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Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds and Domestic Propaganda

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/4486534

1945-2314

Allan M. Winkler,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

Mobilizing the Home Front is a perceptive account of the way the campaigns selling savings bonds bolstered morale in the United States during World War II. James J. Kimble, an assistant professor of communication at Seton Hall University, compellingly argues that even though American leaders were reluctant to engage in an aggressive propaganda campaign at home, they managed to communicate their aims and mobilize people through bond sales, which also helped control inflation. Kimble observes that even though the government had sold bonds in the past, the World War II effort was altogether new. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. understood that if Americans owned government securities, they would have a stake in the vast effort necessary to win the war. He enlisted Peter H. Odegard, an Amherst College political scientist who had written about propaganda, to help frame a program and then embarked on a series of eight short-term targeted campaigns that raised an extraordinary $185.7 billion. The drives drew on the efforts of the songwriter Irving Berlin, the artist Norman Rockwell, the Hollywood actresses Lana Turner and Judy Garland, and the cartoon characters Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny, among many others, to create wide public visibility.