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FIGURE 8 “Work Pays America! Prosperity.” Vera Bock, Works Progress Administration, 1936–41. WPA Poster Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

      President Roosevelt spoke repeatedly about the pragmatic need to put aside class and regional conflict. FDR sounded a similar note when he encouraged tourism and travel as an economic stimulus and as a way to encourage citizens to cultivate their shared identity as Americans. The WPA poster “Work Pays America!,” by Vera Bock, echoes a theme common in Roosevelt’s speeches—that in the Great Depression, recovery depended on stimulating both the farmer and the laborer; each needed to be put back to work to aid the recovery of the other. While campaigning for a second term in 1936, FDR’s campaign train made a short stop in Hayfield, Minnesota, where he began his rear-platform remarks by referring to tourism and regional and economic mutuality:

      I am glad to come to this section of Minnesota. I have never been on this railroad before. I hope in the next three or four years to come through by automobile and get a better idea of this country.

      One of the things we ought to think a lot about in this campaign is what has happened to our national point of view in the last four years. In every section of the United States we have gained the understanding that prosperity in one section of the country is absolutely tied in with prosperity in all the other sections. Even back in the Eastern States and cities, they are beginning to realize that the purchasing power of the farmers of the Northwest will have a big effect on the prosperity of the industry and of the industrial workers of the East. In just the same way, I know you realize that if the factories in the big industrial cities are running full speed, people will have more money to buy the foodstuffs you raise.⁵⁷

By the late 1930s, the Federal Arts Project began to shrink, owing to changing policies and an economy stimulated by defense preparations. DeNoon writes, “In 1942, after the United States entered World War II and the nation’s energies turned in a new direction, the Federal Art Project was transferred to Defense Department sponsorship and renamed the Graphics Section of the War Service Division. Under this new sponsorship, the government-employed poster artists produced training aids, airport plans, rifle sight charts, silhouettes of German and Japanese aircraft, ‘Buy Bonds’ booths, and patriotic posters such as one designed to encourage homefront knitting: ‘Remember Pearl Harbor—Purl Harder.’”⁵⁸ The themes and motifs in the World War II posters (see figs. 9–13) are all echoed, sometimes with new meanings and valences, in the Berkeley antiwar posters of May 1970—speech and silence, the safety of children, unity across class and racial boundaries, the flag.

FIGURE 9 “Silence Means Security.” Office for Emergency Management. Office of War Information. Collection of the author.

      FIGURE 10 “Who Wants to Know? Silence Means Security.” US Adjutant General’s Office, 1943. World War II Poster Collection, Digitized Collections, Northwestern University Library.

FIGURE 11 “Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them. Buy War Bonds.” Lawrence Beall Smith, US Department of the Treasury, 1942. World War II Poster Collection, Digitized Collections, Northwestern University Library.

      FIGURE 12 “Men Working Together!” Office for Emergency Management, Division of Information, 1941. World War II Poster Collection, Digitized Collections, Northwestern University Library.

FIGURE 13 “Give It Your Best!” Office of War Information, 1942. World War II Poster Collection, Digitized Collections, Northwestern University Library.

      The WPA artists and their successors who created the World War II posters reinvented a genre that had first flourished in the United States, Europe, and other participating nations in World War I. Pearl James writes of the World War I posters that “mass-produced, full-color, large-format war posters . . . were both signs and instruments of two modern innovations in warfare—the military deployment of modern technology and the development of the home front. . . . Posters nationalized, mobilized, and modernized civilian populations.”⁵⁹ A strikingly similar claim is offered by William L. Bird Jr. and Harry R. Rubenstein in the opening pages of Design for Victory, their account of home-front posters in World War II America: “World War II posters helped mobilize a nation. Inexpensive, accessible, and ever-present, the poster was an ideal agent for making war aims the personal mission of every citizen.”⁶⁰

The widespread view that World War II was a total war, in which victory depended on the mobilization of national industries, had the effect of at least implicitly justifying large-scale bombing campaigns against industrial and civilian targets. If every citizen was a soldier, every citizen was a potentially legitimate target. The home-front

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