A soldier reads a paperback in the shadow of a tank in a poster from the "Reading Under Fire" exhibition at Poster House in New York. The text beneath declares, in the plain declarative confidence of wartime America, that books are weapons in the war of ideas. It was printed around 1942.
Standing in front of it in 2026, the resonance is impossible to ignore. The war the poster described never quite ended — only the uniforms changed, and the weapons got quieter.
The exhibition, running through spring, collects propaganda posters from multiple Allied nations during World War II, organized around a single premise: that literacy was a form of national defense. The Office of War Information, the Council on Books in Wartime, the Armed Services Editions program — these were federal priorities, backed by political will and public money, premised on the belief that a democracy that does not read cannot defend itself. Paperback books were shipped to soldiers by the millions. Libraries were framed as arsenals.
The timing of exhibiting this history now, in the current political moment, is not accidental.
Across the United States in 2025 and into 2026, book bans have accelerated dramatically. PEN America documented more than 10,000 book bans in American public schools during the 2023-2024 school year alone. The targets are familiar: books about race, books about gender identity, books that center the experiences of children who do not see themselves reflected in the dominant culture.
In Florida, House Bill 1467 required that all school library books be individually vetted and approved before students could access them. The fallout left shelves emptied and librarians uncertain whether keeping a book on display constituted a punishable offense. In some districts, schools removed everything and started over.
In Iowa, a 2023 law required the removal of any book containing a "description or depiction of a sex act" from school libraries, a standard broad enough to snare literary classics. Toni Morrison's "Beloved." "The Kite Runner." Books that have lived on school shelves for decades, that teachers have taught with care and students have carried home dog-eared and underlined. Gone, pending review, in a state that once prided itself on its literary tradition.
Library funding, already precarious after years of austerity at the local level, has come under more deliberate pressure. In 2025, the Institute of Museum and Library Services — the federal agency that channels grant funding to public libraries across the country, particularly in rural communities — faced severe budget threats as part of broader federal spending cuts. For a rural library in a small county, IMLS funding is often the difference between a functioning children's program and an empty room with outdated books.
"Reading Under Fire" reminds viewers that the veneration of reading was once a bipartisan, even patriotic, consensus. The men who designed those wartime posters were not progressive activists. They were ad men and bureaucrats and military officers, and they believed that access to books was what separated a free society from an authoritarian one. The Nazis burned books. America shipped them to the front.
That framing — books as democracy's immune system — makes the current wave of restrictions disorienting when held against that history. The argument offered by supporters of contemporary book bans is often cast in terms of parental rights, of protecting children from age-inappropriate content, of local control over local institutions. But the pattern of what is actually being removed skews heavily toward books by and about people of color, LGBTQ+ young people, and experiences that complicate a certain version of American innocence.
The WWII posters are not naive documents. They were propaganda in the technical sense — produced to move people, to shape behavior, to win a war. But their underlying claim has aged better than most wartime rhetoric. A society that starves its libraries, that removes books from shelves because they make someone uncomfortable, that defunds the institutions that provide free access to ideas for people who cannot afford to buy them — that society is not defending itself. It is dismantling something.
The exhibition closes soon. The policy fights it quietly illuminates will not.
