Mine More Coal!

From the 2015 UMMA Exhibition Mine More Coal! War Effort and Americanism in World War I Posters curated by Antje K. Gamble.

Propaganda, commodity, and art came together in posters promoting the war effort during World War I (1914-1919). Just a week after the United States entered the Great War on April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Less than ten days later, the CPI launched the Division for Pictorial Publicity (DPP). Posters were already common in consumer advertising, so it was easy to harness their democratic appeal to successfully market the war. With help from the who’s who of American Art, the DPP would produce designs for over 700 posters, as well as advertising illustrations and political cartoons all urging the support for the war.

Propaganda directed at the coal industry highlights two of the major themes in WWI posters: voluntary participation in the war effort and patriotic Americanism. Coal mining communities were microcosms of the social and economic pressures in the United States at the start of the war. With some 14.5 foreign-born men in the United States in 1917, 10% of the whole U.S. population, the immigrant-majority workforce was considered unreliable. Exacerbated by escalating labor union strikes, many in Washington were nervous about keeping labor producing in crucial industries like coal. In response, posters addressed unease about America’s ability to wage war by encouraging laborers to think of themselves as equivalent to soldiers at the front.

In addition, posters directed civilian labor, both at home and in the factory, championed volunteerism. Citizens were portrayed at homeland soldiers, planting war gardens and building ships. This U.S. volunteerism staved off the widespread rationing seen in Europe during WWI.

The works on display here include some of the most compelling images to be found in WWI posters, from Lady Liberty sowing the fields, in the opening poster, to the fruits and vegetables of the garden charging over the trenches in Maginel Enright’s design. Featured here are works by famed poster designers Howard Christy and James Montgomery Flagg, the designer of the Uncle Sam “I Want You” poster, illustrators like J.C. Leyendecker and even the acclaimed painter and printmaker Henry Reuterdahl.