The non-fiction best seller lists of April 14 reflected the worries and hopes that readers of the day had about the postwar world. Several books on world peace ranked high on the lists. Memoirs, autobiographies and journalism also were popular, including several that shed light on the war years. The books with a political theme leaned to the left reflecting the political consensus of the day. Works with a religious theme were also popular. It was not all serious topics on the lists this week. For months a humorous account of a would-be chicken farmer was number one. History, with a single exception, was noticeably absent.
THE EGG AND I, Betty MacDonald’s humorous account of her brief attempt at egg farming in rural Washington state sat on top of the nonfiction bestseller list this week. For the last couple of decades, city dwellers had dreamed of an escape from the modern urban rat race. Ads for starting an egg producing business still populated the back pages of Sunday supplements in New York City newspapers. MacDonald assured her readers that the backwoods was no paradise. The book had been on the bestseller list for six months and Universal had acquired the film rights [Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray starred in the 1947 film]. MacDonald played rural life for laughs and some found her depiction of her neighbors as well as of local Native Americans degrading and condescending. One family, Ma and Pa Kettle, pictured as the stereotypical backwoods bumpkins, later became the central characters in a series of popular movies. The family who believed themselves the inspiration for the characters sued while also attempting to cash in on their notoriety as the real Ma and Pa Kettle.
PLEASANT VALLEY, which also had been on the list for months, presented a different view of life on a farm. The author was Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Louis Bromfield who had returned to his Ohio home to set up an experimental farm. His book was part memoir and part practical farming advice. His Malabar Farm is now a state park.
THE ANATOMY OF PEACE, a plea for world federalism by Emery Reves, held the number two spot this week. The idea had wide appeal in the immediate postwar period. This book came with endorsements from prominent intellectuals and politicians including Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Mortimer Adler and William Fulbright. It was published in 25 languages in 30 countries. Reader’s Digest ran a condensed serialized version and Pocket Books issued a paperback edition. Reves ideas were the topic of sermons and lectures and the book was used a textbook at major universities. Public sentiment for world federalism would erode under attacks in the postwar period from the America First and the American Century crowds who saw the Communists and the West in a battle for world domination. The Soviets were no more enamored of the concept of world government unless they were in charge. Reves argued that the competing “isms” were a barrier to world peace and that diplomatic efforts had proven ineffective in the past in eliminating the tensions that led to war. He wrote that the newly formed United Nations Security Council was an inadequate instrument for the resolution of conflict since it enshrined the Big Power politics that had led to the recent world wars in the first place. He argued for the establishment of basic laws and principles to which every nation must subscribe. The Hungarian-born Reves, first cousin of conductor Sir Georg Solti, was well-known in intellectual circles. Before the war, he had run a news service and publishing house that disseminated essays by leading world figures, much of it warning of the dangers posed by the Nazis. He was Winston Churchill’s literary agent and played a significant role in British propaganda efforts in the Americas after the outbreak of the war. He would long be a leader in the world federalist movement. This book is still in print.
Two other bestsellers addressed the issue of peace with an emphasis on the dangers posed by the dawn of the atomic age. ONE WORLD OR NONE was a collaboration among the Federation of American Scientists, a group that worked on atomic research. ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES, a review of the science behind the atom bomb by Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, had been released to the press days after the bombing of Hiroshima and was an instant bestseller when it became available to the public. Some in the military believed that it made too much information public. In the postwar years, Smyth was an advocate of international control of nuclear weapons and, as the only scientist on the Atomic Energy Commission, a defender of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In print.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, posthumously published in 1945, won the Pulitzer Prize. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. White was a national icon, considered the embodiment of Main Street values, in his role as editor and publisher of The Emporia Gazette. He had shot to national fame in 1896 with his editorial “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” a scathing attack on the Populists who ran the state and on William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential candidate. White was a loyal Republican of the Teddy Roosevelt Progressive wing. He was more cosmopolitan than his public image suggested and was among the founders of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the book had been a club selection.
Five other memoirs, autobiographies and biographies had made the list. STARLING OF THE WHITE HOUSE revealed life in the White House from Wilson to FDR through the eyes of a longtime Secret Service man, Edmund W. Starling, as told to Thomas Sugrue, best known today for his reverential biography of psychic Edgar Cayce. BURMA SURGEON RETURNS was Gordon S. Seagrave’s account of his experience as a surgeon in wartime Burma. It was a followup to a previous bestseller. ALOHA was the second part of a three part memoir by Armine von Tempski, published posthumously. She had been born and raised in Hawaii and played an influential role in the development of the tourist industry on the once remote Hawaiian islands. THE CIANO DIARIES was selections from the journal of Mussolini’s son-in-law, Gian Galeazzo Ciano, who had served as foreign minister for the Fascist government but was executed by his father-in-law for treason for siding with a coup attempt after the Allied invasion of Italy. ON THE EDGE OF EVENING was the autobiography of Cornelius Weygandt, a University of Pennsylvania English professor who previously had written several popular books on the Pennsylvania Dutch and New Hampshire as well as literary criticism. Kenneth S. Davis’ SOLDIER OF DEMOCRACY was a biography of Eisenhower, who was emerging as the most popular hero of the Second World War, an apotheosis that would lead to his election as president in 1952.
