260
In The Naked and the Dead, we see that impotence is
only one type of sexual failure associated with American
men. Since one of the chief ways a male can be 'unmanned'
is through sexual failure, premature ejaculation is,
predictably in Mailer, accompanied by tears, the marker of
emasculation:
[Stanley's] love-making had suffered. . . [I]n
his inexperience he had been inept, incapable of
controlling himself. His love spasms had been
quick and nervous; he had wept once or twice in
his wife's arms at his failure. (Mailer 253).
Broadly interpreted, sexual failure seems to include not
being able to satisfy a woman sufficiently to keep her. In
From Here to Eternity. Jones is quite explicit about the
threat to manliness of a woman withdrawing herself
sexually. When Captain Holmes's wife, Karen, cuckolds him,
he releases a torrent of emotion as he explains the double
standard to her:
"You dont know how a man feels," Holmes said. . .
"Men dont feel like women do. About a thing like
that. Women know it doesn't mean anything to a
man. But it breaks a man all up, inside. It
destroys his manhood." (Jones 924)
A woman can "destroy" a man's "manhood" by removing her
sexual availability. In doing so, women become agents of
male castration. When Karen threatens to leave Warden, he
is being wounded in his most vulnerable place, his own
conception of himself as a man: "'Then I think I'll have a
drink,' Warden said, feeling sick, feeling castrated"
261
(Jones 371). Warden feels this "eunuch-making sickness,
blooming, ballooning through him" (372).
Through withholding their sexuality, women often make
men feel castrated. But women can emasculate men equally
with their maternal impulses, which redefine men as child
like. At her final parting, Karen, at great cost to
herself, protects Warden by saying she truly believes they
will meet again: "It had taken everything out of her. But
she was glad and happy she had been able to protect him.
He needed protecting so very badly. It was hard on him.
He looked so completely lost" (920). Not only is Karen
"protect[ing]" Warden as if he were her child, she is also
confirming the novel's view of men as frail, their
masculinity always on the verge of failure: "Men were so
much softer than women were. She was glad she could make
it easier for him" (920).
Meanwhile, two prostitutes, by babying Prewitt,
infantalize him. When Prewitt is seriously wounded in a
knifefight, Alma and Georgette become surrogate mothers to
him:
They kept him in the bed for a week. . .
maternal, solicitous, very happy, infinitely
protective, such a bottomless flood of maternal
tenderness that it threatened to engulf him
forever and drown him in the soft bosoms of
matriarchy. . . Their motives were openly
obvious. Two whores who finally found something
to mother. (767)11
Women who baby soldiers make them into invalids or, worse,
infants. Prewitt tries to rebel: "He did not intend to let
himself be turned into an invalid for life just because
their frustrated maternal instincts needed something to
baby" (768).12 Determined to reclaim his adult masculine
status, Prewitt parades like a grown boy in front of his
mother(s), showing them how well he has recovered.
Maternal to the core, these prostitutes are crestfallen:
"they watched him go through his act with a kind of hurt
look on their faces, like a mother. . . [who] finally has
to admit, even to herself, that [her boy] is, at last,
grown up" (769). The simile of the mother, however,
ultimately undercuts Prewitt's assertion of his manhood,
and at best achieves he achieves the status of a growing
boy. This is further driven home, since, as a boy, Prewitt
is economically disempowered and feels insulted when this
is pointed out to him: "'You think I like layin around on
my ass livin off you so you can throw it up to me every
time you get mad at me. . .? It seems to me you ask a
whole hell of a lot of a man'" (807). The narrative
consistently steers toward the most emasculating scenarios
for men and portrays the men's resulting fear and
humiliation.
Sexuality is a source of great shame for men, and the
war novels seek out these masculine failures. Women are
263
portrayed as having enormous power to emasculate men by
cuckolding them, by withholding sex from them, by babying
them, or by economically exceeding them. No wonder the
army's function of excluding women is so welcomed by these
insecure men: "One good thing about the Army. It kept you
separated from your women so much they never had the chance
to get sick of you" (867). The army served as a means of
isolating men from the female threat and thus for a time
helped men preserve their tenuous masculine identity. The
army as a refuge from women endears it to men like Prewitt
who require protection from women's tendency to emasculate.
The theme song written throughout From Here to Eternity
includes the important line, "This is the true song. . . of
the men without women. . ." (Jones 249).
On the one hand, women clearly pose one of the
greatest threats to masculinity. On the other hand, when
women can be made into mere sexual objects, they have far
less power to emasculate and become useful for the
confirmation of masculinity. In brothels, prostitutes
function as invaluable resources for confirming a man's
masculinity, as long as the men retreat quickly enough back
into the refuge of the army base— a retreat Prewitt fails
to accomplish in time, giving the prostitutes a chance to
become more than mere objects to him. Unlike prostitutes,
images of women in magazine or film never threaten to
264
transcend their status as objects and thus serve as
invaluable resources for confirming masculinity, as in the
example of the uncensored European movies that transformed
Warden from "an American male" to "a man of the world."
Yet men are so frail that even women as object-images
have the ability to wound. When Prewitt tries to use
girlie magazines and pinups to fantasize a heterosexual
connection, he becomes frustrated: "Yet Prew found himself
staring and staring, trying vainly to penetrate beneath the
plane of the attire to the plane of the figure under it, as
if it were three-dimensional" (177-78). His manliness
cannot be confirmed by a two-dimensional object, and so,
full of frustration and anticipation, he enters the brothel
and ascends "the darkened stairs, feeling the maleness in
him, the maleness that was denied, hushed denounced, hedged
in, scourged, damned, condemned, and used. ..." (178).
Only domination of a three-dimensional sex object can
mollify his increasing sense of emasculation.
Remasculinization of the emasculated cannot always be
accomplished using films or magazines, but sometimes
requires the direct assertion of male power over a woman
sexually.13
For this method to work, the severely emasculated
often must assert their dominance over women in a more
violent way. In From Here to Eternity, physically
265
dominating a woman with the threat of rape helps Warden
recuperate his lost sense of masculinity, diminished since
Karen Holmes's withdrawal from a heterosexual relationship
with him:
Warden caught [the waitress's] wrist easily, in
his left hand, without even moving. She swung
her bloodred nails like talons. . . Then he rose
from the stool on his left leg, pushing it
between her legs and the struggling cursing girl
was off balance and powerless. Warden held her
easily, letting her struggle. "Take it easy,
baby," he grinned contentedly. "I wont hurt
you. . . [B]ut don't get me all excited. I'm
liable to lay you right here on the floor."
