“Real war ammunition:” Artists for Victory, the National War Poster Competition, and the Hostile Imagination on the United States World War II Home Front

Abstract

Artists for Victory (AFV), the New York City-based, national artists’ organization, was founded in 1942, when the U.S. government was actively seeking to connect with the community of artists in and around the city. Its creation was motivated primarily by patriotism and the conviction that there was an important role for art in the war effort on the home front. This was to be demonstrated through AFV’s National War Poster Competition (NWPC) of 1942, which aimed to address the woeful standard of posters designed to underpin the morale of Americans at home. The posters submitted under the heading “The Nature of the Enemy,” the Competition’s most popular theme, are the principal focus here. It will be argued that they captured the hostile imagination, the specific way of thinking that the state of enmity led to on the home front during World War II. This, in turn, assisted the ongoing process of enmification, or enemy-image creation, and thus might be said to “represent the reactions of the American people, as voiced by their artists” (“War Posters Shown at Legion of Honor” B3). Of particular concern here are the most widely disseminated of the posters which were submitted as entries in “The Nature of the Enemy” category (Theme C); it is these that will be subject to close reading. These include those reproduced and distributed by the government and displayed in public spaces, those that appeared in Life magazine, and those which were used as labels for packaging. This comprises some, but not all, of the posters entered for the AFV’s competition. The entire collection (up to 350 posters) was exhibited across the nation and attracted considerable interest, but the general public was most likely to encounter these images in the forms indicated above as the government and AFV sought to weaponize art by using it to engage with a mass audience of patriotic Americans rather than a more select audience of gallery visitors. This article endeavors to tease out the most likely responses of the public to the posters they would have encountered in this way. It seeks to view the posters from the perspective of Americans engaged on the home front in 1942/3, not looking through their eyes, of course, but over their shoulders, as it were, at one step removed. Though it is impossible to gauge responses with absolute certainty, close study of the particular circumstances in which these images were launched upon the nation seems likely to provide some significant indications. What follows will investigate the NWPC and the initiatives that it generated in some detail, setting it in the broader context of the priorities and preoccupations of those living and working on the home front. Any assessment of the efficacy of the posters as weapons requires an understanding of the tropes and stereotypes that prevailed as the process of shaping public perceptions of America’s World War II enemies ran its course. Significantly, a new archetype of the enemy emerges from the analysis of these images: the enemy as destroyer of motherhood. Previous studies of posters have either traced their history as an art form, located them within the broader context of propaganda, or have supplied wide-ranging surveys of their role in war, revolution, and politics across the twentieth century. There is some work on the contributions of individual artists and occasionally on specific audiences or campaigns. Various scholarly works on the posters of World War II include a segment highlighting portrayals of the enemy, but none of these seriously interrogate the role of AFV or the NWPC, even if they include a poster from Theme C for illustrative purposes. The only existing scholarship on AFV is by art historian, Ellen Landau, and her focus was artists’ motivation and aesthetics in the America in the War exhibition, 1943. Her work did not seek to highlight the relationship between AFV and the development of war posters, nor did it concentrate on the art produced as an expression of community perception of the enemy by those who lived through the war. Focusing on the NWPC, therefore, facilitates the exploration of evidence that has been rather neglected in previous research. This evidence, its provenance clearly traceable, is of particular value in highlighting the overlooked role of AFV in wartime poster production and in enhancing our understanding of the hostile imagination more generally. After American entry into World War II the production of effective war posters was considered a vital contribution to the war effort but within the art community itself there were real concerns about the quality of the initial response. Writing for New Republic in March 1942, the month in which AFV and the NWPC were conceived, critic Manny Farber was scathing in his review of the posters that had been produced since the start of hostilities. While certain himself of