Enlist
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Library of Congress · LC-DIG-ppmsca-50552 (digital file from original print) · Public domain · Catalog record
The pins
Context
For discussion
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Appeal to pity The mother and infant A mother holds her baby as they sink; both look asleep. Pity is the whole argument, and the image was taken from a newspaper report of a body found on the Irish shore.
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Appeal to outrage The green water No ship, no submarine, no German anywhere on the sheet. Everyone in June 1915 knew which ship this was; naming it would have let the viewer argue about the facts of the sinking.
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Slogan The word The grief in the picture is turned into one instruction. Nothing connects the two except the viewer's anger, which is the point.
Fred Spear's poster appeared in June 1915, a month after a German submarine sank the liner Lusitania off Ireland with 128 Americans among the 1,198 dead. A mother and her infant sink through green water, drawn from a newspaper account of a body washed ashore at Queenstown. The single word "Enlist" was issued by the Boston Committee of Public Safety two years before the United States declared war, when enlisting meant pressing the country to join.
- The poster shows no ship, no submarine, and no Germans. What does leaving out the enemy do?
- Why one word rather than a sentence?
- This was printed in 1915, when the United States was neutral. Who was it really addressed to?
See also
Same era, or the same techniques.