(933)
That he has rendered the woman "powerless" is what causes
him to grin "contentedly." Yet he takes no responsibility
for the act, claiming, even as he physically forces her
into submission and humiliates her, his intention not to
"hurt" her. He also shifts away from himself all
responsibility for whether he proceeds with the rape,
making it instead depend on whether she "excite[s]" him.
His manliness confirmed, even more so after a subsequent
brawl with the waitress and four soldiers who try to defend
her, he exits in total contentment: "He turned left into
the alley in the middle of the block, still laughing
brainlessly happily" (936). As potential rape victims,
women prove to be the most reliable source for reconfirming
a man's lost sense of manliness. Attempts to dominate
women short of violence often prove ineffective or
266
backfire, as in the use of pinups and (overmothering)
lovers, which just as often make men feel like eunuchs.
Even imagining rape can help a man get in touch with
his gender-defined power over the opposite sex,
reconfirming his sense of masculinity. In The Naked and
the Dead at a moment of intense insecurity— when Martinez
feels "something terrible [is] going to happen to him
today" (Mailer 23)— he recalls a woman, a librarian, who
had once made him cry as a child. As a mental device to
soothe his insecurity, he rewrites the scene, imagining
himself dominating that same woman today:
He was very little then, and he had got scared
and answered in Spanish, and she had scolded him.
Martinez's leg twitched. She had made him cry,
he could remember that. Goddam girl. Today, he
could screw with her. The idea fed him with a
pleasurable malice. Little-tit librarian, he
would spit on her now. (Mailer 23)
Both Jones and Mailer, albeit somewhat ambivalently,
document the power of violence against women to
remasculinize disempowered men.14 Although women represent
one of the greatest threats to men's sense of masculinity—
in fact, because they do— the forceful domination of women
acts as a swift corrective. While these novels explore the
emasculation that comes from relations with women, they
also remind the reader that at another level of reality,
men are bigger and could force women, if so desired, to
have sex. Whether this bottom-line reality is revealed in
267
rape fantasies or in violent scenes, it can reassure men
that all the impotence and masculine failure encountered in
these narratives is by choice, and that if a man really
wanted to he could always come out on top.
This ritual of masculine reassurance only applies to
men's relationships with women. The far more threatening
domain is that of men with men, for there is no escape
hatch from this line of exploration. That these novels go
so far as to explore males touching males shows how bold
these narratives were. The horror of the possibility of
physical contact between men is heightened by its frequent
contemplation (and vigorous avoidance) in these narratives.
Male touch in The Naked and the Dead is often approached
then suddenly "aborted" (485). There is a sense of fear
that such a connection would lead to unbearable male
closeness and even to an unbearable physical sensation in
those who have tried every means of anesthetizing
themselves. But there is no anesthetizing the sensation of
the male touch. Croft's "mind had excluded his body" (124)
so that he could ignore its pain and fatigue, but the
feeling of a man's light touch on his elbow proves far too
intense for even the man of steel to tolerate: "'C'mere,
I'll show you the setup,' [Martinez] said, grasping Croft's
elbow. Croft slipped his arm free; he hated to have anyone
touch him" (12 6). The metaphor of being "touched"
268
emotionally and being touched physically come together in
sentences like this one: "Red was touched for an instant,
and he almost extended his arm to clap Roth on the back.
But he aborted the motion" (485). As a man, it is too
risky to touch or be touched physically since such a
connection might just cause a man to be "touched"
sentimentally. Although not hypermasculine in the way
Croft is, Red aborts his physical touch for fear it would
encourage Roth to seek further emotional contact, or, as he
calls it, "a touch for sentiment": "He wanted to be kind to
Roth now, but if he did Roth would be coming to him all the
time, donating his confidences, making a touch for
sentiment" (485). Although through sufficient vigilance
proven masculine men like Red and Croft are able to deaden
their inner emotions and sensations, one moment of physical
contact might overpower even them. The only sufficient
precaution is to avoid touch at all costs. These
steel-like men are too raw, too 'naked,' to withstand
personal physical contact with other men.
In From Here to Eternity, however, another man's touch
can also be the greatest reward a man can receive. The
impossibility of men touching men is lamented: "[men
talking] is the first-string substitute for women. . . .
But soldiers are men without women, [Prewitt] thought, and
they cannot hold each other's heads upon their breasts and
269
pat each other's hair" (200). Although men can connect,
they can rarely if ever come into physical contact with one
another, much less "pat" each other. Yet even though
physically separated by such a taboo, men in deep
discussion can in one sense "touch" each other if you "add
a bottle." When Warden and Prewitt drink themselves into
unconsciousness together, minutes before they pass out, as
they lie in the road unable to get up, they exchange tender
sentiments:
"Nobody cares," Prew said. . . I'm better off
dead." Tears rose up in his eyes. . . . "[S]o
am I," Warden choked. . . they shook hands
solemnly. Bravely they choked back the unmanly
tears. . . . (536)
Alcohol excuses the brief physical handshake and the
"unmanly tears," allowing a closeness between heterosexual
men otherwise impossible. No such encounter between a man
and woman could carry the poignancy for the reader that
this scene does.
In the military prison, Prewitt continues to endure
extreme physical punishment, not only to "keep on calling
himself a Man," but also to get other men to "admire him":
But he would do it. And he knew he would do it.
He had to do it. Because he wanted Angelo Maggio
and Jack Malloy, and even Berry, to admire him,
he wanted to keep on calling himself a Man, by
his definition, there was no way out but to do
it. (624-25)
Prewitt's willingness to undergo unjust punishment is
chiefly in order to win what, from a real man, is the
271
highest reward possible: "Prew felt he could see a respect
in Warden's eyes as they looked at each other and neither
one said anything, neither one needed to say anything, an
understanding on the big man's face that made him feel
proud. . . ." (580).