art’s, and especially posters’, role in accelerating popular “desire to drive the totalitarians out of this world,” he highlighted a lack of clarity regarding the nature of America’s enemies as a particular problem, as well as confusion regarding the function of art in wartime. At the same time, he identified a refusal “to make use of the enormous psychological and emotional potentialities of pictorial expression as a way of bringing home to the average citizen the purpose and meaning of this war. We are fighting fascism, but you couldn’t tell it from our poster art” (366). This critique was endorsed by Time a few months later, which went even further, arguing that the majority of posters produced in support of the war effort had been “ambiguous, arty, dutiful, frequently not worth the paste that held them up” (“War Posters” 54). In this context, the NWPC represented a significant initiative in terms of addressing the weaknesses identified by these critics, especially in relation to clarifying the image of the enemy for those who remained on the home front. Before the U.S. entered the war a degree of cooperation between the art community and the U.S. government was evident, especially in New York. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) coordinated a National Defense Poster Competition for the U.S. Army Air Corps and the Treasury Department which ran from 29 April-28 June 1941, exhibiting the posters later that year (“Posters for Defense” 2). Museum President John Hay Whitney was to claim that, through participating in the competition “the American artist has brilliantly demonstrated his value as a potential worker in the interest of defense” (Renwick 24). In this way, MoMA was instrumental in making the case for establishing links between artists and the government in a “national emergency” even before the U.S. found itself actually engaged in the global conflict. Indeed, the National Defense Poster Competition of 1941 was an early attempt to showcase artists’ potential as war workers and the role of art in national defense. As Alfred H. Barr, MoMA’s Director, later expressed there was a growing conviction that “Art can help us win the war” (12). And by the end of 1942 the Museum had earned a reputation as “America’s leading institution in the business of forging a weapon out of art.” By then, art was very much on the offensive. Ultimately, an extensive range of posters was printed and disseminated by a wide array of governmental, as well as private, agencies and this led to a greater focus on the poster as a way of communicating messages and much careful consideration of the role that the art community might play in wartime. In May 1942, critic Duncan Phillips expressed a sincere belief that art could “serve the cause of victory” and play “a very considerable part in total mobilization,” while noting at the same time that “Our war pictures should be better than they are” (20). ARTnews’ Alfred Frankfurter, confirmed that visual art had a “vast part” to play in winning the war, and that posters’ capacity for instruction, propaganda and appeal gave them “gigantic breadth and terrific agency.” He concluded: “The poster as a medium must be considered a weapon” (9; 44). This, however, was not necessarily apparent in the early years of the war. Posters and billboards were now not automatically considered to be the most effective means of communicating directly with the public, as they had been during World War I; other media, especially radio and film, were increasingly in the ascendancy. It was of critical importance, therefore, that MoMA had been prepared to make the case for art in 1941 and 1942. It was now also in the interests of artists themselves to restate their claim for the efficacy of art as a weapon of war and posters as “real war ammunition” (Poster Handbook 6). AFV began in response to a government request for an artists’ organization in the New York City region with which it could liaise. Its immediate predecessor, the Artists’ Council for Victory, was formed in January 1942 by the merger of rival organizations, the National Art Council for Defense (“Artists’ War Measure” 33) and the Artists’ Societies for National Defense, which had both launched in late 1941. The Council united the city’s artists in a “central organization” for cooperation with “governmental, industrial and civilian agencies.” Its purpose was to “make fully effective the talents and abilities of the artistic professions in the prosecution of the war and in the protection of the country.” President of the Council (and later AFV), Hobart Nichols, explained: “Now we are merged for patriotic service” (“Artists’ Council for Victory” 33). By early 1942 it had 10,000 members and Art Digest considered it the “definitive organization of artists for war work” (“Ten Thousand” 17; “Artists’ Council for Victory” 32). In March 1942, now called Artists for Victory, Inc., it was a national volunteer organization coordinating artistic war work for federal, state, and local government (“Artists for Victory” 28). Both the Council (“Artists’ Council for Victory” 32) and AFV prioritized artists’ potential for special wartime service resulting from their “qualities of imagination” and it is through that imagination that a key dimension of the American experience of World War II in 1942 is captured. Artistic expression led to pictorial representation documenting important features of the conflict which disclose societal views on those aspects and add to the war’s narrative. We artists, our country at war, our welfare and security threatened, join the struggle of the nation against enemy aggressors. We offer our talents, our all, to help to win the war so that we shall remain a free nation, dedicated to a creative useful life, practicing the arts and sciences of peace. Demonstrating the national reach of the new organization, the Seattle Times’ art reviewer reported, “it represents the first effort to ally America’s artists in one democratic art front working in a unified way to defeat the Axis and establish a free world.” There were no other comparable, multi-discipline, non-partisan, national cultural movements which used visual art to expound war rhetoric in the same fashion as AFV. Initially, there were considerable tensions with the Federal Art Project until its disbandment in June 1943. Undeterred AFV pledged a minimum of five million hours to the war effort (“Hours Pledged” 27). AFV was formed by artists who desired to assist the war effort by using their artistic abilities, especially in graphic arts, to make “the citizens of this United States conscious of the gravity of the present War and of the necessity of buying War bonds and stamps.” It is perhaps not surprising that AFV was created in New York City. The tensions of the pro-/anti-intervention debate, which raged in the U.S. from the war’s outbreak in Europe in 1939 until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, was especially heightened by the city’s proximity to the Battle of the Atlantic. N.Y.C.’s large immigrant population pulled New Yorkers in different, and often opposing, directions. After U.S. entry into the conflict in December 1941, New York Harbor became the principal port of embarkation for the European Theater, and the city itself became increasingly martial because of fortification, training camps and the influx of military personnel and defense workers. The war seemed much more remote in other parts of the country, except the West Coast, where the threat of invasion after the attack on Pearl Harbor felt very real, certainly initially. MoMA contacted AFV to express interest in their work and a desire for collaboration in April 1942. In the same month MoMA was approached about a poster competition by the Council for Democracy (CFD) and in early May 1942 by John Taylor Arms and Irwin D. Hoffman of AFV. The three bodies were collaborating by mid-May. The CFD was an interventionist organization set up in August 1940, over a year prior to American entry into the war. It hoped to counteract the isolationist and non-/anti-interventionist rhetoric of organizations such as the America First Committee and included some of the most notable and influential liberal personalities of the 1940s: for example, C. D. Jackson, Raymond Gram Swing, Dorothy Thompson, and Ernest Angell. The CFD believed that “the preservation of democracy in the United States require[d] the defeat of totalitarianism abroad.” Through its pro-democracy morale program, it placed anti-Hitler commentaries in eleven hundred national newspapers each week (Bird 109). The CFD had first envisioned a poster project in March 1942 which would “visualize our war aims, dramatize the issues at stake, and vitalize our thinking about democracy and freedom.” Upon realizing that AFV had independently approached MoMA “with the same basic idea,” they decided to “join forces in a cooperative project.” Angell considered the NWPC to be a “patriotic undertaking” which would “serve to increase the participation of American artists in the war effort, thereby strengthening the American people with a new understanding and a renewed spirit for carrying forward this mighty conflict to victory.” Ultimately the Council offered four prizes for the Competition. the first and the most important being to assist our country in its war effort by making available to the Government visual information material that will express the principles for which the United States is fighting and the results it hopes to achieve by that fight. … Secondly, it is our hope to raise the standard and effectiveness of poster design. Thus, the NWPC had both pragmatic and aesthetic aspirations. In a letter to FDR, Nichols explained that the competition’s “inspiration” was his recent State of the Union Address. Roosevelt’s speech had emphasized that the U.S. must not be fooled into following a “Pacific-first” strategy, despite the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. It stressed the importance of the United Nations (alliance), the “Union” and the