Evening star., 1941-11-30
Defense Bond Drive Differs
From 1917 Financing Efforts
Then Treasury Sought Huge Loans; Now 1t Seeks
To Keep Cash From Burning Holes
In Nations Pockets
By Marquis ". CMlds.

In 1917 1t was the Liberty loan drive
Today it is the Defense bond campaign
In their complete dissimilarity is
measure of the difference between the
two war emergencies.
When Secretary of the Treasury Henry
Morgenthau outlined the bond campaign
last April, he told his aides that at all
costs the errors of the Liberty loan cam
paign must be avoided. People were not
to be coerced, but persuaded. There
were to be no arbitrary quotas No one
was to be called Stacker for not buying
bonds.
The Liberty loan drive of the last war
got huge sums of money but that is not
primarily the problem Of the Treasury
today. Ordinary bend issues offered in
the financial markets are oversubscribed
many times as soon as they are an
nounced. The primary problem is to mop
up excess purchasing power in the hands
of people who find themselves. thanks
to the defense boom, with more money
than they need for the necessities Of life.
Drive Inadequate So Far.
How close has the bond drive come to
mopping up the flood of new money re-
leased by the expenditure of defense bill
lions? Treasury economists and statis-
ticians are frank to admit that they
have no very definite answer to this
question. while acknowledging that thus
far the campaign has proved far from
adequate to do the vital job at hand.
They agree too that unless it can be
stepped up, more drastic measures-per-
haps compulsory savings-Will have to
be resorted to-
Al the time that the Defense bond
campaign was planned, the most optl-
mistic planner estimated the total sales
of all classes of Defense bonds at $780,
100000 a month In November. the sixth
month of the campaign, the total was
nearly at that level
A tremendous voluntary organization
has been created throughout the coun-
try under the leadership of Eugene w
Sloan. executive director. and Gale F.
Johnston, national field director Mr..
Johnston. regional manager for a large
insurance company in the ST Louis area,
has travelled thousands of miles and
made dozens Of speeches in the course Of
building up an organization for the
promotion and sale of Defense bonds
In terms of the original plan, the drive
is succeeding beyond the hopes of all eX-
cept the most optimistic Treasury aides.
But the scope of the drive was laid out
last spring and since that time the num-
her of billions to 60 into defense has been
doubled and tripled so that the size of
the mopping-up job has at the same time
been increased two or three fold. That
is why new effort is being made to or
ganize bond sales from the bottom using
particularly. trade union ganizations.
Sales Ingenuity Required.
Inasmuch as the campaign outlined
last April was not to be coercive but
persuasive, it called for all possible in
genuity and effort on the part of the di-
rectors Mr. Johnston has put into the
drive the selling ability that made him
one of the foremost insurance men in the
country. He has spoken to groups in al
most every State during the last six
months in an effort to make the public
understand exactly what the objective is
SO that people will buy bonds for their
own good and for the good of the country
and not through the kind of violent emo
tional stimulus that was supplied in the
Liberty loan drive.
One of the first steps was to organize
field staffs in each State But the paid
staff was limited to two or three in each
instance, since the emphasis was almost
entirely on voluntary effort and since
the operating budget had been purposely
kept down to S3,OO00OO for the fiscal
year. The field stats then began to work
through every sort of organization-labor,
industry, clubwomen
Larger businesses were urged to adopt
a voluntary allotment system. Under
this plan the employe elects to have the
employer set aside a certain amount of
his salary each month and this is put in
a special fund until an amount sufficient
to buy bond has accumulated. Then
the employer buys bond in the en-