In recognition of their deepening bond, Warden for
once momentarily disregards the masculine taboos against
male expressiveness and male touch, thus signaling
extraordinary affection:
Warden slapped him stingingly on the shoulder.
It was the first frank gesture of friendship he
had ever seen The Warden make toward him, or
toward anybody else. It warmed all the way
through like a drink. It was worth three months
in any Black Hole in any Stockade. His face
stayed stolidly impassive. (580)
For Prewitt this one male "slap" is the most sought after
of all rewards, bestowing upon its recipient the ultimate
in male validation, and he gladly sacrifices his freedom,
and ultimately his life, to attain it. Although Prewitt is
in the midst of experiencing the equivalent of what for him
is the greatest possible climax between two men, he forces
himself to remain all the more "impassive"— ever loyal to
the tenants of male behavior for which he is being
rewarded.
All-male institutions such as the military depend on
homophobia to certify that any male closeness is innocent.
So why does homosexuality play a prominent part in two
272
best-selling fifties' paperback war novels, especially when
homosexuality is not included merely to bash it? (Both
Mailer's and Jones's treatment of homosexuality is at once
condemnatory, often exploratory, sometimes ambiguous.) The
backdrop of war allowed these authors extraordinary freedom
in exploring male taboos. In The Naked and the Dead, with
the character of General Cummings, Norman Mailer gives us
one of the most extended, most explicit, and neutral, if
not sympathetic, portraits of a man struggling to conceal
and deny his own homosexual longings. Mailer seems to
share the fifties' belief, discussed earlier and
perpetuated by experts such as Spock and by the popular
media, that the origins of 'feminine' behavior in males is
caused by women who over-mother. As a child, Cummings was
the victim of such a mother: "What are you doing, boy? [the
father says.] The child looks up petrified. Sewin'. Ma
said it was okay" (Mailer 346). For his feminine behavior,
the boy is not only ridiculed but beaten:
He hears the argument raging about him. . . I
won't have him actin' like a goddam woman. . . .
The slaps redden his cheek from ear to mouth.
The boy sits on the floor, the tears dropping in
his lap. And you're to act like a man from now
on, do you understand? (346)
Since the cause of the ailment lies with the boy's
overidentification with his mother, the sex act would sever
him from that female identity by putting him in the man's
position; this is the expert medical opinion of the family
273
doctor: 1 1 [I]f he were a little older I'd say take the boy
over to Sally's and let him git some jism in his system"
(347) . But since the boy is too young, the only other
recourse is military school, intended to separate him from
any further feminine influence. There, Cummings develops a
crush on his male teacher, but his heterosexual instincts
have already been permanently damaged.
Cummings's last resort is to find a girlfriend when he
gets to college: "He feels an unfamiliar, a satisfying
identity with his classmates when he talks about his girl.
It's important to have one, he decides" (351). He marries
her for, at last, the ultimate cure: "Their lovemaking is
fantastic for a time: He must subdue her, absorb her, rip
her apart and consume her" (355). His nature is "concealed
for a month or two. . . but it must come out eventually"
(355). He comes to an unspoken understanding with his wife
about the matter: "This is all of course beneath words,
would be unbearable if it were ever said, but their
marriage re-forms, assumes a light and hypocritical
companionship with a void at the center, and very little
lovemaking now, painfully isolated when it occurs" (355).
In one last ditch effort, Cummings tries heterosexual
sex in the form of secretive affairs, but "it is a
repetition of Margaret with humiliating endings" (356).
All his attempts either to couple or hide end in failure.
274
What he fears is the greatest threat to manliness of all,
the unspoken dread "beneath words," homosexuality.
Fear of one's own homosexuality is not a concern only
for effeminate men. The possibility exists for every man.
Mailer writes, "There is probably no sensitive heterosexual
alive who is not preoccupied at one time or another with
his latent homosexuality. . ." (in Ehrenreich 129).
Feminist theory might attribute this anxiety to the fact
that masculinity artificially props itself up at the
expense of homosexuality and all that is unmasculine. i.e.
feminine. Those who fail to realize that these
uncertainties and the tenuousness of the hierarchy are
built into the definition of masculinity miss an important
point. In From Here to Eternity. Jones explores this
misunderstanding, as Bloom takes his life because of how
emasculated the homosexual act made him feel:
You're a queer, Bloom thought bitterly, a
monster. Lets face it all, while we're facing.
You did it, and you liked it, and that makes you
a queer. And everybody knows you are a queer.
You dont deserve to live. His hand released the
safety. He put the muzzle back in his mouth. . .
He pulled the trigger. (638)
Bloom regrets his act even as he is dying, and his comrades
understand how it was he made such a mistake:
"My personal opinion," Angelo said sagaciously,
"is that he was afraid he had gone queer."
"Hell, Bloom was no queer." "I know it." "If I
ever saw a not-queer, it was Bloom. . ."
"There's a difference," Angelo said, "between
being queer and thinking you're queer." (650)
275
Bloom failed to make the important distinction between
"being1 1 homosexual and merely fearing he was; it cost him
his life.
In The Naked and the Dead. Cummings also suffers from
a continual fear that he may be homosexual, spending his
life trying to cover up his homosexual urges from others
and from himself. During the conflict in Italy, however,
Cummings briefly succumbs to his urges. The indiscretion
begins with an unguarded moment of male touch:
There is a little man pawing him. Signor
Maggiore you come home with me now? He staggers
along dimly aware of what he wants, but he does
not find it. In another alley the little man and
a confederate jump him, strip his pockets and
leave him. . . (363)
Cummings vows never again to seek physical intimacy with a
man: "The things that happened in the Rome alley is a
danger sign, and he will have to be very careful from now
on. It must never come out again. . ." (364).
Like other men, Cummings is diligent to conceal from
himself any attraction to other men, but there are still
lapses. At war on the island, in his tent, Cummings often
spends time alone with his aide, Hearn. During the long
hours they spend together, an inkling of some kind of
connection appears between them, but thoughts about it are
quickly suppressed: "with acute surprise Hearn saw that the
General's fingers were trembling. The suspicion of an idea
almost defined itself in his head and then was lost. . ."
276
(149). To avoid thinking even the "suspicion of an idea,"
he sublimates: "instinctively his mind clamped down" (149).
