Words and Images (1943)
The issues of the war have to be stated continually.1 They are dynamic in themselves, and they require dynamic treatment. As our allies grew in their understanding of this war, their early plans for the cutting down of education—as in England—were changed. Total war it is; those who can express its issues must be used. And as we inquire into its definitions constantly, testing the meanings against conquest in North Africa, for example, or thinking of the issues of India and Detroit, we must also test—among other techniques—the images of the war.2
One of the clearest means of communication is one for which we have not yet invented a name. It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting—or the frame of film—to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what the dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster. The point is not in the naming of a picture, but in a reinforcement which is mutual, so that the words and the picture attack the same theme from slightly different approaches. Goya does it, when he calls a scene, through the side of whose frame pierce the rifles of the firing squad, “This is not to be looked at.”3 The best of our films do this; and certain portfolios of photographs, and certain picture books, in which the sharp text adds life to the pictures as the pictures add life to the words themselves, and a new and expressive form is before us.
This form is the basic form of the war poster. And when we see the fierce and vivid and constructive image—a face of the war—before us, we have, too, a point of conflict, if we are not yet agreed on the issues of the war. Because what we have is not the raw and brutal impact of the atrocity photograph, nor the cliché of the storytelling picture. We have an emotional image, reinforced from another direction by words, so that both make their strong appeal to the critical mind and to the wish, already moved by the facts of war.
Hardly anything has yet been written about these methods. One of the few recent statements, in an article in El Tiempo, points out the early errors in Mexico’s treatment of fascist leaders as comic and amusing gangsters who imposed laws by bloodshed.4 A basis for a graphics program includes these points, the article continues:
We do not generally vibrate to a war-march, but we are moved by a child.
Traditions that are stepped on make us desperate . . . A violated home pushes us to revenge . . . Contempt revolts us . . .
A poster must be graphically eloquent, even without its slogan . . .
A poster can be attractive through its technique, execution, printing, or presentation; but if it is not moving, it does not meet its aim, and is a bad poster.
Every spectator must feel that the message is directly intimate to him; thus, he will accept its human and vital meaning.
Feeling, emotion, beauty, and severeness all have their negatives, which are: sentimentality, tepidity, and vagueness.
All anti-Nazi propaganda must provoke an energetic impulse.
The challenge is here given in terms of one fairly simple kind of expression. But we cannot forget that it has already been made to us in all the other forms, which reach us daily in the news: the ruin of cities, the death of man, great losses which must be replaced continually with meanings.
As far as posters are concerned, the key word is continually. If we are to provide war posters for America—and the civilian industry which corresponds to this war job, the advertising industry, has already vigorously shown that it realizes the importance of war advertising and war posters—we must look at the images. We must see them not merely image by image and poster by poster. These are images which need to be built up over a period of time, as an image is built up in a poem, as the action is built up in a play, as a product is built up in a year’s campaign. The problem is not the same as it is in advertising, much as the advertising people wish to think so. The problem of war posters is not a selling problem, although selling ideas may be to some people one detail of the war. As a matter of fact, the division between two groups now active at home is the division between people who believe the war is something to be sold and people who believe the war is something to be fought. And a very good emblem of this conflict, and the issues about which it has formed, is to be found in the war posters we now see around us.
With the many ways in which food could be treated—posters about farmers, about inflation, about the relation of city buyers and grocers to farmers—we have, this month, the poster already described in The New Republic, whose caption reads: “We’ll Have Lots to Eat This Winter, Won’t We, Mother?”5 The Southwest has already complained that its needs are not being met; the posters which have reached predominantly Spanish and Indian communities, showing views of Independence Hall and the Minute Man, do not quite make their point, certain sections feel. This month, when discrimination is only one of the enemies we face in the manpower situation, we have a poster whose rather soda-fountain-looking girl proclaims: “I’ve Found the Job Where I Fit Best.”6 We have no posters on the United Nations, except panels of flags. We have had almost no government posters dealing with the enemy.
