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Review the posters given to you in class and answer the following questions. 1. According to posters 1 through 4, what could Americans do here on the home front to assist the war effort? 2. Based on posters 5 through 14, describe how we encourages Americans to join the military or buy liberty bonds. Determine what emotional appeals are made in these posters? In addition, what effect might this have on Americans with German ancestry? 3.
Based on posters 15 and 16, discuss the role of women in World War I? How are women portrayed in these posters? 1. According to the posters 1-4, the Americans during WWI are encouraged to help out the war effort by canning their food, eating less of certain foods like meats, sugars and fats in order to save more for the soilders. They are also encourage to eat less foods because its “ammunition” which I describe that as being fuel for the army men’s body so they can fight the German and beat them. 2.
According to the posters 5-14, they use a lot of emotional appeals to get men to join the military to far the war, for example poster 8 tells me that people question your “Americanism” if you do not enlist and you are looked down apon by your fellow Americans who are fighting in the war. Emotional appeals are used also in Poster 7 with a reminder of the sinking of Lusitania and how tragic it was for the American people and that the Germans are responsible, so you should enlist. With poster 9, I translate that as they are emasculating men by saying “look this woman wants to join the navy, be a man and just do it! Poster 11 is one of my favorites actually, if I saw something like this today I would be tempted to join the military myself I must say. I look at that and I see Abraham Lincoln, a very influential president of his time and I read his quote and when I get to the part, “…shall not perish from the earth” it makes me feel empowered in a odd way to the point where I would think that someone who was not able to actually go to war but wanted to be a part of the war effort, would feel compelled to buy the liberty bonds, because “they are the people and without them, they will lose the war and perish”. . In poster 15, I see women, older women, being portrayed as the mother of America’s military. They show a woman who looks like a grandmother with her arms wide open as if she was a comforting figure and that if you helped the war effort by buying liberty bonds you would be like a caring figure for the “sons of America”. Taking care of them by loaning your money to the government for their food, supplies and a roof over their head, just like your grandmother would do.
Poster 16 is another I like a lot, it really shows that “100% Americanism” campaign. It portrays women to be sort of the backbone of the military, I would guess they might of thought that if any women felt they were unnecessary in the war effort, that they would look at this and think that they could be “the spirit of America” by joining the Red Cross and although they couldn’t be fulfilling their duty on the front lines of war, they would be doing it by taking care of the men in war that are on the front lines.