The tall man with the high hat and the whiskers on his chin
Will soon be knocking at your door and you ought to be in
The tall man with the high hat will be coming down your way
Get your savings out when you hear him shout “Any bonds today?”

Any bonds today? Bonds of freedom,
That’s what I’m selling. Any bonds today?
Scrape up the most you can! Here comes the freedom man
Asking you to buy a share of freedom today

Irving Berlin had Americans singing about investing in the war effort during World War II. Countless movie stars, sports figures, and political figures urged Americans to pour all the treasure they had into buying Defense Bonds (also called War Bonds once America entered the war). Images in magazines, posters on walls, bits of dialogue inserted into movies and radio plays kept up a constant beat of enthusiasm for lending Uncle Sam all you could possibly afford to beat the enemy, protect the home front, rescue those who had already fallen under the arm of tyranny. Even school children could participate – if you didn’t have enough money to buy a whole defense bond, you could buy a war stamp for pennies and paste it into a booklet, filling the booklet with more stamps in the following weeks until your stamps added up to the equivalent of a bond.

The purchase of bonds showed faith in America, with the promise that when you bought a bond for $18.75 and held it for ten years, America would redeem it for $25. That was a relatively low rate of return, but never mind! Let’s be patriotic and lend our money to fight for freedom!

War bonds served another economic interest. With the United States at full employment during the war years – any adult who was willing to work was in the armed services, or working in defense plants, or filling the civilian slots to free men for military service – virtually everybody was earning money, and many were earning far more per week than they had ever earned before. There was money in virtually every pocket.

At the same time, there were limited ways to spend that money. Factories produced far fewer consumer goods during those years, turning their manufacturing capacity over to the production of tanks and airplanes and battleships. Ordinary consumer goods – gasoline and rubber and meat and sugar – were rationed. Maybe you could buy land, but it was almost impossible to get the building permits and laborers and materials to build anything. You could hardly travel for sightseeing! Lots of money, and nowhere to spend it, was a recipe for potentially disastrous inflation, if people were tempted to offer outrageous prices for the few goods available – so funneling as much of that surplus cash as possible into the coffers of Uncle Sam kept it from burning holes in pockets.

The bond drives worked. By the end of the war, $185.7 billion had been loaned to Uncle Sam, by 85 percent of the American population.

There are no statistics to show how American Latter-day Saints responded to the bond drives, but we did. Utah and Idaho met or exceeded its quota in each of the seven bond drives held during the war, as towns and counties competed with each other to be the first one “over the top.”

There was another, lesser Mormon aspect to war bonds, though. Mormons, like everyone else, bought the bonds, sure, and for all the same reasons. They were patriotic. There was the far-off lure of paying a little now and getting more back later. They had boys and girls in the service. They knew and cared about Latter-day Saints in war zones.

But like anybody else, they also liked money. It was inconvenient to have your money tied up for ten years. What if there were a way to be patriotic and buy bonds … but to use those bonds like cash?

What if you used those bonds to pay your tithing? or your budget assessment to build your new chapel?

From almost the opening of bond sales, Latter-day Saints besieged their bishops and stake presidents and mission presidents with queries: Can I pay my tithing in bonds? Will I get credit for the face value, or for the value of the matured bond?

I have letters from Latter-day Saints in St. George, Denver, Chicago, Portland, Atlanta, and probably elsewhere, asking if the Church would accept their bonds. A man in British Columbia wondered if the Church would take his Canadian war bonds.

Very early advice given from Salt Lake seems to have held steady throughout the war. The Church could not take bonds as tithing, and begged its members to consider the reasons why:

First, bonds were not money. The Church in that generation did not have a cash reserve – what came in almost immediately went out, to build buildings and maintain the ones already built (while members in stakes were largely self-supporting in that regard, chapels built or purchased for branches outside of stakes were generally paid for with 60% church funds and 40% local funds). There were expenses to maintain missions, and to pay return transport for the few missionaries who were still serving, and to maintain temples, and for every other expense that the Church normally incurred. They could not patch a leaking roof with a war bond. They could not send war bonds to missions to pay the rent on halls for meeting places. They needed cash.

And second, the Church feared becoming the owner of the greatest share of Mormon-purchased bonds. They needed cash for operations, and if tithing came in largely in the form of bonds, they would have to sell the bonds in order to meet expenses. Selling large amounts of bonds would surely be a publicity nightmare: The Mormon church is not patriotic! The Mormon church doesn’t care if Hitler wins! The Mormon church doesn’t trust Uncle Sam to pay its debts after the war!

“We are very sure that if you will think this matter over carefully, you will see the situation and understand the reason we have been forced to take this position,” Church leaders responded to inquiries.

Even so, there appears to have been a few cases where this policy found limited exception: When building funds were being accumulated in various places around the country, but where building could not be anticipated until after the war, bishops were allowed to accept bonds as custodians, but not as owners. That is, if you wanted to use your bonds to contribute to the building effort, you could give your bonds to the bishop for safekeeping, while waiting for the war to end and for enough money to be collected to begin construction. Then the bishop would give the bonds back to you, you would sell them and give the proceeds to the ward or branch as your building contribution. That meant you wouldn’t be tempted to use your bonds for some other purpose in the meantime, I suppose.

Another variation in the policy allowed some branch presidents, at their request, to invest building funds in war bonds – they couldn’t yet use the money for building, and they preferred to invest in the war than to leave the money in regular savings accounts in the bank.

Buy War Bonds! they urged us. And we did.