Title V Nonsense

The first requisite of a sound democracy is a well-informed electorate. But the U.S. is bending every effort to keep its soldier voters politically innocent.

Last week the Army announced that G.I. theaters could not exhibit Darryl F. Zanuck's $5,000,000 Technicolorful Wilson. Also prohibited was a Fibber McGee movie called Heavenly Days, in which the irreverent Fibber, the wag of Wistful Vista, is selected Mr. Average Man in a Gallup Poll, goes to Washington, and is tossed out of the Senate when he tries to make a speech (see cut). Then the Army reversed its field and said it had not made up its mind yet. But it was firm on the rest of its bans. Army post exchanges may not sell British newspapers. The PXs may not even sell the Air Forces' own Official Guide (525,000 copies printed)--it has an execrable portrait of Franklin Roosevelt as a frontispiece. These were added last week to a suppress list which already includes such "dangerous" intellectual weapons as Charles Beard's The Republic and Catherine Drinker Bowen's biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Yankee from Olympus (TIME, May 8).* Any of these, said the Army, might influence the 1944 elections.

The Army was undoubtedly right. All these publications are helping to influence civilian voters more or less, for better or for worse. But the Army was obeying orders--the orders written by Congress into Title V of the new Soldier Vote Act which provides $1,000 fine and a year in prison for anyone sending political propaganda to the troops.

Title V is specific: it prohibits political argument "of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result of a [federal] election." It was written in an excess of zeal by anti-New Dealers to keep the Administration from making propaganda hay with the troops.

The Navy did not interpret Title V so strictly. The author of Title V felt that he had been victimized by an old Army game: Army officers had just been too literal, complained literal-minded Senator Robert A. Taft. But no Congressmen wanted to argue that laws are not meant to be strictly observed. Last week a Senate committee conferred with the War Department, agreed to reword Title V to have it make sense.

* Others: Sumner Welles's The Time for Decision; Ambassador Crew's Ten Years in Japan; Raymond Clapper's Watching the World; Eric Johnston's America Unlimited; John Carlson's Under Cover; E. B. White's One Man's Meat; Senator James Mead's Tell the Folks Back Home.

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