On Living Life and Accepting Death

  photo by Lari Huttunen (cc by-nc-nd 2.0)

I don’t believe in an afterlife, which means I do believe in death. It shouldn’t be such a strange thing to believe life ends in death, but most people believe or at least hope for more. Death denial is an understandable impulse; sometimes it even extends to family pets, but less often to other animals. We want ourselves and those we care about to carry on. We won’t. They won’t.

Does the reality of death mean life doesn’t matter? No, it means life is the only thing that matters. You get once chance to exist and it’s happening now. Now is the time to love, the time to learn, the time to create, the time to enjoy yourself and choose to either bring comfort or suffering to others.

What about jerks who prosper in life and kind people who live hard lives? Doesn’t the reality of death mean the world is unjust? Yes. That may sound harsh, but how kind is it to tell people that the suffering and deaths of their loved ones is for the best? It can be disheartening to know we can’t make everything better, but what we can do matters all the more because there’s no other help on the way.

Besides, popular alternatives tend to be worse. At least suffering and injustice end along with life. Mainstream Christian and Muslim beliefs promise unending joy for a select few and unending suffering for most people. That’s solving a house fire with an atom bomb.

Why not just have as much pleasure in life as possible and forget about other people? Well, there’s nothing wrong with pleasure. Pleasure is great and it comes in many satisfying forms! As a loved one says: “No time enjoyed is entirely wasted.” As for ignoring the suffering of other people, moral philosophers have tried in vain to find a reason for completely selfish people to care about others. You have to start with caring a little. Thankfully, most of us do. We don’t have to solve whole categories of suffering on our own; we can cooperate with others, working within the limits of our imperfect empathy and our incomplete understanding to make our lives a little better.

“If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.”

— Emily Dickinson

Quote of the Day: Jensen on Library Neutrality

"Take a simple example involving the common assumption in the United States that the capitalist economic system is the only rational and morally defensible way to organize an economy. There can be, and often is, much debate about how to structure and administer a capitalist economy, but the system itself is rarely contested, despite centuries of resistance to capitalism around the world and considerable intellectual work underlying that resistance. Now, imagine that a librarian wants to produce a display of the libraryʼs resources on economics to encourage patrons to think about the subject. In many libraries such a display would include no critiques of capitalism, but simply literature that takes capitalism as a given. Such a display that ignores critical material likely would produce no controversy (except perhaps a few complaints from anti-capitalists about the absence of critique, who could easily be dismissed as cranks). It is unlikely that school boards or city councils would take up the issue of the obvious bias against socialism and other non-capitalist economic systems. Consider what might happen if a librarian charged with this task actually produced a display that carefully balanced the amount of material from as many different perspectives as s/he could identify. In many places, that display would be denounced for its 'obvious' socialist politics. Now, imagine that a librarian, observing the way in which Americans are systematically kept from being exposed to anti-capitalist ideas in the schools and mass media, decides to organize materials that compensate for that societal failure by emphasizing critiques of capitalism. That librarian could be guaranteed not only criticism and charges of political bias, but likely disciplinary action.

My point is simply that all of those decisions have a political dimension, which is unavoidable. My concern here is not which one is the right decision, but that the librarian whose display is in line with the conventional wisdom likely will escape criticism while any other choices will raise questions about 'politicizing' what should be a professional decision. Unfortunately, this neutrality game will derail rather than foster serious discussion of the issues."

- from "The Myth of the Neutral Professional" by Robert Jensen in Progressive Librarian Issue #24.

Quote of the Day: Barack Obama on Special Interests

"I've never been entirely comfortable with the term 'special-interests,' which lumps together ExxonMobil and bricklayers, the pharmaceutical lobby and the parents of special-ed kids. Most political scientists would probably disagree with me, but to my mind, there's a difference between a corporate lobby whose clout is based on money alone, and a group of like-minded individuals—whether they be textile workers, gun aficionados, veterans, or family farmers—coming together to promote their interests; between those who use their economic power to magnify their political influence far beyond what their numbers might justify, and those who are simply seeking to pool their votes to sway their representatives. The former subvert the very idea of democracy. The latter are its essence."

— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, 2006, p. 116.

Quote of the Day: Barack Obama on Reading Critically

A 1950 edition.

