Randa Abdelfattah and Ramteen Arablui

A mass tax.

Because now, it wasn't just the rich being taxed.

It was also everyday middle-class Americans that had to contribute.

In 1939, only about 5% of American workers were paying income tax.

By the time victory tax came along, it had risen to 75%.

Are Americans angry about this?

You know, war has a way of holding that kind of taxpayer anger at abeyance for a while.

Patriotism really matters.

Like, hey, our boys are dying in the field, in the trenches, in Europe, in the Pacific.

The least we can do is contribute our dollars to support them.

And the government builds a whole PR campaign around this new tax, partly to make sure people comply, and partly because... People who had never done it, they didn't know how to do that.

The federal government commissioned people like Irving Berlin to write songs.

This is Jason Scott Smith.

He's a historian at the University of New Mexico who's written two books about FTR and the New Deal.

They were all about how, hey, I've paid my income tax today.

Isn't this great?

And there was this famous campaign that they rolled out using Donald Duck.

Are you a patriotic American?

Now, it's one thing to ask people to pay their taxes and have a cartoon explain how to file them, and a whole other thing to actually send your tax money to the government.

There was a huge fear that these new taxpayers would, one, not realize that they were supposed to pay in the first place and just wouldn't file returns, or two, wouldn't have enough money saved to pay the taxes when the time came.