Hearn is as diligent as Cummings in policing his own
thoughts and behavior: huddled with Cummings over a game of
chess, Hearn thinks, n/If someone walks in, it'll be a
pretty sight/H (153). Especially between two men of
different rank, this intimacy violates two taboos at once:
"he was bothered by the fact that he was playing chess with
the General. It made everything between them more overt.
There seemed something vaguely indecent about it. . . ."
(153). The very vagueness of the vocabulary here— the
imprecision of words like "everything," "something," and
"vaguely"— work at the level of language to keep the topic
veiled.
Compared to Cummings's indiscretion in Italy, nothing
"overt" occurs with Hearn at all. The one indiscretion
recalled by both men throughout the rest of the book is
extremely indirect and involves no sexual contact
whatsoever: Cummings loses control of his emotions and
reveals his animosity toward his wife and, by implication,
toward women: "'The truth is, Robert, my wife is a bitch'"
(157). The reader is expected to piece this together with
Cummings's earlier struggles against homoerotic urges. To
assist the reader, Mailer suspends the moment in time,
277
slowing down the action, using the key word from the book's
title to flag the incident's importance:
For that single instant the General's voice was
naked. . . Hearn stared into his eyes, which
were luminous at the moment, almost beseeching.
He had an intuition that if he remained
motionless long enough the General would slowly
extend his arm, touch his knee perhaps. (157)
The possibility of male touch alerts the reader that Mailer
is describing one of the climactic moments of the
relationship. As with all male touch in the book, it is
suddenly and forcefully rejected: "with a sudden agitated
motion," Hearn lunges to his feet (157). He had become
spellbound by Cummings's veiled invitations to intimacy,
but the complete rejection of women sets off his alarms.
Hearn's next movements reveal the homosexual subtext:
as he lunges away from the chessboard, Hearn inadvertently
stumbles against the General's cot. In the charged
atmosphere of men half-contemplating physical relations,
the cot suddenly becomes an overt symbol. Thinking his
sudden lunge toward the bed might be interpreted as an
acceptance of Cummings's possible offer, Hearn thinks
desperately to himself: "His cot. No, get away from here,
before Cummings grabbed that interpretation" (157). The
two men have escalated a moment's eye contact, easily
dismissed by the reader, into an unforgettable incident.15
Yet obliqueness has its uses, for just as Hearn's mind
"clamped down" before he could think a homosexual thought,
278
so the entire incident with the general remains
conveniently ambiguous: "But when morning came. Hearn was
no longer sure that anything had happened at all" (158).
Whatever the General's underlying motive had been, Hearn's
interpretations reveal how extreme his own fear of latent
homosexuality is and the shakiness of his own sense of
heterosexuality.
Despite the ambiguity of the scene, the reader soon
learns that Hearn indeed felt something for Cummings,
however veiled. When Hearn returns alone to the general's
tent, something deeply repressed "stir[s] in him": "The
floor was spotless, the blankets were drawn tautly over the
General's mattress, the desk was uncluttered. Hearn
sighed, felt a vague uneasiness stirring in him. Ever
since that particular night" (267). Because it is
inarticulable, the feeling is all the more horrifying.
"[T]hat particular night" continues to have a powerful
charge throughout the rest of the novel, and is indeed
largely responsible for Hearn's death. The reader
eventually learns that General Cummings viewed that night
as not at all ambiguous, but as his second adult
indiscretion:
Cummings says to Hearn, 'It's been a long time
since we've had a little talk, Robert.' 'Yes,
sir, it has been.' Not since the night of the
chess game. And they were both aware of it.
Cummings surveyed Hearn with loathing. Hearn was
the embodiment of the one mistake, the one
279
indulgence he had ever permitted himself, and it
had been intolerable to be with him since then.
(273)
The reader is left to infer that something indeed must have
occurred that night. I surmise that, although Hearn is not
homosexual, a moment of mutual attraction occurred between
the two men.
Cummings hates this "weakness" in himself, causing him
to hate Hearn: "it had produced first the intimacy, the
attraction they had felt toward each other, and then the
hatred" (335). For the rest of the novel, Cummings
persecutes Hearn and then sends him on a virtual suicide
mission, during which Croft contributes to Hearn's death by
enemy bullets. Removing the witness of Cummings's moment
of weakness, however, does not remove the feelings. He
feels such urges again: "With Hearn out of his daily view,
certain regrets, certain urges, were tempting him once
more. But he repressed them. What a touchy business that
thing with Hearn could have been, Cummings thought" (332).
This portrait of homosexual longings was unique in 1948,
especially in a novel about men in battle; the nation's
perception of American fighting men had not included such a
portrayal.
As in The Naked and the Dead, homosexuality is not a
straightforward issue in From Here to Eternity, either.
While the novel shares some of the homophobia of other
280
works, it at the same time it shows contradictory
tendencies which make it far more complex and which make it
a fitting work with which to end this study. While it is
true that Spillane includes portrayals of homosexuals in
some of his works, their function is strictly to be
ridiculed and killed. In The Naked and the Dead. Mailer
chooses to make one of the central characters a man with
homosexual urges who is not killed, showing a willingness
to explore the issue rather than merely dismiss it. In
From Here to Eternity one finds dialogue such as this:
1 1 Lots of guy'll tell you if you even talk to them you're
queer yourself, that you ought to beat them up all the
time. I dont figure like that. I figure those guys just
hate them" (416). The protagonist, Prewitt, responds to
this remark:
"I dont like them," Prew said thoughtfully. "But
I dont hate them. I just dont want to be around
them." He paused. "Its just that they, well for
some reason they make me feel ashamed of
something." He paused again. "I dont know what
of." (416)16
Such equivocal statements about homosexuality by
heterosexual characters were uncommon, although increasing,
in mainstream literature, and Prewitt's feelings of shame
add even more complexity to Jones's treatment of the topic.
The postwar fear of unmanliness made homosexuality a
central concern of the reading public, and perhaps nowhere
281
in mass circulated paperbacks is the issue explored so
open-endedly as in From Here to Eternity.