‘“Sister Regina,” Marcus said. “You know Barack, don’t you? I’m trying to tell Brother Barack here about this racist tract he’s reading.”

He held up a copy of Heart of Darkness, evidence for the court. I reached over to snatch it out of his hands.

“Man, stop waving that thing around.”

“See there,” Marcus said, “Makes you embarrassed, don’t it—just being seen with a book like this. I’m telling you, man, this stuff will poison your mind.” He looked at his watch. “Damn, I’m late for class.” He leaned over and pecked Regina on the cheek. “Talk to this brother, will you? I think he can still be saved.”

Regina smiled and shook her head as we watched Marcus stride out the door. “Marcus is in one of his preaching moods, I see.” I toss the book in my backpack.

“Actually, he’s right,” I said. “It is a racist book. The way Conrad sees it, Africa’s the cesspool of the world, black folks are savages, and any contact with them breeds infection.”

Regina blew on her coffee. “So why are you reading it.”
“Because it’s assigned.” I paused, not sure if I should go on. “And because—“
“Because…”

“And because the book teaches me things,” I said. “About white people, I mean. See, the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid. So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.”’

— Barack Obama recounting a college experience in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

How We Know Abstinence-Only Education Doesn't Work

Abstinence-only education does not reduce teen pregnancy. If it did, decades of research would have demonstrated this many times over. Instead, research results have been overwhelmingly inconclusive or the opposite of what its advocates would like to see.

A method of "education" characterized by limiting what is taught had better yield clear practical benefits. At least then there might be a trade-off between knowledge and behavior.

The Rise of Abstinence-Only Education In the United States

Federal funding for abstinence-only programs began in 1982 with the Adolescent Family Life Act, which was part of the previous year's omnibus spending bill (blue "AFLA" line on the chart below). This sent millions of dollars annually to programs aimed at preventing "adolescent sexual activity and adolescent pregnancy." These programs were encouraged to partner with "religious and charitable" organizations, which led to such a degree of religious involvement that a case went up to the Supreme Court by 1988. In Bowen v. Kendrick (487 U.S. 589), the Court decided that the Act was not unconstitutional on its face, but did note that there appeared to be "impermissible" specific applications, which it called for other courts to examine.

In 1998, a major welfare reform dramatically increased funding for abstinence-only programs (red "Title V" line on chart below). This bill defined an abstinence education program as one which:

1. Has as its exclusive purpose, teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity
2. Teaches abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school age children
3. Teaches that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems
4. Teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity
5. Teaches that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects
6. Teaches that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents, and society
7. Teaches young people how to reject sexual advances and how alcohol and drug use increases vulnerability to sexual advances
8. Teaches the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity

In 2001, additional federal funding began flowing from the Community Based Abstinence Education program (purple "CBAE" line on the chart below). The overall progression has been from low funding in the 80s and early 90s, medium funding in the late 90s, peak funding in the 00s, and back down to medium funding through at least 2014, thanks to $50 million per year allocated as part of the Affordable Care Act. In other words, the red line holds steady for three more years than this chart depicts:

From http://www.siecus.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewPage&pageID=1340

Two decades and well over a billion tax dollars later, there is no scientific evidence that programs matching the 8-point definition are effective at reducing teen pregnancy.

An Official Investigation

As part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, Congress authorized funds for a scientific study of Title V abstinence-only programs. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contracted this study out to Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. After years of study, Mathematica submitted its final report to HHS in April, 2007:

http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/abstinence07/

To maximize the opportunity for positive, reliable results, this study focused on four school programs that were especially intensive and could be especially well documented:

"All programs offered more than 50 contact hours and lasted for one or more school years, making them relatively intense among programs funded by the Title V, Section 510 grant." (Trenholm, 2007, p. 2)

"These four programs are called 'impact sites' because they had program features and staff capable of supporting a rigorous, experimental-design impact evaluation." (ibid., p. 7)

Over twelve-hundred students were involved in these four programs, with over eight-hundred students in control groups. To measure differences over time, follow-up surveys were given from 42 to 78 months after the surveys given at the beginning of each program (ibid., p. 19). It was just the sort of broad-but-detailed study that would have stood up to scrutiny from critics of abstinence-only education. Some conclusions:

