World War I

The United States was in World War I for only about 19 months, from April 1917 to the armistice on November 11, 1918. In that short time it produced one of the largest outpourings of printed images in the country's history.

Much of it was organized. A week after war was declared, President Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information, run by the journalist George Creel. One of its branches, the Division of Pictorial Publicity, recruited the best-known illustrators of the day, Charles Dana Gibson among them, to design posters for free. The government needed men, money and food, and posters were how it asked for all 3.

The most famous result is James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam pointing straight at the viewer with the words I Want You for U.S. Army. Flagg used his own face as the model. Around it were thousands of others, asking people to buy Liberty Bonds, plant gardens, save wheat, knit socks, join the Navy or keep quiet about troop movements.

The photographs tell a different story from the posters. The Army Signal Corps had photographers in France, and newspapers and the Red Cross sent their own. Their pictures show training camps, trenches, field hospitals, wrecked French villages, horses and mules hauling guns through mud, and early tanks and aircraft. Back home there are parades, rallies, women working in munitions plants and at jobs men had left.

Worth noticing is the way the posters changed women's roles on paper before the war changed them in fact. Early posters show women as figures to be protected. Later ones show them in uniform, at factory benches and behind the wheel. And look at the faces in the troop photographs. Most of the soldiers are very young, and many of the pictures were taken in the last weeks before they shipped out.