GREENWICH, CT.- The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, spotlights a recent gift with a patriotic theme that has been added to the Museum’s permanent collection in the new exhibition That Liberty Shall Not Perish: World War I Posters, on view through February 1, 2009. The show features eighteen original posters from the First World War, including those created for the four Liberty Loan campaigns, the War Savings Stamp program, the Victory Loan program, and the Red Cross. Now nearly one hundred years old, the posters are a window to a time that is growing increasingly distant from personal knowledge. They primarily reflect an overriding national tone of innocence, patriotism, and national pride, far different from more recent conflicts of the twentieth century.

The posters in That Liberty Shall Not Perish: World War I Posters are a recent gift to the Bruce Museum’s permanent collection by Beverly and John Watling, who also are providing support for the exhibition. John’s stepfather Charles B. Warren, Jr., along with his older brother, Wetmore Warren, collected these posters while they were living in Washington, DC, where their father, Charles B. Warren, Sr., was stationed during World War I, serving on the staff of the Judge Advocate General.

The American posters can all be dated very specifically to the twenty months that the United States was active in World War I, which was also called the Great War and the War to End All Wars, between the declaration of war by President Woodrow Wilson on April 2, 1917, and the German surrender on November 11, 1918.

Many notable American artists were recruited to produce posters, including one of the best-known and most admired American illustrators, Howard Chandler Christy, who produced the famous example featuring a uniformed American beauty with the title, “Gee! I Wish I Were a Man! I’d Join the Navy!” Another Christy poster in the exhibition features a beautiful, flag-waving brunette, exhorting the viewer to “Fight or Buy Bonds.” Many posters made use of emotionally-charged patriotic symbols such as the American flag, the Statue of Liberty and Uncle Sam, or included tear-jerking captions like “Must Children Die and Mothers Plead in Vain? Buy more Liberty Bonds” illustrated by Henry Patrick Raleigh. A startling example is by the well known printmaker Joseph Pennell. His creation lends its text, “That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth,” to the title of this exhibition and shows a headless Statue of Liberty, broken torch at her feet, in shades of red and purple on a yellowish ground, across the harbor of New York, which is in flames and under attack by enemy bombers.

The government issued more than twenty million copies of approximately 2,500 posters in support of the war effort. In an era that preceded radio and television broadcasting, they were created as a way to communicate essential information rapidly and efficiently. They accomplished this by using bold graphics, strong color and concise wording to urge Americans to contribute to the war effort in specific ways. Enlist! Fight or Buy Bonds! I Want You for the Navy! One of the most compelling posters has no words at all, only a lovely Red Cross nurse with outspread arms beseeching the viewer.

“For many World War I posters to speak to us now,” Walton Rawls has written in World War I and the American Poster, “requires an effort on our part to be more responsive to the spirit of that period…a dominant faith in America as God’s ‘chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world.’….It now seems that, in many ways, citizens of the World War I era are about as distant intellectually from post-Vietnam Americans as are the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table.”

The Bruce Museum is grateful for this generous gift, which provides a fascinating window into the American experience in the early twentieth century and further insight into the social and political history of this era.