Home : World War II : A Generation Of Patriots :

WWII Posters

Save Freedom of Speech Norman Rockwell created a series of paintings on the "Four Freedoms" theme. In the series, he translated abstract concepts of freedom into four scenes of everyday American life. They can be seen in their entirety at The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in an exhibit called Powers of Persuasion - Posters from World War II.

Although the history of the poster reaches far back in time, the ones produced during World War II seem particularly vivid and meaningful, even after the passage of fifty years. And although it is easy to take them at face value--after all, that's part of the appeal of a poster--there is more to them than meets the eye. They seem simple: an image, a slogan, and a splash of color. But posters have generated a surprising amount of controversy. For something intended to be so clear, they can be quite deceptive.

They offer an invaluable historical text, since they reflect the shifting hopes and fears of countries at war. They offer a virtual catalog of propaganda techniques, aimed at bolstering friends and discouraging enemies. They also offer clear insight into a country's sociology, its cultural roots, its folklore and its prejudices. And apart from these intellectual concerns, posters can be appreciated simply as well-designed-or amateurish-visual entities.

The central debate between defenders and detractors of posters is whether posters are art or advertisement. If both, where does one role start and the other end? Can posters only "sell," or can they teach and inspire? The critics, the connoisseurs, the people who collect posters and the people who create them all seem to disagree.

However, no one disputes one thing: Posters are popular. Posters and billboards are widely accepted as offering the quickest and most reliable insights into a country's events and preoccupations. They have been a visible and familiar part of the United States' visual landscape for a century. Posters were particularly prominent during World War II, when the military services, civilian groups and all levels of government called upon them to serve dozens of needs and to play an astonishing variety of roles. Posters announced, exhorted, scolded and amused. They instructed, guided and ordered. They produced, in viewers, feelings of power, sorrow, guilt and fury.

Although the topics and techniques of the posters changed during the course of the war, the posters themselves are only tenuously linked to the military progress of the conflict. The posters were aimed at the folks back home and only rarely at the soldiers in camps or foxholes. Thus, although soldiers are a dominant image in posters, the posters aim to communicate to mothers and grandparents, industrial workers and civilians at large. The intended audience of the posters, as well as the let's-get-'em, gung ho mood of the times, is neatly expressed by Lauren Lyman, assistant to the president of United Aircraft Corporation, in this passage from the 1942 book America Organizes to Win the War - A Handbook on the American War Effort: "Men and women, many of them novices, are working with all their strength to provide the air power that is striking power. Folks from the farms; girls from offices; boys from school and college, from city streets and mountain villages; youngsters just out of school; old men who thought they had retired-they are all there together, all playing the greatest game of their lives on the varsity team of Democracy, playing with no time out, as consecrated to victory, and as necessary to it, as the pilots who will actually fly the planes they, the workers, are making."

The messages aimed at this audience were important. According to historian D'Ann Campbell in Women at War with America, "Passive resistance to the war in the form of tax evasion, refusal to buy bonds, or participation in the black market could have seriously weakened the war effort, and concern over this possibility led to far tighter governmental controls on the lives of the people. The Office of War Information (OWI) constantly monitored the mood of consumers," issuing hundreds of posters in response to its findings. Campbell wrote, "Keeping up the pitch of activity on the home front was a constant challenge, which probably increased in difficulty as the war progressed and victory became simply a matter of time." This challenge explains the tremendous redundancy of posters, and the continued reappearance of similar topics throughout the four years of the war. Even when the war ended, for example, plenty of bills needed to be paid, and posters kept up the harangue.

On the one hand was the government, which had specific tasks it needed specific parts of the civilian population to do. On the other hand were millions of citizens who wanted to get involved in the war effort. The match between the two wasn't always perfect. The result was a great many nebulous posters whose goal was to boost morale, but which didn't really tell anyone what to do about it. "Many strategists saw the civilian population as the weakest element in national defense. Lacking military training, leadership, and discipline, the civilian would be less prepared to cope, his morale could be more easily shattered," historian Lee Kennett wrote in For the Duration...: the United States Goes to War, Pearl Harbor-1942 (1985). Numerous posters were aimed simply at bucking up civilians. The "loose lips sink ships" genre of poster let people feel involved in the war effort while literally doing nothing at all.

The roles that women played during the war eventually found diverse expression in the posters. The accuracy of that expression is open to discussion. According to some critics, the frequency and the perspective of the images shown in the posters distort the reality. "The media, closely following directives from Washington, glorified martial values, and saluted women chiefly when they took on traditionally male roles as soldiers, fliers or riveters," D'Ann Campbell wrote. "Yet studying the image of the American Woman, whether that projected by the movies, soap operas, novels, bill boards, women's magazines, daily press, or government propaganda, only offers a very indirect access to American women's actual experiences." Nevertheless, we see Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), nurses, workers, mothers, and shoppers in the posters. The variety of these roles far surpasses that of men's roles.

So as you look at old posters from the war, consider the message and the target audience as you seek to understand and appreciate what the poster means. When analyzing a poster's message, you have to look at the motive behind the surface statement. Some people didn't do what the posters told them to do. In the case of victory ere gardens, the government couldn't lick 'em so it joined 'em. Before the war, the Department of Agriculture tried strongly to dissuade city- dwellers and other non-rural folks from planting gardens. American farmers were producing plenty of food and much more efficiently than home gardeners could. Nevertheless, millions of people started plowing up their yards. Soon, victory gardens appeared on posters as officially approved wartime projects.