One attitude that is more explicit in Jones's novel
than in any other work of the time is the possibility that
all heterosexual men might at some time engage in
homosexual behavior. From Here to Eternity (1951), unlike
The Naked and the Dead (194 8), was published after Kinsey's
release of his statistics on the high incidence of male
homosexual behavior:
In these terms (of physical contact to the point
of orgasm), the data in the present study
indicate that at least 37 per cent of the male
population has some homosexual experience between
the beginning of adolescence and old age.
(Kinsey 623)
Kinsey made an important distinction between being
homosexual, a category far fewer claimed to fall under, and
merely exhibiting some homosexual behavior, to which one-
third of American males admitted. Such a distinction is
consistent with Jones's own portraits of male behavior.
With the flurry of attention given Kinsey's report at
about the time Jones was composing his novel, his work not
surprisingly presents a less black and white picture of
homosexuality. In From Here to Eternity, heterosexual men
spend social time in bars with homosexuals sharing talk and
alcohol, an intermingling with and a new level of
explicitness about homosexuality largely unknown in
American mainstream fiction.17 When a heterosexual soldier
282
like Angelo Maggio is broke, he goes to a bar and lets a
homosexual treat him to drinks. Homosexual contact in the
novel is always seen as a possibility for heterosexual men:
"'I'll take me fifty cents and go to town and pick me up a
queer. I aint never picked me up a goddam queer, but I
guess I can do it if other people can'" (173).
Since these men share not only homophobic reactions
but also fear of their own latent homosexuality, such
encounters, though mildly enjoyable, are more than a little
threatening. Prewitt warns another soldier against taking
such risks: "'Listen, dont you let Bloom talk you into goin
queer huntin with him, hear me?'. 'Not me,' Sal Clark said
solemnly. 'I don't like queers. They make me feel funny,
they make me scared'" (172). Fear of homosexuals and of
one's own latent homosexuality make soldiers exceedingly
cautious around homosexuals. The risk of "getting made"
(seduced)— with its overtones of emasculation— is
accompanied by the even graver risk of being "made"
homosexual (becoming one). Prewitt warns a soldier: "Maybe
he's pimpin for this queer. You're liable to end up gettin
made" (171).
The notion of responsibility is an important
psychological issue in From Here to Eternity. A
heterosexual who spends time with homosexuals, as long as
it is his choice, is "not queer." At one point, a
283
homosexual says to Prewitt: M/You have an inquiring mind
and all it needs is the proper direction/n (421). Prewitt
assumes the man is trying to convert him to homosexuality.
Without saying yes or no, Prewitt asserts his right to
decide: "'I make up my own mind. About everything.
Including queers'" (421). As long as he chooses for
himself, by his code he is allowed to choose homosexual
contact without hurting his character.
But having no choice also seems to absolve one of
taking responsibility; when one has "only one
alternative. . . to choose from" (212), the responsibility
does not accrue to oneself. There are a series of scenes
that move from male failure to be satisfied at the brothel
to "queer huntin" in the bars. In the first of these
scenes, Prewitt has a fight with Lorene, his lover, because
on paydays when the brothel is busiest she can only spare
him three minutes for love-making. A prostitute with more
leisure consoles him: "What you got to do now is to
remember that it aint nobody's fault. Its the system.
Nobody's to blame" (409). Finally Prew understands: "She's
got to earn her living. According to the system. Aint
she?" (410). Relieved of personal responsibility for his
choices, Prewitt goes looking for a homosexual: "Hell, if
he got drunk enough he might even be able to pick himself
up one himself. He had tried everything else. He might as
284
well. . ." (411). At first none are available: "No queer
today. All queer busy like hell Payday" (412). Prewitt
claims sour grapes: "I never did like queers. Every time I
get around them I want to punch them in the head." But
Angelo is persuasive: "Aw, they all right. They just
peculiar is all. They maladjusted. Besides, they'll buy
you preparation all night long" (413). Prewitt is
interested again: "'You think you could find me one?' Prew
said, hesitating, yet knowing all the time that he would
go" (413). What else can he do? Since heterosexual
relations have been denied him, the "system" has exonerated
Prewitt from any responsibility, leaving him no other
choice. His "hesitat[ion]" is staged, since he "kn[ew] all
the time he would go." The phrase "Its the system"
relieves Prewitt of responsibility for his choices, yet he
still seems under his breath to be able to choose.18
The philosophy of 'no choice' is partly illustrated
when, as a boy, Prewitt is seduced by an older man, one of
the few cases of a bestselling work that includes a
protagonist who has been sodomized. The double meaning of
"on the bum" makes light of a serious childhood trauma:
It was also on the bum, at the tender age of
twelve, that he'd had his first experience with
queers, when a fifty-year-old jocker had seduced
him in a rolling boxcar. It was more a rape than
a seduction, since another man had had to hold
him. (171)
285
Because of Prewitt's tendency to assign responsibility
elsewhere, it is curious that he does not just describe the
boyhood scene as "rape," even to himself. The language
leaves ambiguous Prewitt's role in the encounter. But if
Prewitt had at first been flattered by the older man's
attentions, and then had balked at the prospect of the sex
act, at that point having to be forced to comply, that
initial attraction might explain his curious hedging of
language in the phrase "It was more a rape than a
seduction" (emphasis added).
Prewitt's ambiguous feelings about his rape/seduction
make him alter the narrative when he is being interrogated
by a lieutenant during the army's homosexual witch hunts:
"All right, I'll ask you again, Prewitt: Have you ever been
with a queer" (473) . Here Jones seems to reveal at least
some familiarity with the Kinsey Report, though the
statistics are exaggerated: "'You don't have to lie to me,'
the lieutenant said patiently. 'The psychological
textbooks say that almost every man, at one time or another
in his life, has been out with a queer'" (473). Accepting
the fact of universal homosexual experience, Prewitt
decides he must relate a homosexual experience or be seen
as guilty of lying, so he selects his childhood experience,
but rewrites the story to make it appear less emasculating:
"'I rolled one once,' Prew said, 'when I was on the bum
286
before I got in the Army'" (473). His new narrative
succeeds, and he is exonerated.
Prewitt accepts the contention that most heterosexual
men have been with a homosexual at least once; citing the
psychology textbooks may convince many readers as well.
