I was really drawn to the World War I posters that focus on hunger. The US Food Administration produced a lot of them to encourage people to save as much food as they could during wartime—not just for their own soldiers (and soldiers’ families), but for the “starving [multitudes] of Europe.” Throughout many of these posters runs the slogan, “Waste nothing.”

This campaign simultaneously draws in Americans across the economic/racial spectrum and emphasizes the abundance of a country distant enough from the war to have the privilege of surplus. One poster in particular stresses this reality with lots of Thanksgiving imagery. A great deal of healthy food surrounds a card that reads,

“This is what God gives us[.]
What are you giving so that others may live?
Eat less
Wheat
Meat
Fats
Sugar”

And then the kicker:

“Send more to Europe or they will starve.”

Posters like this manage to put Americans in perspective about how much less affected they are by the intense suffering taking place overseas and reinforce their sense of saving the masses from evil—not just from political destruction but from the ravages that total war wreaks. It promotes the “commonly held vision…in an idealized form” (James 19) that Pearl James talks about in her introduction to the book, Picture This. Others remind Americans of the Belgian refugees (“For three years America has fought starvation in Belgium”); another makes the religious dimension even more explicit with Cardinal Mercier’s plea. One quotes General Pershing, reminding us to ‘waste nothing’: “We must not only feed our soldiers at the front but the millions of women and children behind our lines.” All this active language evokes the sense that the home front is actually placing food in the hands of the hungry, saving lives from their safe towns across the ocean. I’d like to know more about the logistics of how this “Waste nothing” campaign played out during the War and who actually delivered food to starving people—or how much of it actually went to those it was intended to save, or how much it actually helped them.

Clearly, this altruistic campaign was not without its political ambitions. I found an interesting page from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History that describes the “Food Will Win the War” program initiated by Herbert Hoover when he was appointed head of the Food Administration (in 1917, according to this site—it also includes a poster specifically about saving France and includes the line, “Denying ourselves only a little means Life to them.”). On the Lehrman site, Sandra Trenholm discusses how Hoover’s poster campaign also appealed to recent immigrants in the ‘fight’ against hunger and communism. She quotes Hoover in 1919: “Of course, the prime objective of the United States in undertaking the fight against famine in Europe is to save the lives of starving people. The secondary object, however, and of hardly less importance, [is] to defeat Anarchy, which is the handmaiden of Hunger.” Knowing that he said this after the Armistice, this makes me even more curious to see the wider and more long-term effects of such campaigns in war-torn countries, both in the context of WWI and the many other conflicts in which we continue to swoop down from safety to rescue the helpless. Such a goal is not without its merits, but it raises a lot of questions for me about the ways that these posters color the perspective of total war for ordinary citizens and give them the illusion(?) of participation in something that could only have be seen to be understood.

("Blood or Bread" poster originally seen in McFarlin Special Collections; image taken from Fine Arts Museums from San Francisco. Artist: Henry Patrick Raleigh)