Government & Politics

The Great Seal of the United States took Congress 6 years and 3 committees to settle. The first committee, appointed on July 4, 1776, included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Their ideas were set aside, and the design with the eagle, the shield and the arrows and olive branch was not adopted until 1782.

That slow start is a fair picture of how American government gets its symbols. A collection on government and politics tends to hold 2 kinds of material. The first is the founding documents and emblems, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the seal and the flag, reproduced over and over in engravings and prints. Facsimiles of the Declaration made from an engraving in the 1820s are the source of most later copies, because the original faded badly.

The second kind is politics in action. Election campaigns produced a flood of printed material in the 19th century, from campaign portraits and banners to cartoons and prints showing the candidates as heroes or fools. Currier & Ives sold campaign portraits of both sides in the same election. Torchlight parades, rallies and stump speeches were the entertainment of their day, and turnout in the late 1800s was higher than it has been since.

World War I brought government into ordinary life in new ways, and this collection reflects it. The U.S. Food Administration, run by Herbert Hoover, asked Americans to observe wheatless and meatless days and to plant gardens, mostly through voluntary appeals and posters rather than rationing. The Treasury paid for the war partly through 4 Liberty Loan drives and a Victory Loan, selling bonds directly to the public with posters, parades and movie stars.

Worth noticing in the Liberty Bond posters is how hard they push. Some appeal to pride, some to guilt and some to fear, with images of enemy soldiers threatening American homes. They are some of the most direct pieces of persuasion the government has ever printed, and they show how much the war depended on ordinary people's savings.