Although its statistics are inflated, this fictional
passage parallels Kinsey's research and may have helped
even more readers rethink antiquated notions about an
impermeable division between heterosexuality and
homosexuality.
From the forties' Armed Services Editions to the
fifties' war novels, paperbacks were increasingly
preoccupied with the topics of emasculation and
homosexuality, and in general they show an evolution in the
treatment of these themes. The war novels, while
containing contradictions concerning uhmanliness, end up
being bolder and less condemnatory than other genres. But
this raises one of many puzzling questions, as any
investigation of popular culture tends to do. If the
American public was so threatened by emasculation and
homosexuality, why were they buying war novels dealing with
such themes? Did the popularity of such texts indicate
repressed homoerotic desire or merely a fascination with
what had been forbidden? Perhaps fascination was the
logical outcome of increasing dread of the feminized male.
287
And why did explicit exploration of homosexuals and
heterosexuals consorting together occur, of all places, in
war novels? As mentioned, the toughness of the characters
and writing style provided a buffer against accusations of
softness, no matter how deviant the male behavior. Also,
these works deal with a historical period when masculinity
was more secure, lending the narrative a freedom to explore
behaviors otherwise too threatening. Finally, the
military, as a subject, lends an aura of unassailability
since the military establishes its impeccably masculine
credentials by excluding women and homosexuals and by
denigrating the feminine in men. These factors unique to
the war novel lent it a credence that protected it from
accusations of going soft, and allowed it to explore
homosexuality while still reaching a mass audience.
Homosexuality is also a natural topic for works that
deal with all-male groups. The war novels do not exclude
women entirely, of course; women are included to show their
danger to men; Cummings's mother encourages him to sew,
diminishing his heterosexual impulses; in From Here to
Eternity, prostitutes baby Prewitt so much that he
regresses to childhood. Contact with women is risky, yet,
in some form, essential for maintaining masculinity.
Because of the risks involved, sex resembles a military
maneuver; "[The men] had already made their bomb run on the
whorehouses. . ." (Jones 822). Women, like natural
resources, are marshalled for the purpose of
remasculinizing the troops, but only as long as the men
quickly retreat back into the walls of the base. All-male
housing presents problems that brothels can't wholly solve,
however: males living, showering, and sleeping together
create the suggestion of physical intimacy. In The Naked
and the Dead, though always rejected, male touch is often
contemplated. The intensity Of emotions men experience in
war settings creates even greater bonds of intimacy, as in
the final jungle scenes when Croft grows closer to his men.
In From Here to Eternity when Warden slaps Prewitt, it is
the "first frank gesture of friendship he had ever seen"
(Jones 58). Such intimate male relationships at times
threaten to cross over into physical intimacy. One wonders
if it is because of this ever-present potential for
emotional and physical intimacy between G.I.s that
homosexuality and male touch become so central in these war
narratives.
Part of the answer may be found in the contradictory
motivations the public had for reading these war novels.
On the one hand, the novels served a nostalgic,
romanticized, even escapist purpose; they were popular
because, in a time of fearfulness about emasculation, the
reader could indulge his (or her) nostalgia of a time when
men were men. Contradicting this motive, however, the
novels were popular in the way the Kinsey Report was,
because they exposed the naked, shocking truth about the
previously over-idealized G.I.; at last Americans could
read the real story. A third impulse, although shocking,
differs significantly from seeking the real story about the
forties' G.I.: in it, the reader and the narrative project
fifties' fears of emasculation onto forties' backdrops and
characters; the concerns are contemporary, but the setting
is war. Trying to pin down which is the definitive meaning
of a text to its culture is impossible, of course, and none
of these three competing impulses— nostalgia, expose, or
projection— consistently dominates the narratives. It is
significant, however, that the narratives consistently
steer directly towards the most emasculating scenarios for
men. In The Naked and the Dead, men cry more than fight;
Hennessey soils himself by failing to "keep a tight ass
hole"; Hearn is "disgust[ed] with himself" for failing to
keep his lips tight. In From Here to Eternity, a mortified
Prewitt identifies his mouth as his "Achilles heel," and
Karen Holmes "destroys" her husband's manhood, while
infecting Warden with the "eunuch-making sickness." These
examples are not the stuff of nostalgia, yet, as shocking
as these scenes are to readers, neither are they likely the
"naked" truth about G.I.s; as much as anything, they are
290
postwar concerns about manliness projected onto wartime
masculine figures.
Works of other genres were less interested in such
exploration of the complexities of masculinity and
emasculation. Riesman, Whyte, Hawley, and, to some extent,
Wilson used 'masculinity lost' in order to help sound a
national alarm about current emasculating conformity; the
message was that masculinity was in trouble. Mailer and
Jones, on the other hand, recall the past and its men
neither to carefully protect a cherished image of the G.I.
nor to sound a warning about declining American
masculinity. Their works are exploratory; because of their
freedom and explicitness, they may shock, but they don't
attempt to whip up concern about the •'crisis" of
masculinity. They are less concerned with protecting the
American male than with exploring the complexities of
American masculinity. Although these novels share with
other works of the time a preoccupation with masculinity,
they are less carefully guarded, more open-ended, more
curious; readers benefitted from this frank approach that
allowed them to go much further in contemplating the
unthinkable.
291
Chapter Six Endnotes
1. Another popular softcover war novel is Herman Wouk's The
Caine Mutiny (1951, Anchor paperback 1953), which
maintained its bestseller status for 21 months. In The
Organization Man. Whyte reserves an entire chapter, titled
"Love that System," to examine The Caine Mutiny, which he
finds glibly condoning of the new "Social Ethic" and part
of the evolution toward pro-conformity fiction: "unlike
most popular fare, it does not sugar-coat the precept to
adjustment by trapping it up with the words of
individualism” (Whyte 270). American fiction is as
conformist as the organizations themselves, it seems.
Wouk's novel depicts rebellion against the organization but
then condemns that rebellion, a twist Whyte considers
typical. Whyte calls The Caine Mutiny the:
biggest-selling novel of the postwar period. . .
