I thank my colleagues and students at Penn State University, who are a continuing source of inspiration and support. Stephen Browne, Rosa Eberly, Cara Finnegan, John Gastil, Kevin Hagopian, David Calandra, Brian Curran, Philip Rogers, Susan Squier, and Brian Snee offered encouragement and useful questions. Phil Rogers, discerning reader and old friend, read the entire manuscript and offered many valuable suggestions. The ongoing support of the College of the Liberal Arts and of the faculty and students of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences has been generous and unstinting. The Penn State University endowment for the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric has made possible some research time and indispensable support for travel to archives and acquisition of research materials, and a sabbatical leave made possible the time needed to complete the research and writing.
Kendra Boileau, editor in chief of the Penn State University Press, gave me early encouragement and ongoing support as my editor for the project, and many others at Penn State University Press have been helpful along the way. Robert Turchick, editorial assistant, assisted with the acquisition of images and other tasks; my copyeditor was S. Scott Rohrer. Patrick Alexander, director, offered perspective and encouragement.
My family has given support, suggestions, and love—daughters Daisy and Sarah Benson; granddaughter Lucia Benson-Ruth; son-in-law Richard Ruth and daughter-in-law Hannah Peacock. My wife of more than fifty years, Margaret Sandelin Benson, has encouraged me at every stage, all these years.
POSTERS FOR PEACE
Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action
FIGURE 1 “Peace Now.” Berkeley, California, 1970. Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection, Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, University Libraries, The Pennsylvania State University.
This book is an account of the visual rhetoric of a collection of peace posters created in Berkeley, California, in 1970, and of the circumstances in which they were brought into being and given meaning. The posters themselves were a small but telling part of an energetic and diverse movement by American college students in the 1960s and early 1970s against war and racism. Student activism in the United States in the 1960s was part of a loosely connected worldwide movement that took on different forms—most memorably, perhaps, in 1968. The events of May 1970 brought a terrible climax to a long period of confusion and turmoil.
Posters for Peace begins with an extended essay on the rhetorical history of the posters and their immediate and longer-term historical context. It offers close readings of the posters from a rhetorical perspective, with comparisons to other visual examples where appropriate, and with annotations to explain some of the posters’ multiple cultural meanings. The rhetorical approach attempted here regards the posters as addressed to viewers—in this case, by unknown artists to unspecified audiences—and it explores their antecedents, contexts, and forms. Through close reading and comparative analysis, this approach attempts to recover and reimagine the potential experiences invited by the posters as rhetoric. The second section of the book presents a gallery of the Berkeley posters in the Protest Posters Collection at the Penn State University Libraries. The posters themselves are now owned by the Historical Collections and Labor Archives in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library. A condition of their gift to Penn State was that they should be freely available for nonprofit educational uses. They are also available online at the library and at the Flickr Creative Commons.1
The close-reading approach is an attempt to recover how the posters might have looked in 1970. This is partly an exercise in recovery—recovery of the meanings that might have been invited by and achieved by these posters in 1970—but also reflects an understanding that the posters are of interest as part of the continuing conversation of American culture. Recovering the meanings that might have been circulating in 1970 is not simply an exercise in taxidermy, the recovery of an inert and bygone moment. Our own historical and political context may distort our capacity to recover the posters’ rhetoric as it existed in 1970. And yet, a reader of this book might very well want to look at these posters precisely to make use of them. Understanding something more about them as part of a context will perhaps make that recovery more useful.
The close reading of visual rhetoric begins by attending to the primary, manifest verbal and visual content, as well as the primary stylistic features—color, form, line, and so on. Comparative, inventional, and audience perspectives guide the analysis. A comparative approach, when undertaken from a rhetorical perspective, as in this study, has multiple, overlapping dimensions. The posters’ direct appeal stems from their location within the larger rhetorical currents of the time—both the “moment” of May 1970 and the broader political and cultural rhetorics of the long 1960s. A comparative approach to the posters as visual rhetoric seeks to invite the reader to view the posters in context and in contrast to earlier and later visual rhetorics that may or may not have been accessible to the artists and audiences of the posters in 1970; such an approach helps us to see what contemporaries probably took for granted, things seen but not explicitly noticed by artists and audiences in 1970. A study of the pre-1970 history of the poster and of political graphics may provide clues into what may be called the inventional rhetoric of the posters—that is, the resources, traditions, and rhetorical iconographies that the poster artists may have consulted, directly or indirectly, as they created the images considered here. A parallel comparative approach attempts to reconstruct what might be called the rhetoric of reception, which takes into account the resources of those who viewed and perhaps recirculated the posters in 1970. These three comparative approaches—of the poster artist, of the 1970 poster viewer, and of the reader who comes upon the posters decades later and seeks to recover them for the present—are not entirely exclusive, but they are conceptually different. In any case, the close readings and the comparisons are undertaken from a rhetorical perspective—this study seeks to understand the posters not primarily as part of the history of art but as works of visual rhetoric and civic persuasion.
The study of rhetoric was itself at a transformative moment in 1970, and that transformation is part of the story I attempt to tell in these pages. In May 1970, the month these posters were circulating in Berkeley, a group of scholars came together in the National Developmental Project in Rhetoric. The 1960s campus politics of civil liberties, civil rights, and peace helped to prompt a redirection and renewal of rhetorical studies; those changes in rhetorical studies, especially the development of studies in visual rhetoric, provide some of the grounding of the present study, and they may be seen as one example of how the 1960s prompted transformations in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.
In 1970 some art historians would have argued that these posters were mere illustration or graphic design, but not art. Similarly, some rhetorical scholars would have argued that posters were not rhetoric in the full sense of the term—some scholars and gatekeepers saw “rhetoric” as being limited to persuasive verbal discourse, or even more narrowly to public oratory. In this study, I do not ask whether the posters are art or rhetoric (or even whether they are neither). Instead, I assume they are at least in some sense both, and I inquire into how they played their part in the politics of 1970. “Posters,” writes Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “provide a literal, material bridge between the new public sphere constituted by mass communications and the public spaces that become the sites of modern politics as street theater.”2 For decades, posters had been employed as agencies of state propaganda and popular protest. In The Power of the Poster, Margaret Timmers notes, “By its nature, the poster has the ability to seize the immediate attention of the viewer, and then to retain it for what is usually a brief but intense period. During that span of attention, it can provoke and motivate its audience—it can make the viewer gasp,
