1968 brought the Tet Offensive and Lyndon Johnson’s announcement that he would not run for reelection.50 George Wallace of Alabama emerged as a candidate of the Southern backlash against civil rights, and Richard Nixon won the presidency with a promise to execute his secret plan to end the war and to restore order in the streets, along with the code words of the new Republican Southern strategy. The year 1969 brought further frustration in Vietnam and further division at home. The political and civil turmoil of the 1960s was matched by a widespread cultural upheaval. The Berkeley posters themselves have direct antecedents in Paris of May 1968, but the larger political and rhetorical climate of Berkeley in May 1970 was distinctively American.
The antecedents of the Berkeley peace posters reach beyond the recent Paris posters and the local psychedelic posters to the nineteenth-century development of the poster for commerce, art, propaganda, and protest, and further back through a long history of prints, handbills, broadsides, signs, and graffiti.51 In the United States, poster art was employed as government rhetoric in World Wars I and II, as well as in the New Deal. The New Deal stimulated a rich government investment in public arts of all sorts, partly to develop a sense of national cohesion and optimism, and partly as a means of providing direct support to artists in all spheres—painters, writers, actors, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, designers, architects, and poster and print artists. Roger G. Kennedy and David Larkin note that in announcing the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt “was not announcing a program of princely patronage or largesse. He was, instead, inviting each of his countrymen, artists among them, to come forward in a covenant of service. Artists were among the many who needed work in 1932, and the nation needed the work artists could do.”52 Kennedy and Larkin emphasize that New Deal art was not simply propaganda or make-work, but a diverse and needed contribution to the public good “that summoned forth pride out of common experience.”53 In his pioneering 1987 study of the posters produced by artists recruited by the Works Progress Administration, Christopher DeNoon recalls the ephemerality of the posters. From 1935 to 1943, WPA artists “printed two million posters from thirty-five thousand designs.” Of all those posters, only about two thousand are known to have survived. With the coming of World War II and after a red-baiting witch hunt against WPA art programs led by Martin Dies—a headline-hunting, conservative, anti–New Deal congressman from Texas and chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee—the WPA project came to an end, and most of the posters disappeared into landfills and pulp mills, along with much other New Deal public art.54 The Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division collected 907 of the WPA posters in the 1940s; that collection is now supplemented by the WPA Living Archive project, which collected additional posters from various sources. By 2012 the Living Archive had brought the total of rescued posters to 1,601.55
The WPA posters were created for the most part by the silk screen process. Anthony Velonis, a WPA poster artist who taught classes in the technique to students and fellow WPA artists, wrote a classic forty-four-page handbook on the method. Velonis remarked that silk screen printing, although two thousand years old, had not been used in the United States until the early twentieth century, and yet, despite the availability of various mass production printing techniques, the “Chinese stencil process has had a greater proportional growth the last five years [before 1939] than any other modern printing technique.” Velonis observes that “although silk screen cannot approach the chiaroscuro of offset and lithography, it makes up for this by the richness of its pigment layer and the highly valued effect of its ‘personal touch.’” And, he adds, “its initial cost is much less.”56 The WPA posters promoted public health and safety, tourism and travel, exhibitions and performances, and a wide variety of community themes (see figs. 7 and 8).
FIGURE 7 “See America. Welcome to Montana.” Jerome Rothstein, Works Progress Administration. United States Travel Bureau. WPA Poster Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
FIGURE 8 “Work Pays America! Prosperity.” Vera Bock, Works Progress Administration, 1936–41. WPA Poster Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
President Roosevelt spoke repeatedly about the pragmatic need to put aside class and regional conflict. FDR sounded a similar note when he encouraged tourism and travel as an economic stimulus and as a way to encourage citizens to cultivate their shared identity as Americans. The WPA poster “Work Pays America!,” by Vera Bock, echoes a theme common in Roosevelt’s speeches—that in the Great Depression, recovery depended on stimulating both the farmer and the laborer; each needed to be put back to work to aid the recovery of the other. While campaigning for a second term in 1936, FDR’s campaign train made a short stop in Hayfield, Minnesota, where he began his rear-platform remarks by referring to tourism and regional and economic mutuality:
I am glad to come to this section of Minnesota. I have never been on this railroad before. I hope in the next three or four years to come through by automobile and get a better idea of this country.
One of the things we ought to think a lot about in this campaign is what has happened to our national point of view in the last four years. In every section of the United States we have gained the understanding that prosperity in one section of the country is absolutely tied in with prosperity in all the other sections. Even back in the Eastern States and cities, they are beginning to realize that the purchasing power of the farmers of the Northwest will have a big effect on the prosperity of the industry and of the industrial workers of the East. In just the same way, I know you realize that if the factories in the big industrial cities are running full speed, people will have more money to buy the foodstuffs you raise.57
By the late 1930s, the Federal Arts Project began to shrink, owing to changing policies and an economy stimulated by defense preparations. DeNoon writes, “In 1942, after the United States entered World War II and the nation’s energies turned in a new direction, the Federal Art Project was transferred to Defense Department sponsorship and renamed the Graphics Section of the War Service Division. Under this new sponsorship, the government-employed poster artists produced training aids, airport plans, rifle sight charts, silhouettes of German and Japanese aircraft, ‘Buy Bonds’ booths, and patriotic posters such as one designed to encourage homefront knitting: ‘Remember Pearl Harbor—Purl Harder.’”58 The themes and motifs in the World War II posters (see figs. 9–13) are all echoed, sometimes with new meanings and valences, in the Berkeley antiwar posters of May 1970—speech and silence, the safety of children, unity across class and racial boundaries, the flag.
FIGURE 9 “Silence Means Security.” Office for Emergency Management. Office of War Information. Collection of the author.
FIGURE 10 “Who Wants to Know? Silence Means Security.” US Adjutant General’s Office, 1943. World War II Poster Collection, Digitized Collections, Northwestern University Library.
FIGURE 11 “Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them.