[because of] the moral overtones that have made it
compelling. Here, raised to the nth degree, is the
problem of the individual versus authority, and the
problem is put so that no reader can duck it. (Whyte
269-70)
At the height of a South Pacific typhoon, Captain Queeg
turns the minesweeper under his command downwind: "Maryk
pleads with him to keep it headed into the wind as their
only chance for survival" (Whyte 271). Maryk's dilemma
between individual right and conformity to the organization
begins: "What shall Maryk do? If he does nothing he is
certain that they are all lost. If he. . . relieves Queeg
temporarily of command for medical reasons, he is in for
great trouble later" (Whyte 271). Maryk takes command, but
is acquitted in court. Whyte is quite satisfied with the
novel up until this point: "Then the author pulls the
switch. At a party afterward, lawyer Greenwald tells Maryk
and the junior officers that they, not Queeg, were the true
villains of the piece" (Whyte 271). Whyte reads the
lawyer's view as Wouk's view: "But the lesson is plain. It
is not for the individual to question the system" (Whyte
272). What really peeves Whyte is that the book sold so
well: "but did Americans gag on it? In the critical
reception of the book most people got the point— and most
of them agreed with it" (Whyte 2 72). For Whyte the tale's
moral is a horrifying one: "The 'smart' people who question
things, who upset people— they are the wrong ones" (272) .
Since Whyte equates "popular fiction" with "popular
morality," he believes the novel's popularity is further
evidence that a long-term shift in American values is in
progress.
2. From Here to Eternity was 861 pages long in hardcover,
292
and the cost of paper was rising in the early fifties.
Even binding such a text seemed prohibitive. Breaking the
work into two separately-bound volumes had been proved
unfeasible. Abridgment, used with The Lonely Crowd, would
detract from the claim that the softcover reader was
enjoying the same reading experience as the hardcover
reader. Prices would simply have to be raised.
3. Signet also was aggressive in promoting other novels,
such as Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
Several years later, in 1957, when Mailer asked for similar
special promotional techniques for his newest book, The
Deer Park. Wevbriaht responded to Mailer's hardcover
publisher: "All the merchandising tricks and devices which
Norman has referred to in connection with Gray Flannel Suit
or 79 Park Avenue were initiated by New American Library"
(quoted in Bonn Traffic 174) .
4. Someone at NAL had to read the 861-page book and use
sound judgment in setting a competitive bid. Weybright had
a reputation as one of the fastest readers among New York
editors of the day: ". . . 1 borrowed the galleys of From
Here to Eternity and read them at a single
sitting— probably the only reader who has managed such a
feat" (quoted in Bonn Traffic 64).
5. "In later years Weybright would be less apt to take
credit for these precedents as he lamented with some
frequency the 'astronomical' bids hardcover publishers were
demanding for softcover reprint rights" (Bonn Traffic 29).
6. From the perspective of the fifties, the war years
seemed a less ambiguous time, and there were, perhaps, not
only the nostalgic feelings for earlier men, but also for a
simpler time as well, when America had a clear mission to
accomplish: "uncertainty about values helped explain the
tendency of novelists to discern meaning by interpreting
and reinterpreting a limited area of data. . . [as in]
realistic novels about the war (such as Norman Mailer's The
Naked and the Dead. . . .)" (Hart 279).
7. In fact, the reviews for the Kinsey Report did not read
very differently from those for The Naked and the Dead? the
U.S. Quarterly Booklist reported that "Kinsey emerges as
something of a crusader for more realism. . ." Mailer too
was credited with promoting a realism too explicit for some
readers to take; the Nation found its 'realism' so literal
as to be mere "transcribing."
8. In an interview for The Paris Review. James Jones
293
comments on the usefulness of war for proving masculinity:
There're so many young guys. . . a whole generation of
people younger than me who have grown up feeling
inadequate as men because they haven't been able to
fight in a war and find out whether they are brave or
not. Because it is in an effort to prove this bravery
that we fight— in wars or in bars. . . (247)
9• In The Paris Review Interviews Writers. 3rd Series
(1967), Mailer refers to the "flatness" of style in The
Naked and the Dead (266). By this he perhaps refers to a
certain emotional distance (or deadness) despite horrendous
events. Such a style not only seems to enhance the impact
of such events, but to parallel Croft's emotional
detachment.
10. To express feeling causes repulsion in others: "There
was something nasty, unclean, about the emotion Roth was
showing. Red always curdled before emotion" (486).
11. This quotation ends on a very self-referential note,
calling attention to the actual writing of the book: "A guy
could write a book about it, he thought bitterly, call it
From Hair to Maternity. It would probly be a very long
book" (767). Such a joking and jarring meta-reference
either hints at the anxiety surrounding the subject of
"drown[ing]. . . in the soft bosoms of matriarchy" or a
self-consciousness about the subject matter.
12. The indefinite word "something" (not someone) occurring
in both passages implies that Prewitt is not childlike, but
has almost an inanimate status.
13. "Remasculinization" is a term coined by Susan Jeffords
in her work on Vietnam narratives, The Remasculinization of
America: Gender and the Vietnam War.
14. It is shown as pitiful that men must resort to
fantasies of spitting on librarians to keep their diseased
masculinity from destroying them.
15. I myself read the passage again and again, at first
unable to detect even an inkling of a homosexual overture.
As a boy, Cummings is told by his father to "act like a
man," confirming that outward conformity is sufficient. In
the word "naked" from the book's title, however, Mailer
signals brief moments when men are no longer acting, but
can be seen in their genuine, unrehearsed state: Cummings
"voice was naked" when he tells Hearn of his antipathy
toward women. Such moments of naked genuineness have great
294
power, but finally prove too intense, too vulnerable, too
unendurable.
16. Early on, there is a rumor about Prewitt's sexual
orientation: "Red wondered if [Houston] could have made a
pass at Prew. But it could not be that; Prewitt would have
half-killed him" (17). Prewitt's homophobia dispels the
rumor, but his later consorting with homosexuals puts in
doubt his intolerance for homosexuality.
17. Also from this time period, J. D. Salinger in The
Catcher in the Rve and a film like Tea and Sympathy make
much milder references to homosexuality.
18. Prewitt has a rough time accepting drinks and
conversation from homosexuals. He periodically bursts out
into angry attacks on his host: "'I guess I just aint cut
out for this kind of life,' Prew said" (434).
