Dispatches from Home: WWII Posters

About a month ago, I was on a video call with  members of the Humboldt Bay CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) and one of the members was talking about the necessity of planting a garden in case grocery supply chains were heavily impacted by the current COVID crisis. He mentioned that they worked similar to Victory Gardens in WWII. A few days later, I saw an advertisement somewhere by some garden supply company encouraging people to plant their Victory Gardens, no doubt as some kind of relief from Shelter in Place boredom for customers and slowing sales for the company. I remembered seeing some kind of Victory Garden posters that were produced in WWII, and I was pretty sure were in the Clarke collections. It’s interesting to see when little snippets of history, often disguised as nostalgia pop up here and there, especially in advertising. It’s a powerful tool. Thanks to Mad Men for helping me become more cognizant of that.

​Last week, I went by the Humboldt County Historical Society with a stack of 57 posters, mostly from WWII. I had been talking the Archivist Jim about doing some kind of joint online exhibit on the posters, including posters from WWI that the Historical Society has in its collections. The main barrier for the Museum was that we didn’t have a way to digitize the posters. I tried a tripod and a camera, but the quality was subpar at best. Thanks to a grant they received a few years ago, the Historical Society has a large format scanner that we could borrow to scan the posters. I had seem them at Humboldt State, but had never used one, so it was a good opportunity to learn something new. It was a good opportunity to test out the equipment, and understand how to work with large files.

​The posters are pretty large, some of them are almost 40 inches wide and are twice as long, while others are smaller. With the exception of about two of them, they are in stellar condition with minimal tape marks or pinholes. I’m not entirely sure that they were ever used.  Most are from Cecile’s original collection, some were donated by individual donors over the years. 

​These posters are really interesting to spend time looking at, and get more interesting as you learn more about them. They were produced by the Office of War Information to promote full engagement of the civilian population in supporting the war effort however possible. Some were positive, like the “Plant a Victory Garden” or “Buy War Bonds”, asking people to take action with attractive images and artwork. The ones I was most surprised to see were the ones that used fear as a motivating feature to get people to not do something- like talking about anything related to the war effort when outside of work (if you were in a war industry). The phrase “loose lips sink ships” came into being thanks to one of these posters. The idea was that spies for enemy countries could be anywhere, and information on the war effort could lead to incredible losses for the Allies. 

When Jim and I were going through the posters, I told him that I was pretty sure most were from WWII, but a few WWI posters could be peppered in. I recognized the helmets shown in the pictures below as indicative of WWI era uniforms, but the inclusion of the Jeep and WWII era firearms said otherwise. These details, along with other details we noticed from processing the posters and discussions we had made the 3 hours of scanning feel like they went by very quickly. Some of the thoughts that came up appear in the Clarke's webpage about WWII posters here. 

​It took some figuring out on how to get the files from the Historical Society to the Clarke, as the files were almost 50 gigabytes of data. I had to get a thumb drive large enough to transfer them over, then convert the files to be small enough they could be shared online. It’s a process I’m still working with, but it’s giving me a chance to learn how to manage collections as they go digital, which will be really important as we continue digitizing.

​I’ve been seeing many people writing about the explosion of digitization that is taking place now that museums and archives are closed to the public. Digitization has been an important and often sidelined part of being in a museum, not so we can get rid of the originals and free up space, but to make materials more accessible to the public. When everything is digitized, if a researcher contacts us for pictures of say, Ferndale, we can do a search on our database, compile the photos, and send them their way. It saves them a trip here, and it saves the photos from being looked through and potentially damaged (minute damage happens even when the most careful people handle items!). it also allows us to reprint images for exhibits, postcards, and other uses without needing to rescan images.

​Since we’re closed to the public and not running events, we have some breathing room to take on these long range, necessary projects that are all the more important now that people are staying home and looking for things to do, like maybe research for a historical article they’ve always wanted to write. It’s a way for us to continue engaging the public even though they can’t physically be here.

So, without further ado, I’ve included a few of the posters we’ve scanned in this article and below. My plan is to get all of them up on our WWII memorial webpage, which can be seen here, but it may take some time. So here’s a teaser! Click on any of the photos below for a larger image.