"None of the individual programs had statistically significant impacts on the rate of sexual abstinence, whether measured as either always remaining abstinent or being abstinent during the last 12 months." (ibid., p. 30)

"Program and control group youth also did not differ in the number of partners with whom they had sex." (ibid., p. 31)

"Programs did not affect the age at which sexually experienced youth first engaged in sexual intercourse" (ibid., p. 31)

"Forty percent of program group youth reported that they expected to abstain from sex until marriage compared with 37 percent of control group youth, a difference that is not statistically significant" (ibid., p. 32)

"Across the individual programs, estimated impacts on unprotected sex, measured either at first intercourse or in the last 12 months, were likewise small and statistically insignificant" (ibid., p. 34)

"Ten percent of youth in both the program and control groups reported having been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant, and roughly half of them (five percent overall) reported that they had had a baby." (ibid., p. 35)

"[P]rograms raised the proportion of youth who reported that condoms never prevent HIV from an estimated 17 to 21 percent; the proportion who reported that condoms never prevent chlamydia and gonorrhea from an estimated 14 to 20 percent; and the proportion who reported that condoms never prevent herpes and HPV from an estimated 15 to 23 percent." (ibid. p. 46)

Yikes! These golden examples of abstinence-only education programs failed to alter behaviors or even attitudes. They did, however, increase the number of teens who believed condoms were useless for STI protection.

State Studies

A number of states have run evaluations on their own abstinence only programs. Unfortunately, these state studies haven't generally been models of scientific rigor. No control group, or no follow-up, or both! Although abstinence-only education failed to come out looking good in any of the studies, opponents of abstinence-only education should not rely on desired results that come from shoddy methods. Advocates for Youth put together a summary of these state studies here:

Five Years of Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Education: Assessing the Impact

Two of these studies did include both a control group and a follow-up. California's 17-months-later follow-up found that program students were no less likely than control students to have become sexually active, pregnant, or infected (Kirby, 1997). The program was cancelled based on these results. Missouri's smaller study had similar findings (Hauser, 2004).

Abstinence Until Ready

In 2010 a rigorous scientific study came out that showed a positive effect for abstinence education:

Efficacy of a Theory-Based Abstinence-Only Intervention Over 24 Months: A Randomized Controlled Trial With Young Adolescents

But there's a catch. This abstinence program deliberately did not match up with federal standards for abstinence-only education:

"It was not designed to meet federal criteria for abstinence-only programs. For instance, the target behavior was abstaining from vaginal, anal, and oral intercourse until a time later in life when the adolescent is more prepared to handle the consequences of sex. The intervention did not contain inaccurate information, portray sex in a negative light, or use a moralistic tone. The training and curriculum manual explicitly instructed the facilitators not to disparage the efficacy of condoms or allow the view that condoms are ineffective to go uncorrected. The results of this trial should not be taken to mean that all abstinence-only interventions are efficacious. This trial tested a theory-based abstinence-only intervention that would not meet federal criteria for abstinence programs and that is not vulnerable to many criticisms that have been leveled against interventions that meet federal criteria." (Jemmott, 2010)

The study's authors suggested a role for this kind of modified abstinence education program: an improvement over federally-defined abstinence education in communities that will not allow comprehensive sex education. It still lacks much of the information of comprehensive programs, but at least it doesn't encourage false and fearful beliefs...which evidently don't help anyway.

Correlations

Good news! Teen pregnancies, teen abortions, and births to teens have been falling:

Can this be attributed to abstinence-only programs? Perhaps the studies above are accurate within their particular contexts, but are missing out on big picture trends. If the states that require or emphasize abstinence-only education are generally the states with lower pregnancy rates, then it might be worth looking further into abstinence-only education. Someone did, in fact, look for this pattern.

Using information on state laws and policies in 2005, researchers assigned each state with relevant laws or policies a level from 3 to 0 (Stanger-Hall, 2011):

• Level Three - abstinence-only education, according to federal guidelines.
• Level Two - abstinence stressed, but discussion of contraception methods not forbidden.
• Level One - abstinence covered as part of comprehensive sex education.
• Level Zero - abstinence not specifically mentioned in sex education.

How did the states do?

