Back Your Future, a 1946 Treasury savings bond poster

Back Your Future With U.S. Savings Bonds is a 1946 official Treasury poster signed by the artist Englert. A family of four looks up at a flag, and the only argument on the sheet is the word "future" (NAID 514109, Treasury code SBD 78).

What the sheet prints

The picture is a father, a mother, a boy holding a toy airplane, and a girl with a book, all turned upward toward a large flag. A hand in a cuff with stars reaches in toward the flag from the edge. The words are few.

Back YOUR FUTURE

With U.S. SAVINGS BONDS

OFFICIAL U. S. TREASURY POSTER

SBD 78

A bond poster without a war

Some wartime bond sheets in this collection sell bonds through the enemy. The 1943 payroll-savings sheet "Japs Execute Doolittle Men" uses an execution headline and a caricature, and the 1942 Second War Loan sheet puts a fist into a caricature of Hitler. This one has no enemy at all. The case for buying is the household itself: children, a home life, and a future the poster never describes.

The archive tags it with plain folks and glittering generalities. Both fit. The family is ordinary on purpose, and "future" is a word every reader fills in for himself. Nothing on the sheet says what the bond pays, when it matures, or what the Treasury will do with the money.

The liberty reading

A savings bond is a loan from a citizen to the government. Asking for that loan in public is legitimate, and buying was voluntary; the poster threatens no one. What a reader can fairly note is the swap of terms for feeling. A private bank selling a savings product would be expected to print a rate. The Treasury here prints a flag. That is a normal advertising choice, and it is also a reminder that the state, when it borrows, sells like anyone else.

For the federal information apparatus that produced the wartime bond drives, see the OWI domestic branch and the Office of War Information hub. For the private writers' group that worked alongside those campaigns, see the archive's Writers' War Board study.