skygiants

They did talk a little bit about pressures -- there's actually a really interesting bit of political back-and-forth that started with getting absentee ballots out to the soldiers. Apparently the Republican party were convinced that the sitting Democratic government was going to ship all the soldiers so much Democratic propaganda they'd just vote Roosevelt right back in, so they inserted a clause into a bill about absentee ballots that made it illegal to send political material to serving soldiers. The Army immediately threw a FIT and started banning everything that had even the barest mention of politics, including a bunch of the scheduled ASEs and, like, the daily news, while claiming that they had no choice because they had to strictly interpret the letter of the law. This was of course all for the benefit of getting public opinion on their side about the government CENSORING SOLDIERS' READING MATERIAL and getting the clause reversed, which it eventually was, and everyone could once again read the biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and whatever else was temporarily banned.