Posters are rarely subtle. They are executed with a broad brush, in terms of both media and message. They tend to be bright, loud, startling, even shocking. To some extent, this approach meshes perfectly with the philosophical tendencies of the war itself. Someone was either friend or foe. The Allies were right, the Axis was wrong. There were no shades in between.

You grasp this flavor in the foreword to the book America Organizes to Win the War. Here's how the publishers described the years before the outbreak of war in Europe: "The aggressors had spent most of a tragic decade destroying democracy in Europe and Asia and waging brutal wars of conquest against weaker peoples on three continents. . . . .the world had not been made safe for democracy, the people of the United States were summoned to new sacrifices of blood and treasure on a scale vastly greater than that of 1917." In a speech on December 9, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt disposed of the Axis as "powerful and resourceful gangsters who have banded together to make war upon the whole human race."

These gangsters are the verbal counterparts of the grotesque caricatures of Japanese and Germans that inhabit some posters. Posters tend to deal in archetypes and stereotypes, exaggerated images and icons. Those things are the poster's normal vocabulary; as you study enough posters, you get used to their garish idiom and come to expect it. As Zbynek Zeman pointed out in Selling the War: Art & Propaganda in World War II (1978), "Every nation portrays its warriors as noble, its women as compassionate and virtuous, its war aims as righteous. The enemy, on the other hand, is portrayed as misguided, evil, fighting for an ignoble cause."

Posters tend to simplify matters. They don't give us essays or closely reasoned debates; they give us slogans. They do so to such an extent that Lee Kennett wrote, "The history of the first six months of the war could be written in slogans, beginning with 'Remember Pearl Harbor'-coined in the first hours of the war, and apparently in a score of places at once"-and continuing on through "Tin to Win," "Vitamins for Victory" and dozens of others.

This tendency to simplify things is a two-edged sword and helps explain both the strengths and weak nesses of posters. Posters can cut right to the heart of a matter, but they can also miss the mark entirely: they become overly idealistic, obscure, over bearing, even bizarre. Especially early in the war, many government pronouncements, including posters, were criticized as at best unrealistic and at worst simply deceptive. According to Kennett, "By 1944, pollster William Lydgate maintained apathy, or at least a sense of detachment from the war, was a very real problem, which he laid at the door of the administration. It coddled and babied the public with an over sanitized version of the war, so that many could not see the need for sacrifice." Exceptions certainly exist, but Lydgate's findings may help explain why posters had to keep trying so hard, and why the huge federal poster dynamo worked overtime throughout the war.

Posters for war bonds, recruiting and industrial production dominate any selection. Some posters take less tangible ideas as their subject. They deal, some times symbolically, with such things as democracy and religion, in a way that may sound peculiar to modern ears. Archibald MacLeish wrote in The American Cause in 1941, "To mobilize planes only or armies only, forgetting our purposes as a democratic people, interrupting our history, neglecting the realization of our own hopes, is to invite disaster." These stirring pronouncements were an intrinsic part of the experience of the war, which was once again aimed at making the world safe for democracy.

To understand the enthusiasms of the war years, you must realize that the word democracy meant more than a type of political system. Speaking of Americans in the 1830s and 1840s, MacLeish wrote, "They knew what democracy was. They knew what they were too. They were the smartest, toughest, luckiest, leanest, all- around know ingest nation on God's green earth. Their way of living was the handsomest way of living human beings had ever hit on. Their institutions were the institutions history had been waiting for." Beliefs such as this one carried Americans through the early, dark months of the conflict and through the hard, painful years after.

Author Geoffrey Perrett called Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph, his novel about the war, "the story of how a nation that stumbled into 1939 shaken, divided, confused and unhappy was in a sense remade, so that only six years later it was strong, united, happy and confident as never before or since." Posters were a tool that figured into that remaking. In the summer of 1942, the OWI's Special Services Division studied the war's effects on the family. Among the many pros and cons were two interesting, perhaps predictable findings: the war seemed to give purpose to people, and it increased the sense of community. "To Americans the test of almost anything is how well it works, not whether it is old, or divine, or popular," Perrett wrote. "The war years provided the last great collective social experience in the country's history, and when at the end of the war the United States bestrode the entire world like a colossus, it had proved itself to its own people."

Derek Nelson. Author of The Posters That Won the War & The Ads That Won the War. FlightJacket.com.

Design for Victory: World War II Posters on the American Home Front The poster - inexpensive, colorful, and immediate - was an ideal medium for delivering messages about Americans' duties on the home front during World War II. Design for Victory presents more than 150 of these stunning images - many never reproduced since their first issue - culled from the collections of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. William L. Bird, Jr. and Harry R. Rubenstein delve beneath the surface of these colorful graphics, telling the stories behind their production and revealing how posters fulfilled the goals and needs of their creators. The authors describe the history of how specific posters were conceived and received, focusing on the workings of the wartime advertising profession and demonstrating how posters often reflected uneasy relations between labor and management.

---

top of page

back a page