So much for abstinence-only showing promise in the big picture. Here are comparison charts for pregnancies, abortions, and births (ibid.):

As far as teen pregnancy goes, abstinence-only education may actually be worse than sex ed that never mentions abstinence as an option!

Conclusion

Other issues aside, abstinence-only education does not improve teen abstinence. Its advocates should at the very least be seeking to reform it to be more like the "Theory-Based Abstinence-Only Intervention" mentioned above that went against federal guidelines and showed promise. Personally, I suspect the focus on postponing all sex until marriage is so unrealistic (and not even a worthy ideal) that teen audiences are lost to the positive message that it's OK to wait until both people are ready to make a considered, responsible choice.

References

Kirby, D., Korpi, M., Barth, R.P., Cagampang, H.H. (May/June 1997). The impact of the postponing sexual involvement curriculum among youths in California. Family Planning Perspectives, 29(3). Retrieved from http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/2910097.html

Hauser, D. (2004) Five years of abstinence-only-until-marriage education: Assessing the impact. Retrieved from http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/storage/advfy/documents/stateevaluations.pdf

Jemmott, J.B., Jemmott, L.S., Fong, G.T. (2010) Efficacy of a theory-based abstinence-only intervention over 24 months: A randomized controlled trial with young adolescents. Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 164(2), 152-159. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/archpediatrics.2009.267

Stanger-Hall, K.F., Hall, D.W. (October 2011). Abstinence-only education and teen pregnancy rates: Why we need comprehensive sex education in the U.S. Plos ONE. Retrieved from http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0024658

Trenholm, C., Devaney, B., Fortson, K., et al. (April 2007). Impacts of four Title V, Section 510 abstinence education programs final report. Retrieved from http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/abstinence07/

Quote of the Day: Neil Gaiman on the Power of Fiction

"I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different."

— Neil Gaiman, as quoted by The Guardian on October 15, 2013.

When Librarians Go To War: The ALA War Service 1917-18

"[T]o make better men of the soldiers as well as to make better soldiers of the men."¹

World War I lasted from 1914 to 1918, with the United States finally entering the war in 1917. In April of 1917, the American Library Association—a small organization at the time with a $24,000 yearly budget²—offered to provide professional library services to U.S. military camps and to raise the funds to do so! By the end of the war, the ALA had collected millions of dollars and book donations, built over thirty camp libraries, and employed hundreds of librarians. More importantly, the idea of—and appreciation for—free library services was spread to every corner of the nation, even to communities far from early library strongholds like Boston and New York.

Today's libraries are well-established, but there are worries about public commitment to free library services. One lesson contemporary librarians can take away from the ALA's War Service is that tapping into public interests can enable services beyond what seems possible with the existing budget. Such initiatives can then boost community appreciation for free library services.

A Bold Proposal

Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress, first proposed the idea of the ALA providing books to military men in a private meeting with an assistant to the Secretary of War.³ Between this meeting in April 1917 and the ALA's annual conference in June 1917, Putnam strategically promoted the idea and formed a committee.⁴ With this backing in place, he distributed the committee's report at the conference. The report (unsurprisingly) concluded that what the Association had before it was "an extraordinary opportunity."⁵ This sentiment was widely accepted and echoed. Soon afterward, Raymond Fosdick, the chairman of the War Department's Committee on Training Camp Activities, extended an official invitation. The American Library Association assumed responsibility for providing service to the nation's thirty-two domestic training camps.⁶

Bring Your Own Library

Each camp was populated by thirty-thousand to fifty-thousand soldiers, for a total of over 1.3 million potential readers.⁷ Government grants were not sought. Instead, the War Finance Committee of the ALA made plans to raise the money and collect supplies from private donors! The first step was to raise funds needed to run the main fundraising campaign. $50,000 was temporarily donated mainly from ALA's own resources, Baker & Taylor publishers, and the Rockefeller Foundation.⁸ These seed funds would be paid back from the main campaign, which had a goal of raising a million dollars. The Carnegie Corporation approved a $320,000 grant in September 1917 ($10,000 per camp). By April 1918, the million dollar overall goal had been reached, with an additional $750,000 beyond that!⁹

