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

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."

Amidst the author's maddening semantics and too many facts and figures we don't need to know, there are some interesting observations -- most notably on the role of African Americans in the second world war. As you might expect, given the extent of racial segregation in America at the beginning of World War II, "African Americans were ambivalent toward the war effort." William Pickens, field director of the NAACP, became a key player in countering that attitude. He "pointed to the ideals of the American enlightenment, contrasting them with the racist philosophies embedded in Axis fascism and totalitarianism." Samuel also discusses the work of that truly great black leader, A. Philip Randolph, and of Walter White and Roy Wilkins, who skillfully parlayed wartime racial advances into the leaps forward of post-war America. The patriotic bona fides they displayed during the war were cashed in later on.

President Roosevelt is also credited with welcoming African Americans into the national fold. In a 1943 photo op FDR appeared with a black messenger who had once been his chauffeur, the president presenting him and others as "just a small cross section of the White House staff" subscribing to bonds.