American people, providing a united effort against “common enemies.” A major objective was the liberation of nations subjugated by the Axis, and priorities included work, production and financing the war, as FDR made it clear that the war would be “hard,” “long” and require sacrifice. He emphasized that enemies must not be underestimated as they are “powerful and cunning - and cruel and ruthless” and they revel in killing and destruction. He identified these enemies with “evil,” conquest, and the destruction of Christianity, but assured his home audience that victory and peace would be secured as Americans would pay the price of freedom (Public Papers and Addresses 32–42). The only Competition theme not explicitly raised in the address is “loose talk,” a warning about the dire consequences of revealing secrets to the enemy; but this was implied by Roosevelt’s emphasis on the domestic threat of the Axis. The resultant designs, Nichols wrote, express “in a visual manner the national state of mind on the State of the Union … [and are] evidence that [artists] are with you fighting with what weapons they hold in their professional hands.” The idea of a war poster exhibition based on a competition was considered important by AFV, as “without the opportunity offered by open competition, many a good talent might never be discovered or recognized.” The emergency of war necessitated that all American ability, wherever it may be found, must be exploited for ultimate victory. The “long negotiations” over the Competition were concluded by the end of July 1942. The themes for poster production were approved by the Office of War Information (OWI) and Treasury Department in August. MoMA’s Monroe Wheeler remarked, “I do not know of any competition which has ever been launched with such enthusiastic Government support.” Also that month, full color reproductions of the prizewinners was promised. Ultimately, the Competition was organized by eight themes and twenty slogans. These were: Theme A: Production; B: War Bonds; C: The Nature of the Enemy; D: Loose Talk; E: Slave World – Or Free World?; F: The People Are on the March; G: “Deliver us from Evil” and H: Sacrifice. Think in these terms: The horrors inflicted on the conquered peoples of Europe and Asia – the Crime of Lidice; the violation of the churches and the persecution of their followers; the beating to death and the cold slaughter of women and children …; mass executions of civilians; shooting of hostages; deliberate starving of conquered peoples; Jap atrocities on women; … on prisoners of war, using them for bayonet practice. The enemy can be shown symbolically as the Beast-At-Large, destroying, pillaging etc. The emphasis on atrocity is significant, despite the legacy of World War I propaganda which generated skepticism about the use of such images. In the interwar period a propaganda analysis movement developed and its simplified emphasis, that had entered public consciousness, held that atrocity propaganda was a catalog of misrepresentation and fabrications. Nicoletta Gullace highlights Robert Graves’ autobiography, Goodbye to All That (1929), which questioned the veracity of the atrocity stories of World War I, as working particularly powerfully on the popular imagination. As well as Arthur Ponsonby’s Falsehood in Wartime (1928), which similarly claimed to expose “falsehoods” and “lies” (690). As a result, in 1942 official agencies were wary of rousing this atrocity skepticism. Thomas D. Mabry, Graphics Division, OWI, for example, wrote that many “are dead against anything of the sort.” However, AFV understood, “We need to get a clear picture in our minds of this menace to our lives and our liberty,” and the NWPC volunteer artists were not constrained by having to negotiate with the strictures of working directly for a government agency. The popular hostile imagination seemed entirely unhampered by caution regarding atrocity and with the further impetus of the circular’s advice it is not surprising that it produced emotive images that prioritized the enemies’ atrocious nature. “Horror” posters were predominant. The Competition circular was sent to 28,000 artists (“Editor’s Letters” 4), opening on 15 August, and closing on 22 October 1942, receiving 2224 entries from both professionals and amateurs. The New York Times reported: “Using paint brushes as weapons, 2,000 American artists have attacked the enemy in one of the country’s largest war poster competitions” (“200 War Posters” 25). According to MoMA’s Wheeler this made it “by far the most important poster competition ever held in this country!” Entrants “represent[ed] a cross section of the country” (“More about” 40) from forty-three of the then forty-eight States, plus Honolulu, Hawaii and Washington, D.C. No entries were received from Arkansas, Idaho, Nevada, South Carolina, and Utah, although seventeen were submitted without addresses. Most posters came from N.Y.C. (667) and New York State (218). 