{"id":222067,"date":"2024-04-09T14:55:48","date_gmt":"2024-04-09T14:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/09\/during-the-war-years-posters-from-the-american-homefront-told-you-what-to-do-and-what-not-to-do\/"},"modified":"2025-06-25T17:18:59","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T17:18:59","slug":"during-the-war-years-posters-from-the-american-homefront-told-you-what-to-do-and-what-not-to-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/09\/during-the-war-years-posters-from-the-american-homefront-told-you-what-to-do-and-what-not-to-do\/","title":{"rendered":"During the War Years, Posters From the American Homefront Told You What to Do \u2014 And What Not to Do"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cThe First World War saw the first widespread use of propaganda to stir patriotic fervour,\u201d note Gill Saunders and Margaret Timmers in The Poster: A Visual History<\/em>. \u201cThe need to raise vast sums of money from the public purse to fund the war spawned numerous posters advertising war bonds and loans; countries on both sides of the conflict employed some of their best poster artists for this purpose.\u201d <\/p>\n

If it had worked in one world war, why not try it in another? In his two-volume Propaganda: The Art of Persuasion: World War II<\/em>, Anthony Rhodes notes the \u201cbarrage of posters\u201d produced by government agencies like the United States Office of War Information as well as private companies during the war. And, observe Saunders and Timmers, \u201cBoth the British and the American governments strove to cement the idea of their national characteristics as unwaveringly plucky, with humour more likely to be employed than fearmongering.\u201d <\/p>\n

If you had any doubt about what you should be doing\u2014or not doing\u2014as an American to help the war effort, there was probably a poster that could point you in the right direction. Should you buy war bonds? (The answer was emphatically yes.) How about driving to work by yourself? (No! \u201cWhen you ride ALONE you ride with Hitler!\u201d) If you were a farmer, what should you produce? (Corn! Sugar beets! Milk!) Was it okay to chat about your work with that affable stranger at the bar? (Absolutely not! \u201cLoose talk can cost lives.\u201d) Colorfully eye-catching, the posters exhorted Americans to work harder, produce more war materiel, save gasoline and scrap metal, support their soldiers and sailors, and stop complaining about shortages. In one poster titled \u201cOf course I can,\u201d\u00a0a young woman clutches her home-jarred food and says, \u201cI\u2019m patriotic as can be\u2014And ration points won\u2019t worry me!\u201d (One thing that did not appear to be in short supply during the war was exclamation points.) <\/p>\n

Perhaps the poster that best distilled all the exhortations into one single message showed a bloodied soldier pointing at a battle going on behind him and exclaiming, \u201cMore! More of everything\u2014quick!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ww2-homefront-posters-volunteer\"
(National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"ww2-honefront-posters-farm\"
(National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"ww2-homefront-posters-factory\"
(National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"ww2-homefront-posters-bonds\"
(National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"ww2-homefront-posters-united\"
(National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"ww2-homefront-posters-fight\"
(National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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[ad_1] \u201cThe First World War saw the first widespread use of propaganda to stir patriotic fervour,\u201d note Gill Saunders and Margaret Timmers in The Poster:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":222068,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222067"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}