Georgetown Books propaganda posters

After seeing these images, I think readers will appreciate why I've always loved the medium of propaganda posters. I've been having a lot of fun at the Georgetown Books web site, where posters, book covers, and advertising prints are for sale.

The almightier



The shadow in our schools



Club the democratic press


Was that intended as small or large "D" democratic? This certainly demonstrates how much the Republican party changed from the principles it forwarded at the beginning of the 20th century.

Yellow Press



Looney liberals



Bolsheviks?


That's right! As soon as your employees can wipe their...er, hands...with cushiony tissue, you're Bolshevik problems will melt away.

Virgin in khaki


Just performing a patriotic duty?

Above the law

A 1907 Puck cartoon by the great Art Young, the foremost radical cartoonist of his time. The details are gemlike: For the nobodies, it's Get off the Grass, mass arrests, beatings, and jail; for the Rockefellers in their pious posturing in the clouds above (the law), it's immunity. Any resemblance to today is purely coincidental.

Looking Backward

“Looking Backward” A Puck cartoon from 1893 with sentiments 180 degrees opposite from “The Unrestricted Dumping Ground” Judge cartoon from ten years later. This one shows an immigrant stepping off the ship, only to be greeted by the forbidding figures, in their bourgeois splendor, telling him to go back where he came from. The kicker, though, is in the shadows lurking behind those forbidding figures: It’s the representation of their own ragged selves, and their ancestors, at the time of their own arrival! The caption nicely summarizes the point: “They would close to the new-comer the bridge that carried them and their fathers over.” Sound familiar?