War News: “A Country Worth Saving For”

June 27, 2018

Readers of the June 27, 1918, edition of the Pickens County Herald would have had a difficult time forgetting the upcoming “National War Savings Day.” Scheduled for Friday, June 28, it was the latest in a long line of savings stamp drives throughout the country.

A U.S. Treasury Department publication referred to War Savings Stamps as “little baby bonds.” Purchased for $4.17 (about $69 today), the stamps would steadily increase in value and would mature on January 1, 1923 with a five-dollar profit. The program’s popular slogan was “A county worth fighting for is a country worth saving for.” 

The editors of the Pickens County Herald agreed. Foregoing their usual advertisements for banks and mercantile stores, the paper filled the pages of its June 27 edition with more than a dozen broadsides promoting the stamp program. Among the most inventive was an ad encouraging Pickens Countians to “Line Up and Sign Up” for the stamp program. It showed a long cortege of individuals young and old waiting to purchase their stamp books, new recruits in “the army that stays at home.” Alongside a pencil sketch of a doughboy, another ad asked, “Are we keeping the faith? Are we scrimping and saving and giving to help out boys do the thing that humanity has asked of them, and to help them come back to us sane and whole?”

“Come Across or the Kaiser Will,” read a more ominous call for support. “We must back up our military forces now or suffer much of what Europe has suffered….  The Government needs money to carry on the war.” Another advertisement, this one paid for by the Pickens County Automobile Company, showed an image of the Kaiser with a stamp over his left eye. “Paste him in the eye with a War Savings Stamp,” it read, “then paste him again and again.  Don’t think you have already done your duty. Pershing’s men ‘over there’ don’t go home after their first battle … they keep on pasting the Kaiser.” 

The following week, the Herald noted that residents had responded enthusiastically to the calls to purchase stamps on June 28 and announced another drive set for late July.