In my American History class, we have reached the Great Depression. During my research for the lesson, I found a fantastic collection of 1930’s posters made by the WPA. The archive is maintained by the Library of Congress, and can be accessed here. Enjoy some of my favorites below:
This reminds me a lot of the Soviet Textiles exhibit at the MFA right now. It was amazing to see how people were trying to represent different values in the designs.
The “Work promotes Confidence” poster seems like the antithesis of the current administration. They don’t want us to be confident (because they want us to depend solely on them) so they keep the economy down so we don’t have enough work. They’re exporting confidence to India.
I love old posters like this. I just ran across a page of old Soviet posters the other day, actually. The style’s very propagandistic, and a lot more detailed – more political cartoons than posters.
It’s all in Cyrillic, of course, but the messages are still pretty clear.