Posters in the First World War

James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam poster has a blank space at the bottom. It was left for the address of the nearest recruiting station.

Before the war, picture posters had mostly advertised goods and exhibitions. Between 1914 and 1918, governments took them up and printed them in huge numbers. Posters were easy to reproduce and could go up on walls and fences, in shop and home windows, in workplaces and streetcars, and they could be printed in several languages. They called for soldiers and sailors and asked people to lend money, give to relief, grow more food, and eat less meat and wheat.

Each country organized the work in its own way. In the United States, the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson led a Division of Pictorial Publicity, formed in April 1917, the month the country entered the war. Each week it handed out requests from government offices to artists who gave their work. Germany, unlike France, long had no central propaganda office, and from 1916 several offices competed. Its picture posters were made mostly for war loans, collections of money and goods, and appeals to hold out. People saw their value as records at once. A German war library begun during the war had gathered about 15,000 picture posters by 1923, and in North Dakota a museum curator collected 667 in 1917 and 1918.

What the posters achieved is hard to measure. Print runs sometimes hint at how people at the time judged a poster, but not at what viewers felt. The historian Irina Renz notes the view of Jeffrey Verhey that the poster images of the war shaped the political imagery of Germany in the 1920s. David H. Mihaly, a curator at the Huntington Library, has argued that the planning and wide distribution of these posters set them apart from earlier propaganda.

Three library posters show different appeals. Flagg's I Want You for U.S. Army began as a magazine cover in July 1916; more than four million copies were printed in 1917 and 1918. Its pointing finger borrowed from a British image of Lord Kitchener. Abel Faivre's We'll Get Them! turns a charging French soldier into a hero for the loan of 1916. Fritz Erler's Help Us Win! of 1917 shows a German soldier in a steel helmet, with a serious face, looking out past barbed wire.