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“DIG DOWN DEEP” GIVING BLOOD AND BUYING BONDS Of all the appeals by wartime advertising to achieve the home front’s universal support of the fighting front, none were more direct, personal, and persistent than those for buying War Bonds. Or, indeed, more numerous —about five hundred just in the ten leading national magazines, and that doesn’t include the numerous ads that merely appended a “Buy War Bonds” Plug in a Slug to otherwise unrelated copy. As important but with much less frequency, other ads encouraged giving blood or contributing to war-associated charities. In the same ten magazines only thirty or so ads asked people to give blood, but their urgency made up for their scarcity. Appeals for donations to social service and relief agencies numbered a mere eleven. Still, these causes appealing for funding were needed for the war effort, so a few words about them are in order before turning in more detail to ads for giving blood and buying bonds. “The Greatest Mother in The World” and Friends To the federal government during the war, people paying their income tax in full and on time was as important as their buying War Bonds. By the early 1940s paying one’s taxes was an automatic exercise for most people, so not many ads encouraged them to meet what was then the March 15th deadline. Still, this timely influx of revenue was of enough concern by 1942 that, at the bidding of Treasury Secretary Henry J. Morgenthau Jr., Irving Berlin wrote the song “I Paid My Income Tax Today” that told people to be proud their tax dollars helped build war materiel (see Jones 200). In the Post on March 6, 1943, the Stewart-Warner Corporation took out a two-page ad on a similar theme. The ad didn’t urge paying taxes on time but contrasted free Americans with people’s oppression elsewhere. It took the tack that “We are privileged to pay— and to work and earn and have what others of the earth only dream of having. [ . . . ] the privilege of paying is so small a price for the right to (((((((( (((((((( (((((((( (((((((( 9 live in safety” (51). This was the sole ad devoted exclusively to the wartime rationale and importance of income taxes. Community Chest—forerunner of the United Way—was once the agency in many cities that collected and disbursed funds for various philanthropies and service organizations. The brainstorm of a priest, two ministers, and a rabbi in Denver in 1887 as a way to deal with the city’s welfare needs, Community Chest got its name in 1919 in Rochester, New York (“United Way”). By World War II there were close to a thousand local Community Chests, but no national organization. The war prompted a spin-off of Community Chests variously known as the National War Fund and the Community War Fund that collected and allocated funding for nineteen war-related service agencies including War Prisoners’ Aid, the USO, and the American Red Cross, even though the latter two did much of their own fundraising. Two ads soliciting money for the War Fund appeared in the leading magazines, both in Time. A month after its striking War Bonds ad in October 1943 (see below), New York’s WaldorfAstoria hotel ran an ad on November 15 with just the words “NATIONAL WAR FUND / Match Their Gallantry With Your Giving” (80). With more copy and a drawing of an American POW reading in a Nazi prison camp, the American Seating Company on October 23, 1944, urged contributions to the Community War Fund by describing the workings of agencies it supported, primarily War Prisoners’ Aid, which “provides text books, courses of study and other comforts that strengthen the hope of those who are cut off from the pursuit of American ideals” (77). Also providing comfort to GIs away from home, but usually under less strained circumstances, was the United Service Organizations, universally known just by its initials USO. Established only months before the United States entered the war, in February 1941, this nongovernmental organization depended for funding on corporate and individual donations . The USO quickly became best known for sponsoring entertainment for GIs far and wide and for serving coffee, donuts, and camaraderie in its canteens stateside and abroad, but USO services for the military extended much more broadly. Although the USO’s activities, indeed its very existence, depended wholly on private giving, only one ad soliciting contributions appeared during the war in the national magazines...

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