For a second fundraising drive, the ALA joined the YMCA and five other private organizations involved in training camp services for a United War Work Campaign. The ALA didn't sit back content with general advertising for the combined effort; library-themed posters and bookmarks were created and sent out in huge numbers.¹⁰ By a quirk of history, the first day of the United War Work Campaign turned out to be Armistice Day: November 11, 1918. The campaign raised $205 million anyway! The ALA's portion was 3.8 million, which allowed library services to continue until the ALA could hand off management to the various military branches in an orderly fashion from 1919 to 1921.¹¹

The ALA ran a book collection drive over the same period as the first money drive. By June 1918, over two million donated books had been collected and sent to domestic training camps.¹² Almost 300,000 had been shipped overseas, a riskier affair as several of the ships were sunk on the way by enemy submarines.¹³ Troops also received about five million magazines,¹⁴ not through ALA drives, but through a postal service program. Journals and magazines carried the following notice from the Postmaster General:

"When you finish reading this magazine place a 1-cent stamp on this notice, hand same to any postal employee and it will be placed in the hands of our soldiers or sailors at the front."¹⁵

Why bother with fundraising when books and magazines were being donated in such abundance? There was also a need to supply library buildings, pay librarians in key leadership roles, and purchase non-fiction (mostly technical) books not covered by donations.¹⁶ The ALA asked publishers to offer steep discounts on multiple copy purchases, and all major publishers agreed!¹⁷ After the Armistice, purchasing focus shifted from technical books to vocational literature. Camp librarians put together recommended reading lists on a variety of career areas and placed "Back to the Job" advertisements around the camp to market these services.¹⁸ In total, Carnegie and ALA funds were used to build forty camp libraries,¹⁹ typically including small living quarters for a librarian, which allowed long operating hours of 7 am to 10 pm every day of the week in most locations.²⁰ The bulk of the fundraising and technical services work was, however, carried out by public librarian volunteers.²¹

The Subordinated Majority

Sex discrimination was strong at the beginning of the War, but became increasingly challenged as the draft pulled men out of their hoarded leadership positions. The library profession's composition as a whole was about four women to every man,²² but the ALA itself enforced an unwritten rule against women being paid for work in camp libraries. As protests to the ALA leadership and directly to the War Department grew, Herbert Putnam first falsely claimed that the ALA was only following military rules (as anyone could see by the women employed in private YWCA hostess houses). He then promised a greater role for women, but this was a transparent attempt to defuse complaints without actually doing anything. Finally, Putnam acted as if the protestors were disparaging the work done by the women who had been working in camp libraries (often running them in practice) without pay or status. He relented at last, gracelessly implying that he was only swayed by the voices of male librarians.²³

By the summer of 1918, women were officially in charge of eight of the thirty-two camp libraries.²⁴ Blanche Galloway of the Pelham Bay Naval Station was the first woman to be paid for directing an ALA camp library. In September of 1918, Ms. Galloway spoke at the New York State Library Association's annual meeting:

"The wonderful opportunities which the library has to help these young men from all stations and walks of life, the one great thing that makes it worth while is the fact that the library influence is a leveling up and never down. Every man who seeks help here is going to be able to do something better than he has done it before. This is the kind of democracy we are all proud to have a part in establishing."²⁵

It's crazy to think the ALA had held back Galloway and other passionate librarians; it's inspiring to know she persevered for the sake of her "young men."

Value

The increasing role of technology in early twentieth-century warfare made greater than ever intellectual demands on fighters. It was now "a war of mechanism and of exact science."²⁶

"At one typical camp a single day's circulation included books on the following: French history, mechanics, topography and strategy in war, self propelled vehicles, hand grenades, field entrenchments, bridges, chemistry, physics, astronomy, hydraulics, electricity, medieval history, calculus, civil engineering, geography, American history, surveying, materials of construction, general history, masonry, concrete. About three-fourths of the books taken out were non-fiction."²⁷

This should make it clear that relying on second-hand, outdated gift books from civilians would not have been adequate to the task of making better soldiers of the men. Camp libraries—and especially overseas book distribution—also addressed psychological needs. Major General Glenn of Camp Sherman gave library materials credit for "producing contentment" in men drafted into the new environment of military life.²⁸ Mystery and adventure novels were especially popular. The more elitist librarians liked to tell each other stories of patrons asking for high-brow literature, confident they were making better men of the soldiers.²⁹ As mentioned above, camp librarians took on the role of occupational counselors toward the end.

