This week's Hagley Vault comes from our digital gallery of workplace posters, which gathers a a variety of accessions and items Hagley Library's collections. Posters in this collection include material from Hagley Library's Mather & Company workplace posters (Accession 1994.319), Seagram Company World War II posters (Accession 2004.214), Seagram Company World War II posters (Accession 2004.248), Women at work World War II posters (Accession 1994.236), World War II posters (Accession 1995.211), and other collections, as well as individually accessioned materials.
The image seen here is a ca. 1923 poster from our Mather & Company workplace posters (Accession 1994.319) collection. Mather & Company, was a Chicago, Illinois-based printing firm that ran a subscription-based motivational workplace poster service. Between 1923 and 1929, the company produced approximately 350 work-incentive posters. The posters were color lithographs with illustrations and captions that addressed workplace interpersonal interactions, appropriate behaviors, ideals, and guidelines.
Businesses would subscribe and receive a new poster every week. Posters like this one hung on the walls of factories and offices across America. Many of the posters in this digital collection are other employee motivational posters printed by Mather & Company and focus on personal work ethic and behavior.
Others include defense industry posters created during World War I and World War II by organizations like the United States Department of Labor, National Industrial Conservation Movement, and DuPont. Largely addressed to American workers, the posters encourage continued production in support of the war effort.
The digital collection also offers views of posters created from art in "The Four Freedoms War Bond Show", a collaboration between artist Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post featuring painting based on President's Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" speech. The paintings went on a tour of sixteen American cities, and were reproduced in large numbers of posters. The exhibition, championing the four essential human rights Roosevelt outlined in his speech; freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want, was seen by around 1.2 million people, and sales of posters featuring the art raised over $132 million dollars in war bonds to fund World War II efforts.
To view these items and more in our Hagley Digital Archives, just click here.