# Help Our Town Win the Right to Fly This Flag (1918), the Treasury's honor roll for the Third Liberty Loan A 1918 Treasury sheet for the Third Liberty Loan pictures an Honor Flag "awarded by the U.S. Treasury Department" and heads a list for "the people of Our Town" who bought bonds. The blank town name and the roll beneath it turned a private purchase into a public score. - Home - Archive - Help Our Town Win the Right to Fly This Flag (1918), the Treasury's honor roll for the Third Liberty Loan Help Our Town Win the Right to Fly This Flag: Third Liberty Loan Honor Roll Help Our Town Win the Right to Fly This Flag (1918), the Treasury's honor roll for the Third Liberty Loan The Treasury's 1918 Third Liberty Loan honor roll: an Honor Flag a town could win and a list of the townspeople who bought bonds. National Archives ## Techniques named on the archive record BandwagonIdentity fusion Date1918Made byU.S. Treasury Department (Third Liberty Loan)MediumPosterCountryUnited StatesRegimeWilson AdministrationNARANAID 512439SourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceU.S. National Archives (NARA), RG 4 (U.S. Food Administration), World War I Posters (NAID 512439) , retrieved October 3, 2026SourceNARA Unrestricted; hosted by owner decision U.S. Treasury Department. National Archives and Records Administration, 4-P-196. Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records. Full record at propagandaarchive.org A 1918 Treasury sheet for the Third Liberty Loan pictures an Honor Flag "awarded by the U.S. Treasury Department" and heads a list for "the people of Our Town" who bought bonds. The blank town name and the roll beneath it turned a private purchase into a public score. ## What the sheet prints The top half is a flag: white and red, with three blue stripes. The bottom half is a heading for a list. Between them, the words tell a town what it can win. Honor Flag Third Liberty Loan Awarded by the U. S. Treasury Department Registered. Help Our Town Win the right to fly this Flag THIRD LIBERTY LOAN HONOR ROLL These are the people of Our Town who are helping to win the war by investing in Government Bonds of the Third Liberty Loan FRAME transcription. The printer's line reads "THE W.F. POWERS CO. LITHO. N.Y." Full record at propagandaarchive.org. ## Who made it The Treasury's Third Liberty Loan campaign issued it in 1918, by FRAME's attribution, and the sheet names its sponsor openly. The National Archives copy is in Record Group 4, World War I Posters (series NAID 512439), catalog item 512634, local identifier 4-P-196. The sheet was printed by the W.F. Powers Company of New York. "Our Town" is a placeholder: the same sheet could hang in any place that ran a drive. ## How to read it The poster does two things at once. It sets a collective goal, a flag the whole town flies or does not fly, and it opens a list of the individuals who have paid in. FRAME tags it bandwagon and identity fusion: the town's standing and the buyer's name are made one thing. The list is the sharper tool. An honor roll names the people who bought. In a small place it also shows, without printing a word about them, who did not. No statute in the record required anyone to buy a bond. The roll did not need one. The Fourth Liberty Loan used the same device more bluntly: its Help Our Town Win This Flag sheet is a ruled form numbered 1 to 100 under the words "Honor Roll of Subscribers," left blank for local hands to fill. The honest credit first. Towns competing for a flag is ordinary civic life, and a neighbor who lends to the Treasury in a declared war has done something worth thanking in public. The sheet does not insult anyone, and it does not draw an enemy. The civil-liberties question is about the other column, the one that is not printed. A bond is a loan, and whether a family can afford one is its own business. Posting the names of those who lent can turn that private judgment into a public test of loyalty, and in 1917 the Treasury secretary had already said out loud that a person who refused was "a friend of Germany." That quotation is sourced on the Wilson administration page. ## Sources - FRAME object record, Help Our Town Win the Right to Fly This Flag: Third Liberty Loan Honor Roll, 1918. U.S. Treasury Department (Third Liberty Loan). - U.S. National Archives, RG 4, World War I Posters, series NAID 512439, catalog item 512634, local identifier 4-P-196, retrieved by the archive 3 October 2026. Rights as recorded: NARA unrestricted. - FRAME object record, Help Our Town Win This Flag: Honor Flag, 4th Liberty Loan Honor Roll of Subscribers, 1918, for the Fourth Liberty Loan form. Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/help-our-town-win-the-right-to-fly-this-flag-third-liberty-loan-1918/