Liberty Loan Parade

This silent newsreel footage produced by Hearst-Pathé News shows President Woodrow Wilson and his family as they launch a national drive for the sale of liberty bonds to help fund U.S. efforts in World War I. The president arrives at Pennsylvania Station in New York City on September 27, 1918, with his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, and his mother-in-law, Sallie White Bolling. They are joined in their car by Margaret Wilson and Eleanor McAdoo, two of Wilson's daughters from his first marriage. The film clip also includes footage from a liberty bond parade held in New York the next day, with flags festooning Fifth Avenue, and Emile de Cartier de Marchienne, the Belgian minister to the United States, speaking at the dedication of the Altar of Liberty at Madison Square, an open-air structure promoting the liberty bond effort. In the final segment of the film, the opera singer Geraldine Farrar ceremonially sells a war bond to Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo on the south portico of the U.S. Treasury Building, as the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Leo S. Rowe, looks on.