After Germany’s capitulation and surrender in November 1918, physicians, nurses, and health care experts crossed the former front lines and realized that four years of malnutrition had significantly affected children’s health and physical development. Milk, butter, eggs, potatoes, and fresh vegetables were scarce or available only at prohibitive prices. Americans who saw firsthand the devastation of the formerly occupied regions of northern France committed themselves to feeding and clothing destitute inhabitants. These leaders and visionaries harnessed the compassion, energy, expertise, and generosity of US citizens who were willing to work tirelessly at home and abroad in France to alleviate suffering. The American Committee for Devastated France was not the only postwar initiative formed by Americans to alleviate suffering and restore health and infrastructure in the devastated regions of France. From Jessie Carson’s efforts to create lending libraries with thousands of donated books to the engineering assistance of Harvard University undergraduates in rebuilding French industries to open-air schools, hospitals, and preventoriums (facilities for infants infected with tuberculosis but not with active disease), American individuals and organizations continued the generosity that the United States had shown during the war, even though their country’s leaders were not supporting the resuscitation of their ally.

Until the 1990s, comic books rarely served anything other than a deeply conflicted, even paradoxical role in American public libraries. With rare exceptions, comic books as actual objects did not exist in libraries, but as emblems, comics appeared repeatedly in the professional and public conversations in which librarians participated. To librarians of the mid-century, comic books served the important role of symbolizing everything that libraries opposed, thereby reinforcing librarians’ sense of their own professional identity. Comics represented first and foremost an ephemeral and inferior product of junk culture that took up the finite amount of time and attention that children were imagined to have to spend on reading, meaning that librarians saw them as something that interfered with real reading of legitimate books. Further, comics represented a threat to the authority of children’s librarians, who had crafted a professional identity based on their knowledge of good literature for children. Because comics were imagined to interfere with children’s interest in such literature and because children could access comics without librarian expertise, librarians saw comics as a significant threat. However, comics themselves presented a much more complicated vision of literature, literacy, and even public libraries.