Collection, Digitized Collections, Northwestern University Library.
FIGURE 12 “Men Working Together!” Office for Emergency Management, Division of Information, 1941. World War II Poster Collection, Digitized Collections, Northwestern University Library.
FIGURE 13 “Give It Your Best!” Office of War Information, 1942. World War II Poster Collection, Digitized Collections, Northwestern University Library.
The WPA artists and their successors who created the World War II posters reinvented a genre that had first flourished in the United States, Europe, and other participating nations in World War I. Pearl James writes of the World War I posters that “mass-produced, full-color, large-format war posters . . . were both signs and instruments of two modern innovations in warfare—the military deployment of modern technology and the development of the home front. . . . Posters nationalized, mobilized, and modernized civilian populations.”59 A strikingly similar claim is offered by William L. Bird Jr. and Harry R. Rubenstein in the opening pages of Design for Victory, their account of home-front posters in World War II America: “World War II posters helped mobilize a nation. Inexpensive, accessible, and ever-present, the poster was an ideal agent for making war aims the personal mission of every citizen.”60
The widespread view that World War II was a total war, in which victory depended on the mobilization of national industries, had the effect of at least implicitly justifying large-scale bombing campaigns against industrial and civilian targets. If every citizen was a soldier, every citizen was a potentially legitimate target. The home-front posters themselves sometimes emphasized the risks of defeat, but were largely directed at the mobilization of effort and related themes of the “loose-lips-sink-ships” variety, war bond campaigns, and thrift. Private manufacturers joined the government in the production of home-front posters. “The volume of privately printed posters for factories and plant communities was said to be greater than the number of posters issued from any and all sources during World War I,” Bird and Rubenstein write.61 When large advertising firms brought their talents to the poster effort, debates took shape in the Office of War Information, which was to “review and approve the design and distribution of government posters. Eventually, contending groups within the OWI clashed over poster design. While some embraced the poster as a demonstration of the practical utility of art, others valued it as evidence of the power of advertising. . . . [Those] who saw posters as ‘war graphics’ favored stylized images and symbolism, while recruits drawn from the world of advertising predictably wanted posters to be more like ads.”62 The advertising industry won the argument, partly by winning the support of conservative members of Congress. This in turn influenced the development of home-front posters and secured a financial windfall for advertising firms. During World War II, the effect of posters was almost certainly exceeded by radio, motion pictures, and print. After the war, the introduction of television contributed to the decline of the poster as a primary mode of public and commercial communication. “Not since World War II have government, business, and labor used a wide array of posters as a major form of communication,” Bird and Rubenstein conclude.63 Although their importance as a medium of mass communication diminished after World War II, posters did appear regularly through the 1960s, both as wall posters and as portable signs in citizen demonstrations for peace and civil rights (see figs. 14–17).
FIGURE 14 “Sit-In and Demonstration (Atlanta, Georgia): Congress of Racial Equality, 1963.” The sign carried by the man being assaulted by police officers reads, “July 4th 1776 to 1863: Slavery. 1863–1963: Poverty. Freedom Now. L. I. CORE.” Robert Joyce Papers, 1952–1973, Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Special Collections Library, University Libraries, The Pennsylvania State University. Box 6, Folder 9.
FIGURE 15 “March for Peace (Washington, D.C.): Stop the Bombing; End the War, 1965.” Robert Joyce Papers, 1952–1973, Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Special Collections Library, University Libraries, The Pennsylvania State University. Box 6, Folder 12.
FIGURE 16 “Reaffirm America’s Revolutionary Heritage; Florida Confronts the Pentagon; Vets for Peace in Vietnam: March on Washington Against the War in Vietnam, October 21–22, 1967.” Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection, Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, University Libraries, The Pennsylvania State University. Photograph by the author.
FIGURE 17 “Save Lives, Not Face.” March on Washington against the war in Vietnam, October 21–22, 1967. Photograph by the author.
The psychedelic posters, especially in the Bay Area, helped stimulate a poster culture in the 1960s, which was amplified by the establishment of commercial poster production for private use. College dormitory walls were commonly decorated with locally purchased, mass-produced posters that were in national circulation. Also in the 1960s, some fine artists, turning away from the dominant abstract and pop styles, were creating visual art with strong social content.64 No later than 1965, antiwar posters and paintings were in wide circulation. For the catalogue of an exhibition of protest posters at the New School in New York, in October–December 1971, David Kunzle wrote, “The Poster of Protest was triggered by the sudden, unexpected and massive escalation of the war in Vietnam 1965–66. By 1968 enough antiwar posters had appeared to form an exhibition (mounted in Italy) containing about seventy items. Two years later this number had more than doubled, but there are signs that the wave of the ‘commercial’ poster of protest, with which we are concerned here, is beginning to break, or to move in a new direction: the non-commercial, utilitarian ‘action’ poster, modeled on the famous French student affiches de mai.”65
At Berkeley in May 1970, posters were simply laid out in stacks on tables in the lobby of the College of Environmental Design. Every day, it seemed, there was a fresh supply.66 Lincoln Cushing says that at Berkeley the “short-lived workshop . . . created an estimated fifty thousand copies of hundreds of works.”67 The posters were made with the approval and assistance of the University Art Museum and the faculty of the College of Environmental Design. According to Cushing, “UC Berkeley art history professor Herschel B. Chipp was a faculty advocate for the workshop artists, and he threw his support behind a student-curated exhibition at the then-new University Art Museum. It included work from the University of California, the California College of Arts and Crafts, the San Francisco Art Institute, Stanford, and other schools, as well as posters from Mexico and Paris from May 1968.”68
In his Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond, Peter Selz, former director of the University Art Museum, recalls,
Many antiwar posters were produced in the University Art Museum on the Berkeley campus during this time. In response to the American invasion of Cambodia in 1970, there
