September 13, 2006
Posters of World War II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:55 AM EST The “Editor’s Picks” section of this website’s homepage today links to a National Archives exhibit titled “Powers of Persuasion: Poster Art From World War II.” All of the posters are American, and all of them have that period quality that will make them oddly goofy to some observers and extraordinarily moving to others. The most powerful, for my money, is the still-famous one showing a solitary merchant seaman drowning by moonlight: two eyes stare accusingly, while a muscular wrist and hand point at the viewer, and the caption reads “Someone Talked.” An infinitely sillier one has a pretty and very wholesome blonde saluting from behind a typewriter; the caption reads “Victory Waits on Your Fingers: Keep ’Em Flying, Miss U.S.A.” Smaller print notes that “Uncle Sam Needs Stenographers.” That one was new to me. Images of Rosie the Riveter had a vivid second life courtesy of late-sixties feminism, but that perky patriot-typist vanished in the mists of time, until the National Archive found her and stuck her up in cyberspace. Not all war poster art had so wholesome a view of American womanhood. A couple of years ago I gave a talk at a gallery mounting a war poster show, and received a poster for my pains. I selected a small one showing a woman in a slip standing near a tenanted bed, with her hand in the man’s trouser pocket, apparently assuming the fellow to be asleep. She is mistaken, for he is leering with one eye, telling her “Just Be Sure You Put 10 Percent of It in WAR BONDS!” It is more a thought by Preston Sturges than by Frank Capra. At this remove it usefully reminds the viewer that the people whose husbands, sons, and brothers very literally burned fascism out of their enemies’ hearts were not as wholly naive and sentimental as their posterity often seem to suspect. There are no similar color posters from the Civil War; we didn’t yet have the printing methods to produce them. Posters from the First World War were everywhere, a vital means of communicating with a population that included a lot of marginally literate people, none of whom had radios. Second World War posters, while ubiquitous, were in a sense wholly unnecessary. By the 1940s most Americans could read and had access to radios. We nonetheless produced a lot of posters, perhaps because we had learned the drill in 1917-1918 and posters were now part of the cultural repertoire of a mass industrial society at war. If so, our cultural repertoire diminished very quickly. There were very few war posters during the Korean War, and none that I remember from Vietnam. Maybe television killed them off, or perhaps those wars were not waged in the same spirit of collective endeavor. The war poster had a peculiar, very brief, and unsuccessful revival in the wake of 9/11. As a first dissident gesture against the administration’s war on terror, the images from the posters of the world wars were reworked by antiwar artists, who kept the original images and altered the texts. These artists clearly thought they had found a brilliantly subversive medium, and they were equally clearly wrong. A significant majority of the American people initially supported the war despite those semiotic subversions and turned against it a couple of years after the would-be-transgressive posters vanished. That deliberate transgressive gesture also seemed ill-calculated. Inverting the meanings of images of wars against fascism and militarism risked implying that the role of the American people at war had been similarly inverted, and that we were now the fascists and militarists. As the American people turn against the war, it is nonetheless unlikely that they will adopt the judgment implied by that inversion. So there are two mistakes we should avoid: We should not assume that the population that originally assimilated the World War II posters was foolishly innocent, and we should not assume that our own “knowing” use of images is as brilliantly sophisticated as we sometimes like to imagine. The failure of those transgressive posters suggests that affection for World War II posters almost never involves the pleasures of camp. Rosie the Riveter, with that bared bicep, polka-dot bandana, and blue work shirt, quite humorlessly assured the viewer that “We Can Do It!” Looking at that poster, one remembers that we could, and did. If we cannot now, or ought not, we probably will not thank anyone who too gleefully points it out.
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