American Legion WWII posters

Avi sez, "The American Legion website has a bunch of cool WWII posters in high resolution scans. These posters are eerily relevant to a peak oil, global heating world and virtually demand being reissued for our times." American Legion Posters (Thanks, Avi!)

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Neener

#21, my father is freaking 85 here and my mother is 79. I’ve seen themm in photos from the 1940s and grew up with him railing against people who don’t wear hats, suits, etc. Not vests or spats, that was HIS father’s generation. I am not lecturing anyone and that person’s comment was ignorant, not wry, get your definitions straight.

You want to see how people dress, go to shorpy. Here’s an average inner-city school in Washington, DC in 1941:
http://www.shorpy.com/node/4478?size=_original
Baldhead

this one begs for a remix: http://www.legion.org/documents/legion/posters/716.jpg
Jason McIntosh

Neener, you are obscure Marvel Comics supervillain Turner D. Century and I claim my five pounds.
Marble River

Wow, what great scans! I have a bunch of these originals that I got from an old factory in New Haven years ago, but there’s a lot here that I’ve never seen before. The Legion did a nice job on these.
MarlboroTestMonkey7

Why do every man, be it photos or illustrations of those days, look as if they were sixty?
spazzm

What I want to know is how a guy looking like that scored a chick looking like her.

Alcohol obviously played a role, but geez – beer goggles only go so far.
Neener

#3, why does every thirty year old man today prance around in dungarees and a t-shirt as if they’re 14?
slywy

Did affluent Manhattanites sucking down cocktails ’til all hours really do “workmanship”? That doesn’t look like Rosie the Riveter!
shahryarrakeen

It would be nice to retool the posters that encouraged conservation and sustainable production (ie victory gardens) as long as we do away with those that have racist caricatures.
kip w

Careless workmanship like, oh, crappy poster art and boring dialogue balloons with no real punctuation? That sort of thing?

Hm.

“You can’t fight the Axis if you have V.D.” In fact, we encourage anybody with VD to go fuck the Axis, as often as possible.
MarlboroTestMonkey7

Well, Neener, that’s because we are “metro” ;)
What i’m referring to is the physical apperance…
Jonathan Badger

Did affluent Manhattanites sucking down cocktails ’til all hours really do “workmanship”? That doesn’t look like Rosie the Riveter!

Ah, but you don’t understand — shoddy investment banking kills troops too!
Fooksie

Wow. I guess that was back in the day when Americans wanted to win a war.
Progress…go figure.
Muscato

Yeah, I have a feeling that Claude and Nina there weren’t exactly essential to the war effort. The next morning he had to be at the Century Club by lunchtime and she had to meet Mary Haines over at Sydney’s…
drtwist

#4: because collared shirts suck.
Scuba SM

MarlboroTestMonkey7:

Think for a moment…. they were created during war time…. What age groups were at the front? Which age groups were back home?
semiotix

@5: Actually, I can see a basic resemblance to Rosie the Riveter, now that you mention it.

And it works, too. I start out almost every day saying to myself, “We Can Do It!” And by cocktail hour, I’m all, screw it, just like this Eveningwear Rosie is.

Meanwhile my Japanese housemate chuckles evilly and plots to seize my outlying territories (the shady part of the garage).
Jason McIntosh

#3, as far as these particular posters go, I’d reckon it’s because most of the younger men were away fighting.

I once saw a Batman serial from the WWII years, and they had to give a justification at the top of the reel as to why Bruce Wayne wasn’t overseas with a rifle like all his peers. (He managed to get classified as a 4-F drunken lout, of course…)
DaveX

I can’t believe nobody has pointed out the proto-lolspeak in:

http://www.legion.org/documents/legion/posters/2765.jpg
Neener

#5, what you don’t get is that in the 1940s and 50s people who worked in factories were still brought up with manners and acted like they had manners. The people in that photo are by no mans affluent Manhattanites, they’re your average Joe and Jane Sixpack from an era where people didn’t wear baseball caps sideways on their heads.
Neener

#13, what about the Green Hornet whose Japanese sidekick Kato immediately became his Filipino sidekick Kato in January 1942?
TharkLord

God bless you Verna B. Grimm.

I heartily propose her canonization as Saint Verna, Patron Saint of Compulsive Collectors.

I lift a glass in her honor. (well, not right now, but as soon as I am off work…)
Hmpf

@#14: Finally, the link between LOLcats and Cats That Look Like Hitler revealed!
eccentriffic

The best war poster I ever saw was in a library book (yes, I was a librarian…). It said something along the lines of:

“You can’t fight the Axis if you have VD!”

DaveX: So true, haha!
DWittSF

I’m sure if the American Legion came out with these posters today, they’d tell teh People to shut up about the War and the Economy, put their heads down, and go to work.
DaveX

I ended up doing a “remix” of #1046:

http://startlingmoniker.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/a-lil-update/
slywy

#15, these people were brought up in the 10s and 20s if they were partying during WWII. My parents (born 1913 and 1919, dad a WWII veteran serving in England) didn’t dress anything like the people in the cartoon and didn’t party all night with cocktails in hand. John Cheever people did. Working people — the ones the poster seems to be aimed at — didn’t. (And my dad did wear an odd assortment of amusing hats, none of them baseball caps or fedoras.)

Please don’t lecture people you don’t know. Especially when they’re making wry observations.