From The Twenty-Year Revolution, Chesly Manly 1954

The peculiar sensitivity of the State Department, under the Eisenhower administration, to criticism by the Communists and the anti-anti-Communists was demonstrated by its anguished antics when the McCarthy sub-committee demanded the removal of procommunist books from the overseas libraries of the United States Information Service. Under the Truman administration, these libraries, maintained with funds appropriated by Congress to propagate American ideals in foreign countries, were loaded with books by Communists, including twenty-one who invoked the Constitutional privilege against self-incrimination and refused to answer questions of Congressional committees about communist activities. The overseas libraries included books by Earl Browder and his successor as boss of the American Communist Party, William Z. Foster. They even included one title by Ilya Ehrenburg, director of the Kremlin�s propaganda machine. They offered the complete proceedings, from 1929 to 1947, of the notorious Institute of Pacific Relations, which was regarded by Soviet officials and by the American Communist Party as �an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda and military intelligence,� according to the report of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. The works of Owen Lattimore, who was described in the Senate report as �a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy,� and many other communist IPR writers were prominently displayed in the 196 United States information centers overseas.

When the McCarthy committee launched its campaign to remove the communist books from the libraries, there was a great hue and cry  . . from the communist Daily Worker, the New York Times and �liberal� academicians and theologians. The pretended liberals induced President Eisenhower to admonish the people against joining the �book burners� in his speech at Dartmouth College on June 14, 1953. At a press conference four days later the President indicated that he had learned something about the purposes of the act authorizing the establishment of the libraries. He said it would be �silly� to display communist books advocating the destruction of the United States on the shelves of overseas libraries established to �advertise the United States.� Such books should be eliminated . .  .

Still later, however, the President . . . deprecated the removal of �whodunits� by Dashiell Hammett from the libraries. Someone must have been scared, the President said. The State Department, which had ordered the removal of all books by authors who had refused to answer questions about their communist connections, promptly ordered the reinstatement of Hammett�s books. Hammett had defied not only a Congressional committee but also a federal court, and had served six months in jail for contempt in refusing to disclose the source of a bail fund for communists, of which he was chairman. Just why the tax-payers� money should be spent to enhance the prestige of a Communist by buying his books and displaying them on the shelves of libraries maintained to promote American ideals in foreign countries was not explained by the President or by the State Department.

Apparently dazed by conflicting pressures . . , the State Department issued no less than eleven directives revising its policy on the question of communist books. The final directive, issued on July 15, 1953, declared that works by avowed Communists, those convicted of crimes involving a threat to the security of the United States, and those refusing to answer questions about communist connections, would not be used �unless it is determined that a particular item is clearly useful for the special purposes of the program.�

Chicago : Henry Regnery 1954, p. 238-240.