World War I is also known as the “Great War.”
But
why are these Great War posters here called “Great Posters?”
Arguably
for the first—and last—time, posters were the protagonists
in American wartime propaganda. Though they would be used again,
and in even greater numbers, during World War II, their impact would
then be overshadowed by other media, notably the radio. As O.W.
Riegel, propaganda analyst for the Office of War Information in
WWII, notes in his introduction to Posters of World War I and
World War II in the George C. Marshall Research Foundation,
“It may not be excessive to say that the poster campaign involving
all warring nations during World War I has never been equaled in
its combination of magnitude and poster primacy for a single cause”
(Riegel 3). During WWI, America and the American government depended
on the poster for mass communication as they never had or would
again.
The numbers
and impact of the posters were themselves great. An estimated 2,000
to 3,000 posters were produced in America alone during the war,
and printings of 100,000 “were not uncommon” (Riegel
3). According to Walton Rawls, more than twenty million American
posters were printed, outstripping poster production in all other
countries combined.
Many of posters
are of great beauty and great fame. Arguably the best known American
poster of all time, James Montgomery Flagg’s “I Want
You for the U.S. Army” (1917) was initially printed for the
Great War (though it would be printed again during WWII). Based
on a British poster, Alfred Leete’s “Your Country Needs
You” (1914; which depicts a heavily mustached man pointing
directly at the passing viewer), Flagg’s version has, from
its first printing to today, inspired thousands of offshoots and
spoofs.
The artists
who produced these posters, in the case of Charles Dana Gibson and
his Division of Pictorial Publicity in particular, worked for free,
with noble—great—and patriotic intentions. As architect
Cass Gilbert “defined their mission: ‘To visualize to
the people the facts of the great contest […] to place upon
every wall in America the call to patriotism and to service”
(Rawls 153). The Division “mustered nearly three thousand
of America’s most famous artists into government service”
(Rawls 147) and George Creel, who directed the greater Committee
on Public Information of which the Division was a part, remembers
that “even in the rush of the first days… I had the
great conviction that the poster must play a great
part in the fight for public opinion” (Rawls 150; emphasis
added).
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