63 percent of entrants were male and 37 percent female. Submissions came from the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and Coast Guard, as well as civilians, including “Indians,” nuns, “negroes,” high school children and schoolteachers. The results represented “easel artists, commercial artists and citizens in many walks of life who wanted to pound the Axis with a poster.” Most entries came from commercial artists, however. Though, as hoped, the Competition discovered additional artistic talent, and AFV’s Hoffman proudly reported: “‘We uncovered about 200 persons utterly unknown who turned in work of really great merit.’” The Nature of the Enemy was the predominant theme with 415 entries, over a fifth of the total submissions. According to MoMA’s Publicity Director, Sarah Newmeyer, this popularity “indicate[d] that people are more interested in the nature of the enemy than in any other thing about the war.” The posters were “starkly realistic and documentary testimonials of the cruelty of the Axis” which reflected a desire by Americans on the home front, insulated from battlefields and enemy occupation, to understand the enemy’s nature. In particular, they helped explain enemy actions and behavior in opposition to accepted moral positions, especially about the treatment of civilians. The emphasis on rape and violence in the images is significant, as James Aulich has shown that depictions of “graphic violence” are “scarce” in official anti-enemy posters (18). This is perhaps a reflection of the war’s remoteness in 1942: its brutality was imagined based on increasingly alarming press reports of the Nazi and Japanese occupations. Such prominence is simultaneously revealing of genuine concerns about the threat of invasion, freedom’s destruction, and the suffering this would mean for the American people. Interestingly in terms of who the enemy was, most dealt with the Nazis, despite the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor being the catalyst for U.S. entry into the conflict. That this revealed Nazi Germany as the U.S.’ primary enemy was noted in a contemporaneous art critic’s review (Price “Camera” 26). FDR’s plea for a “Germany-first” strategy had been heard, but it was also perhaps an acknowledgment that this was Germany’s second reversion to barbarism. None of the exhibited or reproduced posters addressed the Italian enemy, despite Italy still fighting as part of the Axis until September 1943. This is perhaps explained by the significant Italian American population in N.Y.C., as well as the ancestry of the city’s popular Mayor, Fiorello La Guardia. The final meeting of the jury to decide on prizes took place between 24–26 October, and winners and those with honorable mention were announced in late November (“Poster Winners” 27). Theme C’s winners Karl Koehler, “native American of German descent,” and Victor Ancona, “naturalized American of Italian parentage,” were themselves reminders of American racial diversity which complicated enmification. Both were of enemy descent when framed through the wartime filter. This potentially meant that they could comment on the enemy’s nature with more accuracy and confidence, whilst through their voluntary effort to expose that nature, simultaneously prove their patriotic attachment to the American cause. If we look over the viewer in 1942’s shoulder (as in all subsequent analyses), their winning design portrays a brutish, Nazi officer with stereotypical monocle, downturned mouth and terrifying stare which betrays what he sees in reflection: a man hanged on gallows. He may wear a uniform purporting to be a worthy opponent but instead he is barbarous and represents what would become a typical Nazi type. Contemporary reviewers associated the “needle-like nose” to Reinhard Heydrich, “the infamous ‘Hangman.’” The facial resemblance is striking and probably not coincidental: the “Crime of Lidice” had occurred in the wake of Heydrich’s attempted assassination and consequent death in June 1942, so he had been evoked in the Competition’s recommendations. For British art critic, Eric Newton, this “‘hate’ poster” was “very powerful” because of the “concentrated venom of the terrifying close-up” (102). The Treasury Department, invoking FDR’s wartime emphasis on justice through punishment of war criminals, added to the subsequent label: “An Eye for An Eye – The Swine Will Swing!” This certainly advocated hatred (Figure 1). Despite winning the Competition, the poster would not be used officially for its intended domestic audience. With an altered title, Ecco Il Nemico (Here is the enemy) (Aulich 37), and style it was used after “Operation Husky,” July-August 1943, in Sicily by the Army’s Psychological Warfare Branch. The poster was intended to motivate the Italians to see their former allies as their new enemy. The Army therefore approved of this vision of the nature of the enemy and believed that the poster was “ammunition” to elicit the correct response. Honorable mentions were given to Adolph E. Brotman and Ben Nason. Brotman’s poster depicts a menacing, strangely