NATIONAL WAR SAVINGS COMMITTEE. Scrap book. 1918. Album 21x123/4 inches. Condition varies, generally B+: cloth-backed boards, embossed with title, covering pages originally held together by metal tabs, contemporaneaously (?) rebound with string. Approximately 45 pages packed with the colateral material released by the Treasury Department in an attempt to sell war stamps: Posters (featuring such artists as Flagg, Coffin, Bull and others), broadsides, window-cards, buttons, envelopes and stationery, War Savings Certificates, explanatory letters to banks and citizens, window decals (unused), copies of The War Saver, a newspaper-style bulletin for War Savings Societies and more. Raising money to fight the First World War was far more of a grass roots movement than we are used to in modern America. This collection makes clear how individual citizens were encouraged to buy war stamps for $4.12 in 1918 which would mature in 1923 to a full $5 (a rate of 4%) and how institutions were mobilized to begin collecting money. More than just a national campaign, this album also features posters promoting the purchase of War Savings Stamps in local areas like Denver and Rhode Island. Rawls describes the War Savings movement as taking place in between the Third Liberty Loan drive and the Fourth. "The primary mission of the War Savings movement . . . was to entice discretionary or surplus money out of the hands that might tend to squander it on luxuries" (Rawls p. 215). The results of this campaign, which was alternately aimed at children, women, parents, workers, etc was phenomenal, "By means of intensive campaigning, the government was able to bring in more than a billion dollars through the sales of Thrift and War Savings Stamps" (Rawls p. 222).