These lacks must be supplied. They go very deep. They exist because of confusion about the issues of the war, sometimes; but, more often, they exist because those people who have the editorial power of turning down clear and honest posters dealing with the basic issues of the war—our friends, our enemies, and what we fight for—are not willing to make clear statements. Posters have been made on these subjects, and they are the property of the Office of War Information. They are ready to be used. We need posters that will continually set before us the clarity and belief which strengthen us, and the tradition and future we fight for. We need poster people who believe in the issues of the war, and in the American people. We receive only harm (“sentimentality, tepidity, and vagueness”) from people who feel that when they were in business they got “given” space for signs, since they had a good product which they could exchange for advertising space; and that, now they are in the United States Government, they are getting “begging” space.7
These attitudes of fear cripple our images, weaken our handling of ideas, and make us weaker in the war. We have here a very clear form. We can make bold images, forward-looking images. We can build up, over a period of months, campaigns of images that will explain our allies, not only as a set of flags, but in terms of their armies, their leaders, their people, and what they fight for. We can build up an explanation of domestic problems—first, in terms of what America is; then, as with the food problem, for example, by showing the farmers their great constructive power, by showing our consumers where “their” food is. We can tie in the problems of food, of coal, of warm underwear, with the war, every time. If we do that, we shall surpass ordinary advertising, and provide it with a program in which it can take its place as a detail of the war. We shall be relating these war issues to the war itself, and in doing that, we shall be surpassing ourselves. We need to surpass ourselves in order to bring the war through to a sound peace. We can only do this by facing our own time, and by using our weapons.
As urgent as these questions were before the disbanding of the Graphics Division of the OWI, they are more urgent now, when the funds for domestic posters have been cut off. We have stopped necessary machinery before, only to find that we must set it up again. Even the profoundest critics of these posters knew that a government poster program was necessary. The advertising business recognized that need; although its reliance on worn-out technique was making its own kind of Maginot Line—its own reliance on technique instead of imagination.8 Collier’s says, in its July 24 editorial: “The high American standard of living and, in truth, the mighty industrial machine of America, is today the hope of all free people as a direct result of advertising.”9 Which is to say, “In the beginning was the Slogan.” This is the empty-headed expression of what has so far been the leadership of the war-poster program. And now, in spite of what we have been able to do—public statements, letters to Senators, all the things which failed to keep the OWI Graphics Division going—we must have another poster set-up. The issues have been clearly shown, the symbols are simple and usable. And we need these expressions from our government; as a whole country, we need the images and words which will strengthen our lives, for war and for peace.
(New Republic, 1943)
1. In November 1942, Muriel Rukeyser began working at the Office of War Information (OWI)’s Graphics Workshop, a wartime propaganda agency. She designed its posters and the touring library exhibit Words at War, about language’s democratic and anti-fascist power. In May 1943, she resigned, disagreeing with the agency’s consumerist, undemocratic turn under its new director, an advertising executive. Rukeyser also addresses her OWI experience in her poem “Letter to the Front,” in CP, 239–247.
2. In summer 1943, race riots broke out in Detroit, a war production center, following white factory hands’ work stoppages in protest of the hiring and promotion of Black workers. By the same summer, over three million Indians had died and millions more migrated internally, searching for food, work, and health care amid the high inflation and food rationing caused by Great Britain’s wartime economic policies.
3. Francisco de Goya protested Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Spain with The Disasters of War, etchings depicting various wartime atrocities with brief text captions. Rukeyser alludes to Goya’s etching No se puede mirar (1810).
4. El Tiempo, a daily newspaper in Chihuahua, Mexico. This article has not been located.
5. The poster’s subtitle actually reads: “Grow your own, can your own.” It pictures a smiling white, blond mother canning vegetables with her identically dressed daughter.
6. The poster features a smiling, young white woman wearing a headscarf and her hand on a machine. The subcaption reads: “FIND YOUR WAR JOB In Industry—Agriculture—Business.”
7. Source for parenthetical citation unknown.
8. On the Maginot Line, see Muriel Rukeyser, “The Fear of Poetry,” in this volume, note 29.
9. Editorial (“I Will Advertise Thee What This People Shall Do . . .”), Collier’s, July 24, 1943, n.p. Between July and November 1943, local papers nationwide reprinted or excerpted the editorial. Collier’s, a popular weekly, mixed consumer ads with investigative photojournalism.