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1914. "Treasury Department, Office of Comptroller of Currency -- bond vault. Contains bonds to the value of $900 million securing government deposits and postal savings fund." National Photo Co. glass negative. View full size.
From what I've been told about my coal miner grandfather, he used the postal savings exclusively. He distrusted banks, saying that (back then) there were any number of counters for making deposits, but only one for withdrawals. According to him, they even knocked a hole in the wall so you could put your money in at night.
What's going on with the top of the glass plate? At the top, it appears there's part of another picture, and the I-beams and everything else are abruptly cut off.
[It's the very top portion of another shot taken at the Treasury Department at the same time. At some point in the past, prints were copied to glass negatives and these two happened to be stacked unevenly atop one another.]
The direct cost of U.S. involvement in WWI was roughly $23 billion, from the U.S. declaration of war in April 1917 until the end of the war in June 1918. (Source: "Direct and Indirect Costs of the Great World War" 2d ed. [Washington 1920] by Ernest L. Bogart.) So the $900 million represented here covered the cost of two weeks of the looming "war to end all wars."
$900 mil would be +/- $20,360,700,000 in 2011 according to the inflation calculators.
US Postal Savings, existed from January 1, 1911 until July 1, 1967. It was still big in Europe the last time I looked. This system was set up by the US Government to act as a saving account for anyone too poor to have a saving account or lived too far from a bank.
Looks like he's reaching for the fan switch before they light up.
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