PEACE OF MIND was a self-help book by a rabbi, Joshua Liebman, who sought to reconcile religion and psychiatry. The book reached number one on the New York Times list in October 1946 and held the position on and off for 58 weeks. It was on the bestseller list for three years. Other books on religion or philosophy were selling exceptionally well. THE IDEA OF CHRIST IN THE GOSPELS presented the thoughts of the renowned 82- year-old philosopher George Santayana on Christ and religion. Santayana was a humanist and materialist but also a traditionalist and elitist . He was known for his elegant prose style as well as his at times contradictory philosophy. Although he did not believe in a personal God and was not a member of any church, he was aesthetically strongly attached to Catholicism and defended the importance of religion as a valuable attempt of the poetic imagination to address truth but whose literal truth was irrelevant. The Spanish-born, Boston-raised former Harvard professor never took US citizenship and spent the war years in a convent run by Irish nuns in Rome where he remained until his death in 1952. Like many conservative elitists of his day, he initially was a Mussolini admirer. A major figure of his time who was both intellectually respected and popularly read, he had a best-selling novel in 1936, The Last Puritan, but is most remembered today for the oft repeated quote “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” THE GREAT DIVORCE was a religious allegory about heaven and hell from C.S. Lewis, the devout Anglican, Anglo-Irish writer already known in 1936 for The Screwtape Letters. His fame has grown since then, especially for his Chronicles of Narnia series. THE REVISED STANDARD VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT was the first installment of the new Protestant translation of the Bible. It was widely hailed by religious leaders when it was first published and had made it to the bestseller lists although some traditionalists held out for the archaic but poetic language of the King James version. When the new translation of the Old Testament appeared, Fundamentalist opposition intensified with one Evangelical pastor going so far as to burn the new Bible. THE PRACTICAL COGITATOR was the latest edition of a long-popular anthology of the editors’ choice of the most important ideas and writings of history's greatest thinkers. It had gone through many revised editions since its initial publication at the time of World War One. It was sort of the secular counterpart of a book of devotional readings.
UP FRONT was a collection of the wartime cartoons of the Pulitzer Prize winner Bill Mauldin, who created the archetypal GIs, Willie and Joe. It had been a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. In print. BRAVE MEN was a collection of newspaper articles by Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent who had died during combat in April 1945. It also had been a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and sold a million copies in 1945. WASHINGTON TAPESTRY was a collection of writings by syndicated Washington political columnist Ray Clapper with biographical notes by his widow, Olive Ewing Clapper. Ray Clapper had died in a plane collision in the South Pacific in 1944 while covering the war. Another journalism collection list was FARMER TAKES A WIFE, a collection by the folksy Maine humorist, John Gould, who had a syndicated newspaper column.
THE AGE OF JACKSON, the Pulitzer Prize-winning history by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., was the only representative of the genre on the lists this week, making only the Herald Tribune chart. The son of a prominent Harvard historian, the younger Schlesinger was well on his way to fame which would reach its height in the Kennedy era when he would be a prominent spokesperson for the anti-Communist liberal establishment. In his book, Schlesinger drew comparisons between the Jacksonian Democrats and the New Deal liberals of his own day. Critics of his thesis point out that in many ways Jacksonian Democracy bore a closer resemblance to Populism than to New Deal liberalism.
In REVEILLE FOR RADICALS community organizer Saul Alinsky presented a blueprint for battling inequality and injustice. The book is in print today and Alinsky’s practical advice is still widely followed. In fact, conservative groups, while eschewing Alinsky’s goals, also have adopted his tactics to influence public policy and the political process. In FIRST FREEDOM, Morris L. Ernst, a founder of the ACLU, discussed how the concentration of media in the hands of a few large corporations was a threat to freedom of the press. Ernst's opposition to the covert tactics of the Communist Party made him anathema to the Far Left. Ernst believed that the Communists, while posing as civil libertarians, only supported freedom of speech when it served their interests, and he purged them from the ACLU leadership. For more on this book see the review this week in the Herald Tribune book review.
The postwar interest in housing sent three books to the Herald-Tribune bestseller list. THE BOOK OF HOUSES offered practical advice and house plans from housing economist John P. Dean and architect Simon Breines. TOMORROW’S HOUSE from prominent architects George Nelson and Henry Wright included designs for the modern postwar house. Iconic names like Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius and others also contributed house plans to the book which is still in print today. MADEMOISELLE’S HOME PLANNING SCRAPBOOK had ideas for the postwar home from the popular magazine.
Another 1945 Book-of-the-Month club selection still on the list was LOVELY IS THE LEE, an exploration of an Irish river and the surrounding countryside from British artist Robert Gibbings.