295
AFTERWORD
My only love was always my husband, but. . . he's
a fairy, damn him!
— Tereska Torres,
Women's Barracks
I want to urge you not to worry.
— Dr. Benjamin Spock
From medical works to mysteries to Mailer, the theme
of unmanliness is represented with greater or lesser
degrees of panic. In exploring the 'dangers' to men, these
authors capture various visions of alternate masculinities.
Visions of the feminized male vary greatly from writer to
writer: in Spillane, the feminized male is "hitched,"
trapped in the suburb with women and children; in Torres,
he is not hitched, because self-sufficient lesbians have
usurped the male role; in Spock, he is an anxious (or
overgrown) boy overmothered until he becomes interested in
women's activities, such as "interior decoration." By
contrast, in Riesman, Whyte, Hawley, and Wilson, he is a
full-grown man working his way up the ladder of success
within the organization, but he has become more attuned to
296
others than to his own inner voice; in Mailer, he has been
reduced to his "naked" self, and can no longer hold his
bodily orifices tight; in Jones, he has been sodomized and
spends time with homosexuals, but is able to redeem his
masculine status through emotional and physical stoicism
and death.1
In terms of attitudes toward the feminized male, one
might tentatively arrange these authors along a continuum
from very panicked to uncomfortable but curious. Despite a
periodic willingness in Spillane to represent disempowered
males, with his frequent representations of homophobia,
misogyny, and hypermasculinity, Spillane anchors one end of
the continuum. Spock, with his encouragement to fathers,
is located in the center of the continuum, but because of
his fear of feminized boys he can be placed no further
along the continuum. The works about the organization
occupy a place between Spillane and the center of the
continuum because (with the exception of some ambiguity in
Sloan Wilson) they nostalgically worship older masculinity
and sound a cry of alarm about modern conformist
masculinity as shaped by the organization. Torres goes
beyond the center of the continuum, but not much, since
ultimately lesbianism is blamed on emasculated manhood, and
the work is purportedly written to expose homosexuality.
The war novels are located at the most extreme end of the
297
continuum, although representations of homophobia are
rampant in any military setting, because the curiosity
about homosexuality is clearly evident in these works.
Clearly, each work contains contradictory tendencies
which make their placement on any such continuum open to
dispute. This raises an intriguing question: despite the
sometimes condemnatory attitude toward feminized males in
these works, did non-traditional representations of
masculinity have only a cautionary effect, or, in some
cases, did they also carry a subversive potential? Might
textual representations of a variety of 'soft'
masculinities possibly be seen, not merely as conformist,
but also as subversive? Congress seemed to feel these
images were subversive enough to warrant an investigation,
and Kaja Silverman celebrates representations of males
embracing castration as an undermining of traditional
masculine power.
The authors analyzed here offer glimpses of a new kind
of masculinity, neither entirely foreclosing men's
potential for becoming more sensitive nor unequivocally
embracing that potential for sensitivity. Spock asks men
to father more, and, at times, Spillane portrays Hammer as
unemployed, disarmed, passive, and subordinate to his gun-
toting secretary. Both let the nostalgically-celebrated
absolute strictures of masculinity slide a little. Perhaps
298
they give readers an early glimpse of a new freedom for
masculine behavior that would not come to fruition until
the 1960s. Lhamon's view in Deliberate Speed is that
within the fifties are contained the seeds of change that
only sprout visibly in the sixties. This view would
suggest that the very anxiety about masculinity that
preoccupied readers in the postwar period is perhaps in
itself to be read as a sign, not of cultural repression,
but of an anxious fascination with new possibilities for
manhood. The more the anxiety, the more the veiled
contemplation of potentialities.
Whether the pervasive public anxiety about the
feminized male might be read as the stirrings of new
visions of masculinity is speculative, but these texts
contain representations of men that contradict the
completely repressive and monolithic view of fifties'
gender conformity. One might conjecture that there was
both a new sense of freedom in representing masculinity at
the same time as there was an increased sense of
conservatism. In the end, this contradictory model best
approximates cultural conditions of the time; it also tends
to be borne out by other postwar contradictory tendencies,
such as the license taken in paperback cover art coupled
with the repressiveness of the Congressional investigation.
Such a mixed outlook neither revolutionizes the old
299
repressive and conformist view of the fifties nor does it
simply reaffirm it. Perhaps the first inklings of the
sixties were indeed being explored, but only in the most
tentative fashion: in inexpensive ephemeral paperback texts
that generally deteriorated, went quickly out of print, or
were disposed of before the culture had to acknowledge the
implications of what was being contemplated, a greater
variability and freedom for one of the culture's central
tenets, traditional masculinity.
Summing up a culture, its texts, and its time is never
easy and almost invariably raises further questions for
investigation. In just this way, this study is intended to
serve as a springboard for more research. Further study of
the relationship between paperback publishing and issues of
gender will ultimately begin to answer some of the
questions raised here. Especially fruitful would be to
trace the relationship between gender and publishing into
other time periods to discover if there is something
inherent in the inexpensive softcover medium that aligns it
with issues of gender. For instance, it is probably no
coincidence that one of the most gender-defined publishing
phenomena of the seventies, the inception of the modern
romance novel, depended on softcover publishing. What
similarities are there between the male-oriented paperbacks
of the fifties and the female-oriented paperbacks of the
seventies? What is it about the softcover medium that
allows it to continue to reach gender-defined audiences as
well as, or better than, other mass media? Comparisons
between fifties' paperbacks and works of other decades and
other media will help enormously to further contextualize
the fifties' rise of the paperback and the fear of
unmanliness.
301
Afterword Endnotes
1. It is tempting but unnecessary to postulate distinct
audiences for, say, Spock, Spillane, and Riesman. We
cannot define one monolithic reader, but only aspects of
male readership. One reader might conceivably read Spock
during the day while parenting, and read Spillane in the
night when his less civilized urges are open to expression.
In the end, determining actual reading demographics of
works is difficult and unpredictable. For example, despite
Playboy's anti-marriage stance as reflected in the
statement of purpose in its opening issue, about half of
its subscribers were married (Ehrenreich 43), affirming
that a text's apparent ideology does not always accurately
reflect the beliefs of its readers.
302
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