{"product_id":"1940s-wwii-war-bond-pin-vintage-whitehead-hoag-treasures-gifts","title":"Vintage 1944 WWII Pennsylvania 6th War Loan Worker Badge 🎖️ NOS Extra Bonds Minuteman Stick Pin, Mint Whitehead Hoag Complete Steel Coal Factory Home Front Pin New Old Stock","description":"\u003ch2\u003eWhat Was the 6th War Loan? 🎖️ A Treasury Flag on One Side, a Promise on the Other\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 1\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fc4HOof9ogY\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis little 1944 tag tells two stories, one per side. The blue side is a flag in miniature: a white Minute Man in a ring of thirteen white stars, the design the U.S. Treasury patented on August 18, 1942, and awarded as the Minute Man flag to businesses that enrolled 90% or more of their employees in payroll deductions for bonds. A company flew that flag over its building. The person who wore this tag went further, and the cream side says so in plain type: \u003cstrong\u003eI Bought \"EXTRA\" Bonds\u003c\/strong\u003e, on top of the ones already coming out of every paycheck.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhitehead \u0026amp; Hoag of Newark, New Jersey, printed it for the Pennsylvania War Finance Committee and the 6th War Loan drive at the end of 1944. The Payroll Savings Plan it measures itself against outlived the war by eighty years: the Treasury discontinued it on January 31, 2025. This one is new old stock, never issued, still on its stick pin.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏷️ What the Tag Prints\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eBlue side:\u003c\/strong\u003e white silhouette of the Concord Minute Man with his musket and plow, circled by 13 white stars, with \"6th\" in the lower right corner\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eCream side, maker's corner:\u003c\/strong\u003e W. \u0026amp; H. CO. NEWARK, N.J., with the printed figures 2,000,000 and 9-27-44\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eCream side, center:\u003c\/strong\u003e I Bought \"EXTRA\" Bonds \/ Over and above my regular Payroll Savings\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eCream side, foot:\u003c\/strong\u003e 6TH WAR LOAN \/ PENNSYLVANIA \/ WAR FINANCE COMMITTEE\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eMount:\u003c\/strong\u003e a wire stick pin hooked through a punched hole at the top edge\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 1 inch\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eCondition:\u003c\/strong\u003e new old stock, complete with its pin\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 2,000,000 and the 9-27-44 are set in the same type as the maker's name, so every tag from that press run carries the identical figures; neither one is a number given to a single tag. The printed date, September 27, 1944, sits almost eight weeks ahead of the drive's opening day on November 20.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e💰 \"Over and Above\": The Extra Bond\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy 1944 millions of working Americans bought bonds without lifting a finger. Under the Payroll Savings Plan an employee signed an allotment and a slice of each paycheck went toward a Series E bond. The Treasury's theme was \"everybody, every payday,\" and the plan became a way of life in business, industry and government, and the major source of war bond sales.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe war loan drives asked for something harder: an extra bond on top of the deduction, paid for out of money a household had already spoken for. Posters for this very drive read \"Buy Your Extra 6th War Loan Bonds Here.\" This tag was the receipt you could pin on, the way to show a shop floor, a store counter or an office that you had bought beyond your pledge.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Treasury rewarded employers as well. The Minute Man flag copied on the blue side marked 90% enrollment, and a second banner, the \"T\" flag of 1942 to 1945, went to firms where 90% or more of employees put 10% or more of the gross payroll into bonds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🗓️ The Sixth War Loan, November 20 to December 16, 1944\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 6th War Loan was the sixth of eight national drives; the last of them, the Victory Loan, closed in December 1945. It set out to raise $14 billion and finished with $21.6 billion. Treasury advertising for this drive turned toward Japan as the primary enemy, and advertisers donated well over $11 million worth of space and airtime to it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePresident Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the drive with a statement on November 19, 1944, reminding the country that the war in that November alone would cost seven and one-half billion dollars, and that everyone could practice self-denial. The drive closed on December 16, 1944, the same day German armies opened the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🏭 Why Pennsylvania Bought So Many Bonds\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe folks wearing these tags were building the war with their own hands. Bethlehem Steel turned out more than 1,100 warships for the Allies. The Philadelphia Navy Yard ran around the clock with some 40,000 workers building and repairing ships. Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia, the Army's home of small-arms ammunition since 1816, was flat out through both world wars. Baldwin Locomotive Works, the great steam locomotive builder, built tanks too: M3 light tanks, M3 Lee and Grant mediums and M4 Shermans. And the Budd Company in Philadelphia made military truck wheels and cargo bodies. Out in York, the York Safe \u0026amp; Lock Company, a bank-vault maker, retooled for the Navy in 1941 to build 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns and their mounts; the first gun was delivered in January 1942, and by then more than 3,000 people worked there. A tag like this one, pinned on at a shift change in a Pennsylvania steel mill, shipyard or arsenal, said you were putting your paycheck in, too.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🦅 The Minute Man: From Concord's North Bridge to the Treasury\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe figure on the blue side is not a generic soldier. It is The Minute Man, the bronze Daniel Chester French made for Concord, Massachusetts, which stands by the North Bridge where some 500 militiamen turned back three companies of British troops on April 19, 1775. In 1871 the town set aside $1,000 for a monument and asked the 21-year-old French, a young Concord sculptor whose father was a prominent local lawyer, to design it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrench studied a plaster cast of the Apollo Belvedere at the Boston Athenaeum and the faces of his own neighbors. Instead of a fee he was reimbursed for his studio, tools and materials. The Ames works in Chicopee, Massachusetts, cast the statue from ten Civil War cannons appropriated by Congress, and it was unveiled on April 19, 1875, the centennial of the fight, with President Ulysses S. Grant and Ralph Waldo Emerson in attendance. French had already left to study in Italy and missed it. The granite pedestal carries the first stanza of Emerson's \"Concord Hymn,\" the poem of the embattled farmers and the shot heard round the world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eActon tells its own story.