Beyond reading material itself, libraries provided a quiet place to get away from the usual routine. According to one soldier at Camp Devens:

"Your alcoves are godsends. The barrack's social room in which 75 to 125 are talking and playing cards, where a piano and phonograph are rivaling one another, and where at any moment a basketball may knock your head sideways, is certainly no decent place to read, let alone trying to do any studying."³⁰

Spreading an Idea

Support for the war effort was high, as shown by the generosity of the donors and volunteers who made the ALA's War Service such a fantastic success. Soldiers' need for reading materials would have been a good enough motivation by itself; but even from the beginning, the ALA had an eye on promoting the value of professionally staffed free libraries. In a paper handed out at the Association's 1917 conference, Frank Hill and George Utley said, "if we succeed in this emergency in rendering national service, libraries are going to be a national and community force as never before." Otherwise, libraries would be "looked on as weak, dreary, go-sit-in-the-corner affairs that are not worth public support."³¹

Public library services were familiar to soldiers from the more progressive, urban areas. This wasn't true for many soldiers from poor or remote regions. Camp librarians often had to explain that borrowing was free.³² The war brought everyone together, then sent them back with raised expectations. The War Service was, in a sense, a public library advocacy campaign in disguise.

Still, it's important to understand that the War Service's most clear-cut accomplishment was its direct effect on domestic military camps. Overseas support was relatively weak. The ALA's post-war "Enlarged Program" campaign was a failed, overconfident attempt to grow the Association's wealth and influence in the new style, but without the unifying effect of patriotic fever.³³ Two federal bills which would have brought national support to library services fell flat in 1919, with more of the same in the 1920s.³⁴ The ALA had caught a wave during the war and found that it couldn't do the same in peacetime. It would take more time and steady political alliances to bring about substantial nation-wide support for public libraries.³⁵ The War Service years were an exciting time in U.S. library history that showed what can be accomplished by paying attention to current events and jumping at new opportunities. It was significant part—but only a part—of a much longer process of transforming public library service from a luxury found in liberal cities to an assumed part of American life.

1. Theodore W. Koch. War Service of the American Library Association (Washington, D.C: A.L.A. War Service, 1918), viii. 
2. Arthur P. Young. Books For Sammies: The American Library Association And World War I (Place of  publication: Publisher, Year of publication), 10.
3. Young, Books for Sammies, 10.
4. ibid., 11.
5. ibid., 12. 
6. ibid., 13.
7. ibid., 38.
8. ibid., 20.
9. ibid., 21.
10. ibid., 23.
11. ibid., 87.
12. Koch, War Service, 18.
13. Young, Books for Sammies, 63.
14. Koch, War Service, 18.
15. Committee on Public Information, "Regulation for Forwarding Magazines To Men At Front," The Official Bulletin (Washington, DC), July 18, 1917. 
16. Young, Books for Sammies, 20.
17. ibid., 27.
18. ibid., 55-56.
19. ibid., 25.
20. ibid., 46.
21. ibid., 94.
22. ibid., 126.
23. ibid., 34-35.
24. ibid.
25. N. Louise Ruckteshler. "Library Week at Lake Placid Club, September 23-28, 1918." New York Libraries.6, no. 5. (Nov. 1918): 134.
26. Koch, War Service, vi.
27. ibid.
28. ibid., 16.
29. ibid., 26.
30. ibid., 27.
31. Young, Books for Sammies, 19.
32. Koch, War Service, 22.
33. Young, Books for Sammies, 90.
34. ibid., 97.
35. ibid., 98.

Bibliography

Committee on Public Information, "Regulation for Forwarding Magazines To Men At Front," The Official Bulletin (Washington, DC), July 18, 1917.

Koch, Theodore W. War Service of the American Library Association. Washington, DC: A.L.A. War Service, 1918.

Ruckteshler, N. Louise. "Library Week at Lake Placid Club, September 23-28, 1918." New York Libraries.6, no. 5. (Nov. 1918).

Young, Arthur P. Books For Sammies: The American Library Association And World War I. Pittsburgh, PA: Beta Phi Mu, 1981.