POSTERS FOR PEACE
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Benson, Thomas W., author.
Posters for peace : visual rhetoric and civic action / Thomas W. Benson.
pages cm
Summary: “A rhetorical history of Vietnam War era posters produced at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1970. Places the posters in the contexts of the politics of the 1960s and the history of political graphics”—Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-271-06586-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Protest movements—California—Berkeley—Posters. 2. United States—Politics and government—1969–1974—Posters.
3. Political posters, American—California—Berkeley—History—20th century. 4. University of California, Berkeley—History—20th century. I. Title.
DS559.62.U6B46 2015
959.704’31—dc23
2014040914
Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003
The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member
of the Association of American University Presses.
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
CONTENTS
Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action
The Berkeley Peace Posters in the Penn State University Collection
Notes
Sources
Index
Posters for Peace is a book about a collection of posters made and circulated on and about the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. In May 1970, as part of a national wave of protests against the Vietnam War, an invasion of Cambodia, and the killing of four students at Kent State University, groups of students at Berkeley produced and distributed a series of political posters. This book presents a rhetorical history and criticism, as well as a catalogue of a collection of some of the recovered posters, which are part of the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection at the Penn State University Libraries.
Posters for Peace describes the rhetoric of those posters, using a historical and critical approach that places them in the circumstances of May 1970. It also employs comparative criticism to set the posters in the context of political discourse and political art more generally, and to consider them as works of visual rhetoric. The book ranges widely over the history and criticism of political debates and political graphics, especially regarding the 1960s and the war in Vietnam, with comparisons to international manifestations of visual and public rhetoric in more recent years. The general aim is to reconstruct the cultural and artistic resources that the artists drew on for inspiration, and to describe how viewers might have made sense of the Berkeley posters in 1970. I also offer a brief account of developments in rhetorical studies that were in part coincidental with the events of May 1970 and eventually gave rise to the subdiscipline of visual rhetoric that partly makes possible the analysis presented here. My own discipline, along with many others, was deeply influenced by the turmoil of the 1960s, as it developed new analytical resources in an attempt to fathom what was happening. I provide extensive notes and bibliography for those readers who want to pursue some of the topics that are treated here only briefly.
I was a witness to some of the events described in this history. I was a visiting professor of rhetoric at Berkeley in the 1969–70 academic year, where I gathered a large sample of the posters, which I kept for almost forty years. In 2008 I donated the posters and some related materials from the period to the library at Penn State University, where they form the basis of a continuing research archive, accompanied by an online digital collection.
I am grateful to many colleagues and correspondents who provided crucial help in this project. James Quigel, head of the Historical Collections and Labor Archives at the Penn State University Libraries, worked with me in the transfer of the original posters to the Penn State collection, and supported the complex work of the Libraries in cataloguing, preserving, digitizing, and exhibiting the posters. Jim Quigel and Ellysa Stern Cahoy, Education Librarian, worked with others in the Libraries to post the collection online. To them and to others in the library who have supported this work, my thanks and admiration.
I am grateful for the remarkable and generous help of archivists and librarians to whom I have directed questions over the course of this project. At the University of California Archives at Bancroft Library on the Berkeley campus, David Kessler, Jason Miller, and others went out of their way to help a distant scholar; this help was further extended when I spent a week in the archives in February 2013. At a crucial point in my research into the archival holdings at Berkeley, poster historian Lincoln Cushing generously provided guidance on the location of the key collection. At the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Christopher Hives and Katherine Kalsbeek offered help when it was needed. I have also been assisted by archivists and others at the US National Archives and Records Administration, the Imperial War Museum (United Kingdom), and the Bibliothèque nationale de France; Jon Fletcher at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library; and Geoffrey D. Swindells of the Northwestern University Library.
I am grateful to colleagues who responded to early versions of this work with generosity and good questions. Diane Hope, late Kern Professor of Communication emerita at the Rochester Institute of Technology, invited me to present a keynote lecture on the Berkeley posters in April 2008 at a conference on visual communication that she organized in Rochester. She also provided encouragement, as did other scholars of visual rhetoric who attended the lecture. That lecture is an early version of what became this book. Later versions of the analysis were presented as a gallery talk in the Paterno Library at Penn State University, in November 2011, at the invitation of, and with the support of, Jim Quigel and Ellysa Cahoy, and at a colloquium of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. My thanks to them and to colleagues at both occasions, who asked questions and offered suggested
