Oledging Allegiance: American Identity and the Bond Drive of World War II.

• Author: Roberts, Chalmers

During World War I, when I was a kid of six and seven, I grew radishes in my backyard "victory garden," Mom knitted wool socks for the doughboys, and Dad bought Liberty bonds. During World War II, my wife and I put all the savings we could manage into war bonds, an act which eventually helped build us a home.

All this seemed to me nothing more than simple acts of patriotism to which neighbors and friends alike contributed. But Lawrence E. Samuel, a teacher-businessman-Smithsonian fellow, has turned the whole business into something of far greater scale.

After runmaging through the archives of the two wars and their fiscal underpinnings -- and through much of the NAACP's records from the period -- he announces that: "War bonds both reflected and helped shape a new version of Americanism, steeped in the enduring paradox of `e pluribus unum,' out of many, one." In prose that is too often turgid, Samuel goes on to explain that whereas in the first war, bond drives centered on lining everybody up behind the dominant white idea, during the second war the bond sellers reflected the fact that the country had changed and so the selling was less nativist and more inclusive of the population, most notably of black Americans. "War bonds," says Samuel, "acted as a catalyst in the shift from New Deal populism to a nationalism predicated on the common pursuit of affluence, linking pluralism to the universally shared desire for the good life."

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