Image: Fred Spear, Artist, and Willard Dickerman Straight, Collector, “Enlist”(New York: Sackett & Wilhelms, 1915 or 1916). Photograph, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. Available at https://www.loc.gov/item/00651156/.
What emotions does the poster evoke? The German government pointed out that the Lusitania was carrying munitions and Americans had been warned to stay out of the war zone. Do these facts change the meaning of the poster?
How did the “Enlist” poster and antiwar song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” use women and children as symbols to make larger arguments about the European war? What does this symbolism suggest about gender roles in American society?
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Introduction
On May 7, 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed the RMS Lusitania, a Cunard Line British passenger ship sailing from New York to Liverpool, England. The ocean liner sank within eighteen minutes off the coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 passengers, including 128 Americans. Attempting to quell public outrage, the German embassy in Washington, DC claimed that the Lusitania was carrying munitions (which subsequent investigations confirmed). Furthermore, Americans had been warned not to sail on ships headed into the war zone.
A few days after the Lusitania sank, the British government released the “Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages,” from an investigation headed by Viscount James Bryce (1838–1922). The so-called Bryce Report gave a sensationalized accounting of German atrocities during the 1914 invasion of Belgium. It painted German soldiers as uncivilized, barbaric “Huns,” a derogatory label that equated German ruthlessness with the exploits of Attila the Hun, a brutal Mongolian conqueror in the fourth century.
Extensive newspaper coverage of the Lusitania tragedy included a widely circulated report of a drowned woman who washed ashore still clutching her infant. Artist Fred Spears reimagined this scene in his “Enlist” poster, often considered the first American-produced propaganda poster of the war. The poster was commissioned and distributed by the Boston Committee on Public Safety a month after the attack. The “Enlist” poster, newspaper coverage of the Lusitania, and the Bryce Report heightened anti-German sentiment in 1915.
—Jennifer D. Keene
Source: Fred Spear, Artist, and Willard Dickerman Straight, Collector, “Enlist”(New York: Sackett & Wilhelms, 1915 or 1916). Photograph, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. Available at https://www.loc.gov/item/00651156/.
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