Great Posters of the Great War

Why “Great Posters?”

World War I is also known as the “Great War.”

But why are these Great War posters here called “Great Posters?”

Arguably for the first—and last—time, posters were the protagonists in American wartime propaganda. Though they would be used again, and in even greater numbers, during World War II, their impact would then be overshadowed by other media, notably the radio. As O.W. Riegel, propaganda analyst for the Office of War Information in WWII, notes in his introduction to Posters of World War I and World War II in the George C. Marshall Research Foundation, “It may not be excessive to say that the poster campaign involving all warring nations during World War I has never been equaled in its combination of magnitude and poster primacy for a single cause” (Riegel 3). During WWI, America and the American government depended on the poster for mass communication as they never had or would again.

The numbers and impact of the posters were themselves great. An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 posters were produced in America alone during the war, and printings of 100,000 “were not uncommon” (Riegel 3). According to Walton Rawls, more than twenty million American posters were printed, outstripping poster production in all other countries combined.

Food Posters

The food posters of World War I illustrate a serious European wartime problem: hunger. Starvation, as Walton Rawls argues in his Wake Up America! World War I and the American Poster, was a tactical weapon in this new kind of war. Even before the United States entered the fight, it was a major supplier of foodstuffs to the Allies and neutral nations. In 1917, for example, ninety percent of the wheat in Britain’s daily bread was American (Rawls 113).
In April 1917, Herbert Hoover, famous for his successful wartime work as the head of the Committee for Relief in Belgium, was appointed head of the new United States Food Administration. Often repeating “food will win the war,” Hoover believed that “second only to military action [food is] the dominate factor” (Rawls 112). Yet he was determined to keep American rationing voluntary. Arguably for this very reason, effective propaganda was even more crucial to the Food Administration’s success.

A small number of posters in this exhibit concern alcohol, and, indeed, the question of prohibition had been part of—and a problem for—food legislation since its wartime beginnings. “Temperance advocates,” as Maxcy Dickson chronicles in The Food Front in World War I, “immediately sought to incorporate national prohibition into the Food Control Bill” (Dickson 14). The issue was so divisive, however, that the bill could not pass with a national prohibition clause. In the end, only hard liquor manufacture was curtailed, and no American posters known to this author feature spirits, beer, or wine. The French posters, however, do not shy from the subject. Posters 130 and 184 openly call for the banning of alcohol. But French views were not uniform either, as shown by poster 240, which suggests that families “save wine for our poilus [“shaggies,” or “hairies,” a nickname for the often heavily-bearded French trench soldiers].”

Many of the French posters here pictured are drawn by schoolchildren. They are examples of winning entries in a national competition organized by the Comité National de Prévoyance et d’Economies. Children are often featured in propaganda—children and women are the innocents whose sufferings pull on the nation’s heartstrings most liberally—and one wonders if these child-drawn posters were indeed highly effective. Or, perhaps these posters are a sign of a new, total war—a war so total that even French children actively participated in and contributed to the war effort.

Artist: Steele
Date: Undated
Creator: OC for the Food Administration
Dimensions: 54.8 x 35.3 cm
Item number: UNL poster 102

Artist: Paul Stahr
Date: 1917
Creator: The W.F. Powers Co. Litho. for the Food Administration, New York
Dimensions: 72.4 x 50.2 cm
Item number: UNL poster 268, Food Administration poster no. 4

Artist: Anonymous
Date: 1918              
Creator: The Carey Printing Co. for the Food Administration, New York
Dimensions: 74.1 x 50.5 cm
Item number: UNL poster 398, Food Administration poster no. 22

YMCA Posters

The posters bearing the red (or blue) triangle, the symbol of the YMCA (or YWCA), are divided into two categories: Les Foyers du Soldat and all the others.

The “others” are a heterogeneous group in many ways—authored by many artists, printed at home or abroad—but nonetheless form a cohesive and representative whole. They call for service on all fronts, for donations, for sacrifice, and are in many ways typical of American poster propaganda during this period. Most interesting among these, perhaps, though not unique in American poster design at this time, are posters 128 and 410. Both feature propaganda within propaganda (“in vitro” propaganda): poster 410 shows a YMCA girl posting a YMCA poster, and poster 128 advertises a war film—“Your boy in the movies!” The kind of double vision, as produced in poster 410 in particular, gives a much greater depth to the piece, as well as an amusing, deliberate and self-aware, twist.

The Foyers du Soldat (Union Franco-Americaine) collection features fascinating, sometimes strange, graphically poor posters. The Franco-American Union, concerned with the welfare of the French poilu, advertises the YMCA-run “foyer” (a hard to translate word with all the connotations of “home” in English) as a refuge. Inside, man escapes the battlefield. Contrasted to bleak snowy landscapes (poster 337) or destroyed urban scenes (poster 334), the bright lights in the foyers welcome the returning soldier. But it is not enough to come home: the bearded soldiers must be civilized, and taught not to spit on the ground (poster 48), for example. Though Post Traumatic Stress Disorder did not exist as a term or medical concept at the time, these posters recognize that soldiers are damaged by war and alienated from society and loved ones.