Sheldon’s World War II Posters

Although most of the posters in the collection are from series distributed nationally, this hand-painted poster is specific to Lincoln and its home front war efforts. Posters were an inexpensive and accessible way to promote rationing, patriotism and solidarity, sacrifice, and the protection of sensitive information. 

Many of the earlier war posters were text heavy. The government eventually turned away from such posters because they took too much effort to read and did not clearly communicate their messages.

​This poster’s blatant racism illustrates a deliberate design based on a survey of viewer reactions to similar posters in Canada. The survey indicated that posters were most effective when they were designed to the lowest level of the viewing population’s comprehension, a demographic identified as the “lower third.” Resulting guidelines stated that pictures were more effective than words, and the pictures had to relate to people and objects as the average American saw them. These guidelines all but eliminated the use of fine art imagery in wartime posters. 

Unions and labor groups also produced their own posters crediting wartime production success to the workers and not necessarily to the industry that employed them. These posters reflected tension between labor and management common during peacetime, which was lessened but not ended by the demands of wartime production.