American propaganda posters: US examples by technique

Content note. American wartime posters include racial caricature of Japanese people, the epithet "Hun" for Germans, and posters from dissenting groups that use hostile labels for police and officials. They are shown as they were issued, as evidence of what Americans were told. Showing a poster is not endorsing it.

What counts as an American propaganda poster?

An American propaganda poster is a printed sheet issued in the United States, or by a United States body abroad, that was built to move an audience rather than only inform it. The collection records the issuer, the audience and the stated purpose of each one. This archive applies one working definition to every country (how FRAME defines propaganda), so the questions asked here are the same ones asked of a British, German, Soviet or Chinese poster: who issued it, who it was for, what it asked, and which technique carried the ask.

The set is broad. It runs from presidential campaign lithographs of the nineteenth century through the First and Second World War mobilisations to Cold War posters printed for audiences in Asia, and it includes posters from parties, movements, companies and charities as well as from government agencies. Government bodies issued many of the posters shown here, but they were never the only American voices, and dissenting posters are held to the same standard as official ones. For the world-wide view, see propaganda posters.

Campaign posters before 1914: card stacking and glittering generalities

Long before the world wars, American parties used lithographed posters to sell candidates. A pro-McKinley poster of 1900 splits the sheet in two: on the left, under "1896 Poverty Depression", idle factories; on the right, under "1900 Prosperity", smoking chimneys and a cheering crowd. It pairs two years and two conditions as cause and effect and ends on a slogan, which is the card-stacking tell. Read the technique: card stacking.

The same election produced a pro-Bryan chromolithograph. It sets Bryan's portrait between a bell marked "1776 Liberty" and one marked "1900 No Imperialism", coils an octopus labelled "Trusts" around factories, and ends on "Equal rights to all, special privileges to none". Virtue words ("Liberty. Justice. Humanity."), borrowed national symbols and a menacing image make up the appeal. Two opposing campaigns in one year, tagged with the same vocabulary, show why this archive scores methods and not teams. Read the technique: glittering generalities.

The First World War: name-calling and fear

Henry Raleigh drew this Third Liberty Loan poster for the U.S. Treasury in spring 1918. Against a wall of flame, an American soldier grips a German soldier in a spiked helmet who has seized a half-clothed woman clutching a child. The label "Hun" names the enemy, and the staged threat to a mother and child sits directly above the single remedy, buying bonds. The scene belongs to the Allied "Rape of Belgium" iconography. Some 1914 atrocity stories were later shown to be false or unverified, while documented killings of civilians also took place, as the historians Horne and Kramer record. The poster does not distinguish between them. Read the technique: name-calling and fear appeal. More on the war's posters: WW1 propaganda posters.

The Second World War: mobilisation, secrecy and racial caricature

Home-front posters of 1942 to 1945 had three jobs: production, security and hatred of the enemy. The three examples below show each.

Production. The Office of War Information issued this 1943 labour-recruitment poster (OWI Poster No. 52), based on a photograph by Alfred T. Palmer. The ordinary, neatly dressed worker makes factory work look like a normal step for any woman, and "the sooner we win" ties each individual job to the end of the war. That is plain folks and glittering generalities. Read the technique: plain folks.

Security. A government home-front campaign poster in the style of a wanted notice accuses an unnamed, glamorous woman of "murder" for indiscreet talk, with drowning soldiers superimposed behind her. A single social lapse is presented as the sole cause of deaths at sea, and the blame is placed on one civilian, a woman, with no mention of command, weather or enemy action. Read the technique: scapegoating.

Hatred of the enemy. This war-plant poster, held by the National Archives, draws three Japanese-style soldiers with yellow-green faces and squinting eyes aiming rifles straight at the viewer, under the headline "Murder in cold blood" and the line "Let's force the Japs to pay. Make every bullet grade A." The poster does not say what event "murder in cold blood" refers to and cites no source for the claim. The slur and the caricature are shown as issued. The collection holds other anti-Japanese posters from the same war, including ones issued by the U.S. Army, and treats them in the same way as hostile posters from every other side. Read the technique: name-calling. More on the war's posters: WW2 propaganda posters.

The Cold War: posters printed for audiences abroad

In the early 1950s the U.S. Department of State's information service printed posters in Asian languages for local distribution. This Ilocano-language poster of 1952 shows a farmer, a woman holding a scroll marked "Constitution of the Philippines" and a boy with a schoolbook before the red and blue of the Philippine flag. "Guard your freedom" and "carry out your duties" are virtue slogans, and the flag colours lend the national symbols' prestige to the message. The poster does not say what the freedom is to be guarded against. A pencil note on the National Archives copy appears to record a print run of 23,000. For other posters in this series, and for Soviet and Chinese posters of the same decades, see Cold War propaganda posters. Read the technique: transfer.

Posters from inside the United States that opposed official policy

Americans also made propaganda against their own government's actions, and the collection records it on the same terms.

A 1972 Socialist Workers Party electoral poster, from the Library of Congress's Yanker collection, states that "from 1965 to 1971 the Democrats and Republicans dropped more than 6 million tons of bombs on the people of Vietnam", and asks for votes for Jenness and Pulley. The tell is a single statistic attributed to both major parties with no source or breakdown, used to support a vote appeal. Read the technique: card stacking.

Content note: Memorial poster for a man killed in a police raid, using the hostile label 'fascist pigs' for police. This object is shown as it was published. Why

A 1969 Black Panther Party memorial poster for Fred Hampton, also from the Yanker collection, pairs his portrait with the line "You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail the revolution" and says he was "Murdered by fascist pigs Dec. 4, 1969", a hostile label for the police involved in the raid. The label is shown as printed, and the page makes no ruling on the event the poster describes. Read the technique: name-calling.

How the American record compares

The collection holds more American posters than posters from any other single country. That count reflects what the archive has found and been able to host with a clear rights basis; it is not a claim that American output was larger or smaller than another country's. Differences of scale, intent and context are recorded where the record supports them. For instance, American wartime posters came from a mix of federal agencies, military branches and private firms, and the same techniques appear in the British, German, Japanese and Soviet material in the collection. A reader comparing sides should use the technique pages and the per-object caption, which say what each picture does, and not the poster count.

Browse American propaganda posters

The grid below shows posters in the collection issued in the United States or by U.S. bodies abroad. Each opens an object page with the holding institution, a link to the original record, a transcription of any text and the rights basis for hosting. For every object, not only posters, use the full collection, filtered by technique, era, country and medium.

Sources and rights

Posters on this page come from the Library of Congress, the U.S. National Archives and Wikimedia Commons. Where a rights statement is limited, the object page says so; for example, the Library's Yanker collection items carry the advisory "No known restrictions on publication", and the 1942 war-plant poster's issuer was not verified. Transcriptions are verbatim and translations are labelled.