At a minute and a quarter, the Busy Bee Rag barely has time to land. It goes with a busy piece of June news that Americans are still living with: on June 9, 1943, President Roosevelt signed the Current Tax Payment Act, and starting July 1 employers withheld 20 percent of wages for the income tax.

The war had turned the income tax from something a few well-off people paid into something most workers owed, and hardly anybody was saving up for the bill. A 5 percent “Victory Tax” had already been coming out of paychecks since January. The idea of “pay-as-you-go” came from Beardsley Ruml, treasurer of Macy's and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who argued for forgiving a whole year's taxes so that nobody would pay two years at once. The Treasury balked, and the compromise forgave three-quarters of one year's bill. The government had been selling taxes as patriotism since Disney's Donald Duck cartoon The New Spirit in 1942. The bees in the title are the workers; the honey, as usual, goes somewhere else.