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Transcript

When you think about World War II, what images come to mind? There are lots to choose from, and it seems like most of them are in black and white. Pictures of Roosevelt and Churchill, or film of ships exploding at Pearl Harbor, the flag raising at Iwo Jima, Nazi party rallies, scrap drives, victory gardens, camps for concentration or internment, celebrating in Times Square, a mushroom cloud, the millions of dead and the ruins left behind by years of global warfare. With the passing of the generations who lived and fought and died during that time, all we now have are the things they've left behind, many of which today evoke a sort of wistfulness about a nation united in a common purpose.

One image, though, blazing with color and energy, although intended to have the briefest of lives, has persisted, making its way through the cultural landscape of the last seven decades, its journey telling us as much about the world of its day as about our own, and almost never what it's been believed to be. 

A document that changed the world, a poster bearing the slogan, We Can Do It, designed by J. Howard Miller for Westinghouse Electric, often mistakenly attributed as Rosie the Riveter. 1943.

I'm Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School. When we think today of the war years, and particularly when we look at pictures or movies of the time, we do so with a sort of assured inevitability. We know how it all ended, that the villagers in “Mrs. Miniver” and the submariners in “Destination Tokyo” have more hardships to endure, but they'll eventually win through in the end.

This was by no means certain, however, in early 1943, even though the tide was just starting to turn in favor of the Allies after a very bad 1942. The Casablanca Conference in January of ‘43 laid out the Allied philosophy and strategy to seek nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the Axis. The gruesome Battle of Stalingrad was ending, the first land victory in Asia came in Papua New Guinea, advances were being made in Guadalcanal and the Aleutians, and bombing was being intensified in Europe.

But there is still a long, long way to go in February of 1943 when one of a series of posters designed by 24-year-old Pittsburgh artist J. Howard Miller is put up in Westinghouse Electric Company plants in Pennsylvania and the Midwest for only two weeks, from the 15th to the 28th. If you look carefully at an image of the original, you can see those posting dates in the lower left-hand corner. It was commissioned by Westinghouse's in-house war production coordinating committee.

Fewer than 1,800 copies were printed, and when those two weeks were up, so far as we can tell, she was taken down and largely forgotten. And yet the image is so familiar, without my even describing it to you, I bet you're visualizing it right now. Posters convey simple messages with a dart-like sharpness and impact, and overall fall into a more general category known as ephemera, materials that are intended to be temporary, things like handbills, brochures, menus, and so on.

When these things do last, they can often speak volumes about the life and times of the society that gave rise to them in ways that all the official sources and documents really can't. It's not clear who the woman in the poster is. There are at least a couple of claimants, including Geraldine Hoff, a Michigan teenager seen in a photograph working at a machine in a polka dot headscarf, unaware of her possible fame until she saw the poster in a magazine article some 40 years later.

Some historians doubt it's her, as Miller typically used live models. What is certain is that she's a strong woman depicted in vibrant primary colors, a defiant look in her eye, rolling up her sleeve, and ready for anything. What she's not, though, is Rosie the Riveter.

Rosie came to life in a 1942 hit song written by Red Evans and John Jacob Loeb, and here again many potential inspirations for Rosie have emerged over the years. Then for the Memorial Day 1943 cover of the Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell got into the act with a somewhat more zoftig Rosie, modeled by a Vermont telephone operator, munching on a sandwich, rivet gun nonchalantly in her lap, foot squarely on a copy of Mein Kampf, perhaps recreating the pose of the prophet Isaiah on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This Rosie was much more famous in her day, donated to the government war bond effort, sold and resold until fetching just under $5 million from the daughter of the Walmart founder, and now residing in the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas.

Zealous copyright enforcement by the Rockwell estate means this image is considerably less well-known today. All the Rosies became a symbol and metaphor for the influx of women into the workforce, from 13 to 19 million between 1940 and ‘45, in large part to replace men who went into the military, and in many people's minds, paving the way for their more widespread entry in the decades to come. Our poster, however, was not recruiting women to work.

It was aimed squarely at those people already working, as part of a much larger strategy of propaganda, meant to mobilize a nation and link the military front to the home front, combining the techniques and power of art and advertising to enlarge people's view of their wartime responsibilities. Posters in runs of thousands or even millions, exhorting secrecy, thrift and sacrifice, including buying war bonds, were commonplace in both public venues and the workplace. And those factories were no places of kumbaya cooperation.

The several years before Pearl Harbor was a time of considerable labor organization and unrest. 1941 alone saw 4,000 strikes involving 2 million workers, and an increase of 17% in overall union membership. In the face of war, to facilitate productivity, thousands of companies, including Westinghouse, encouraged by the Federal War Production Board, formed labor management committees, with largely minimal effect apart from bond drives and propaganda campaigns.

We Can Do It is fairly tame by comparison to many of these, and for the record, General Motors had a 1942 poster with the same slogan, showing two male arms symbolizing labor and management, with clenched fists and rolling sleeves, in this case pointing downward. The temperature here was high enough that some posters even frowned on long bathroom breaks. One said, “Killing time is killing men.”

Wow. Anything less than full commitment to your work could be seen as almost treasonous. So when Argo is saying We Can Do It, she's not calling women to the factories.

She's telling the people already there to stop looking at posters, work harder, and follow orders. What labor peace there was didn't last. Five thousand strikes occurred in 1946, involving over 10% of the workforce.

It's not clear how this poster was rediscovered. It appeared in a 1982 Washington Post magazine article and on the cover of the Smithsonian magazine in 1994. Then there was a commemorative stamp in 1999.

And the coffee mugs, and the t-shirts, and the bobbleheads, the whole treatment, adopted as an emblem, dare one say as a poster child, of the feminist movement and the rising presence and power of women in many areas of life. And at some point it became conflated with the Rosie the Riveter name and mythos of wartime unity and camaraderie. Actually, this might be less a document that changed the world than the other way around.

She's not Rosie the Riveter, except now she kind of is. Whoever the woman in the polka dot turban is, if anyone, as she rolls up her sleeve to get to work, she tells us her story, from two-week industrial pacifier, to feminist touchstone, to home front solidarity icon, to object of cultural nostalgia for a time that may not ever have been. She was never really any of these, and yet is now somehow all of them.

Never meant to survive, she has nonetheless endured, serially appropriated, serially evocative, showing us that how we see something is often at least as important as what's really there.