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.