\u003c\/strong\u003e Legend has it French drew on Captain Isaac Davis, the Acton gunsmith who led his minutemen to the bridge and became the first American officer killed in the Revolution, modeling the face on photographs of Davis's descendants. The same story holds that the plow beside the figure was modeled on Davis's own plow, which is kept at Acton's Town Hall.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen the Treasury launched the Series E Defense Bond, President Roosevelt bought the first one from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. on April 30, 1941, and sales opened to the public the next day. French's Minute Man became the symbol of the savings bond program. Its silhouette went onto the savings stamps sold in 10¢, 25¢, 50¢, $1 and $5 denominations, onto posters and advertisements, and onto the bonds themselves. The same statue appears on the 1925 Lexington-Concord half dollar, a 1925 five-cent postage stamp, the 2000 Massachusetts state quarter, and the seals of the National Guard.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏭 Whitehead \u0026amp; Hoag Company, Newark, New Jersey\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe initials in the tag's corner stand for the Whitehead \u0026amp; Hoag Company. Benjamin S. Whitehead (1858-1940) and Chester R. Hoag (1860-1935) founded it in Newark in 1892, starting with ribbon badges. In 1896 they introduced the pin-back button and held the patent on it, and in 1903 they built a new factory at 272 Sussex Avenue and First Street with fifty presses, an engraving plant and a shop that made its own tools and dies. The firm could turn out a million buttons a day, alongside medals, calendars, pocket knives and advertising novelties sold by commission salesmen across the country and abroad.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA 1919 reorganization made it a non-union shop, which is why the union seal found on its earlier work drops away. During World War II the company employed more than 400 workers. The decline came after the war. In 1959 Bastian Brothers of Rochester, New York, bought Whitehead \u0026amp; Hoag, the Newark factory closed that May, and the W\u0026amp;H name was phased out by 1964-65. The story goes that the company's records were destroyed when it changed hands, which leaves the small imprint in a corner as the plainest way its wartime work is still identified.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🗺️ The Pennsylvania War Finance Committee\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe foot of the tag names the committee that ordered it. In 1943 the Treasury's War Finance Division replaced the War Savings Staff, and state and local War Finance Committees took charge of the drives; wherever one was formed, the old War Savings and Victory Fund committees ceased to function. Across the country the War Finance Committees sold $185.7 billion in securities.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePennsylvania had a great deal riding on that work. More than 900,000 Pennsylvania men and some 22,000 women served in the armed forces, and the state was the leading producer of the coal and steel the war ran on. A payroll-savings tag from this committee was for the Pennsylvanian on a payroll who had already signed up for a deduction and then bought one more bond.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e📈 What the Drives Changed\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy the end of the war 85 million Americans, out of a population of about 131 million, had bought bonds. The drives turned a nation of wage earners into direct lenders to their own government, and payroll savings became the legacy that lasted: it stayed the backbone of savings bond sales for decades after 1945, stopped issuing paper bonds through employers on January 1, 2011, and was discontinued on January 31, 2025. The Minute Man flag lasted too; its bar was later lowered to 50% participation and opened to schools, military units and federal agencies.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e❓ Questions People Ask\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat is a 6th War Loan \"I Bought Extra Bonds\" tag?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA small stick-pin tag worn during the 6th War Loan, which ran from November 20 until December 16, 1944, by someone who bought a war bond beyond the deductions already taken from their pay. This one names Pennsylvania's committee at the foot.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWho made it?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe W. \u0026amp; H. Co. in the corner is the Whitehead \u0026amp; Hoag Company, the Newark badge and button maker founded in 1892.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eIs 2,000,000 a serial number?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo. Both figures are part of the printed plate, like the lettering around them, so every tag from the run shows them. The date reads September 27, 1944.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat does the Minute Man on the blue side mean?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is the Treasury's savings bond symbol, taken from Daniel Chester French's statue at Concord, and the blue field with its ring of 13 stars copies the Minute Man flag awarded to employers with 90% payroll-savings enrollment.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHow big is it?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1 inch.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat condition is it in?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNew old stock, never issued.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🎁 Good For\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWWII home front and war bond collections, Pennsylvania history, Minute Man and Concord collectors, Whitehead \u0026amp; Hoag button collectors, and a shadow box beside a family's Series E bonds or a veteran's service photograph.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"relatedBlock\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 More From The Vintage \u0026amp; Antique Gifts Archive\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-vietnam-war-protest-button-1-2-3-4-wdwyfw-3-inch\"\u003eVintage 1960s Vietnam War Protest Button ✊ 1-2-3-4 W.D.W.Y.F.W. 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