Poster, 'Must children die and mothers plead in vain?'

Loans and motherhood

This famous First World War loan poster was created by the United States Treasury Department to urge the American public to buy war bonds. War bonds were debt securities issued by various governments to finance their military operations and other expenses during the First and Second World Wars. The wider campaign for American Liberty bonds combined exhortations for purchase with appeals to patriotism and conscience, especially in those retail bonds specifically marketed to the public.

Pervasive accounts of (largely unfounded) atrocities, such as rape, child murder and mutilation and abuse of soldiers' bodies, lay behind many of the images for these propaganda posters. This particular poster refers to the murder of children by the enemy and depicts a mother shielding her infant children with her own body.

'Pictorial publicity'

The poster was designed by Henry Patrick Raleigh, a significant American illustrator. As a teenager Raleigh worked as a shipping clerk for a San Francisco coffee-importing firm in order to help support his family. His drawing talents were discovered by his boss Colonel Clarence Bickford, who sent Raleigh to the Hopkins Academy art school. At 17, he was hired by the San Francisco Chronicle as an on-the-scene newspaper artist and from there, built his career to become one of the most famous and prolific American illustrator artists of his time.

Raleigh was already well-known when in 1917 his 'Hunger Poster' was selected for a distribution of 5 million copies by the US government Food Administration. He illustrated four more abstract and emotional war posters under his service to the Division of Pictorial Publicity of the Committee on Public Information. This division mobilised America's greatest artistic talents to win over American public opinion on an unpopular war, and to create pictorial publicity' for the war effort.

British and American Posters in New Zealand

This item is part of a collection of First World War posters sent to New Zealand as examples of British and American wartime propaganda. From 1917-1919, the Dominion Museum (now Te Papa) collected such war material with the help of the New Zealand High Commissioner in London and the Department of Defence. This particular poster arrived with the second batch of posters of over one hundred British and American war posters, sent by the High Commissioner in London via the Department of Internal Affairs in June 1919 and New Zealand War Records Section in London (Department of Defence).

The museum intended to collect and display such objects in a planned national war museum in Wellington which never eventuated. Instead, the museum toured over 100 war posters around New Zealand in the early 1920s in the context of increasing commemoration of the war during peacetime. For many, the posters illustrated important aspects of the war and the history of New Zealand's part in the war. This commemorative function was far removed from their original function to encourage wartime contribution.