gray, head and hands emerging from the darkness, identifiable as German because of his distinctive stahlhelm (steel helmet) (“Nazi Rips” 55). His humanity is removed as his eyes are eliminated by the helmet’s shadow. The square but bumpy jawline and puffy cheeks are reminiscent of Hermann Goering. As the clasped dagger slightly pierces the Stars and Stripes (representing the nation) this Nazi soldier is clearly the aggressor; his muscular, veined, tensed hands are belligerent. Nason’s enormous grinning Nazi (swastika emblazoned stahlhelm) skull betrays the reality of what the enemy is: death. Through the eye cavities and presumably resulting from an air raid (eight airplanes leave to the right) a scene of fire, death and destruction ensues. Accordingly, “Only A Numbskull Would Slacken!” (Figure 2) Of note, but not highlighted in the Competition statistics, were designs by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, an Issei designated as an “enemy alien” during the war. Although initially told he was ineligible to enter because of this, the jury's ruling was altered and he submitted under both Theme C and “Deliver us from Evil,” an overlapping theme similarly revealing of the enemy’s nature. He was working as an OWI poster artist and Assistant Director Archibald MacLeish had specifically suggested that his work address the Japanese, implying his inherent knowledge of the enemy. Whilst this is problematic as Kuniyoshi was accepted as an American artist within the art community, he was a longstanding supporter of the Chinese as Japan’s first victims and had fundraised for United China Relief since the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, so this is a probable explanation for his choice of subject in the NWPC. Exceptionally he depicts the suffering of Chinese civilians; corpses lying in their own blood. The central figure, and therefore primary victim, is a supine, writhing, bleeding, and bayoneted woman. The faceless Japanese enemy (Japanese flag on bayonet rifle) is a destroyer of motherhood (drawing on an essentially Victorian stereotype of women’s role). In a rendering of every mother’s nightmare, her baby is abandoned (likely dead, also supine), arms behind its head, denoting helplessness. In the background another civilian (sex unclear, probably female), a child perhaps (as the mother looks back at the body over her shoulder), lies prone with hands bound behind their back, blood seeping from their head. The Japanese are merciless, they kill and destroy indiscriminately. If this is how they behave now, imagine what will happen if they are not stopped (Figure 3). Through its exposure of brutality, this new archetype is a call for manly action in defense of maternity and for sympathy for the enemies’ victims. Utilizing a device already established in World War I propaganda, whilst explicitly depicting an enemy overseas, by implicit extension the enemy represents a menace to American women at home. Worse than this, the enemy is a threat not only to women now, but to the American future as they are the child-bearers, the mothers in prospect. This discovery is a significant addition to considerations of enemy image. In 1927 political scientist Harold Lasswell had argued: “Stress can always be laid upon the wounding of women, … and upon sexual enormities … These stories … satisfy certain powerful, hidden impulses. A young woman, ravished by the enemy, yields secret satisfaction to a host of vicarious ravishers on the other side of the border” (82). This titillating potential is crucially removed in the destroyer of motherhood. Women in this archetype are desexualized and rather than helpless, in need of rescue or desirous of retribution for their defilement, they are dead, irretrievably lost. Their children deprived of their only protector and nurturer (men are away at war). It is not only their loss that should be lamented, but the fate of children left behind, and those now never to be conceived. In addition to the emotions aroused by mothers’ deaths, fears are raised about the treatment of their orphans. The hope of this enemy image is that their sacrifice will somehow be made purposeful through ultimate victory over the forces that wrought their demise, the evils of the Axis enemy. It is significant that images in this archetype foreground explicit depictions of death. It is unusual for the wartime audience to be confronted with this reality of the primary effect of war. The norm was for death to be symbolically represented and initially official policy deliberately shielded the home front audience from such visual images. However, again, the popular hostile imagination appeared willing to face this directly. The enemy as destroyer of motherhood is further evidenced in Mary Stewart’s rendering of a spectral Nazi skeleton (again wearing a swastika adorned stahlhelm). Dressed in a black cape and with a posture of waiting to pounce, its bony claw-like hands silently creep up on a mother and child from behind. The enemy (in red letters) is dang