Posters for public health: WPA posters and national dialogues about health care in the United States

Abstract

During the same years they were designing the now-famous American travel posters, Work Projects Administration (WPA) designers produced an extensive body of public health posters to communicate a variety of health-related messages to the American public. This article explores the role of the WPA’s public health posters in Depression-era health care dialogues in the US. Explicitly, this visual dialogue centered around the need for data-driven personal health choices; expert information about health and disease; and the role of government agencies as representatives of reliable data. Implicitly, the posters also re-enforced existing norms associated with race, gender, and class, framing dialogues that had as much to do with social norms as they did with health care messaging. Drawing on the Library of Congress collection of WPA posters as its sample, this article provides both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the visual messaging strategies employed by WPA poster artists when discussing public health.

Key words:

• Public health
• health care
• Work Projects Administration (WPA) posters

Notes

1. Serlin, Imagining Illness; Cartwright, Screening The Body.

2. Grant, Propaganda in Inter-War Britain; Helfand, The Picture of Health; Lewis, The People’s Health.

3. Carter and DeNoon, Posters for the People.

4. Bold, The WPA Guides.

5. Pillen, “See America.”

6. “Maternal, Infant, and Child Welfare,” 601.

7. Gutman, “Race, Place, and Play.”

8. Dilworth, Imagining Indians.

9. Wasserman, Flannery, and Clair 2007, “Raising the Ivory Tower.”

10. Hobbs, “Equality and Difference.”

11. US Bureau of Labor Statistics and US Department of Labor, 100 Years of Spending, 15.

12. Taft, “Public Health and the Family,” 145.

13. Wood, “One Third of a Nation,” n.p.

14. McCamy, “Variety in Growth,” 287–8.

15. Zimand, “Campaign Calendar,” 166.

16. Swan, “Public Health Education,” 427.

17. O’Connor, Art for the Millions, 181.

18. O’Connor, Art for the Millions, 180–81.

19. O’Connor, Art for the Millions, 177.

20. Lee, “Otto Neurath’s Isotype,” 167–178; Mitman, “The Color of Money,” 40–43.”

21. “Social Showman,” 618.

22. Mercey, “Modernizing Federal Publicity,” 90.

23. Rhodes, “Health Education,” 74.

24. Norman and Rorty, “Our ‘Civilized’ Food Habits”; Dodd, “Conservation of Public Health.”

25. Norman and Rorty, “Our ‘Civilized’ Food Habits,” 446–47.

26. Parran, Shadow on the Land.

27. Wembridge, “Social Background.”

28. Parran, Shadow on the Land, 149.

29. Derryberry, “Health Education,” 1395.

30. Cooter and Stein, “Visual Imagery and Epidemics,” 174–80.

31. Sydenstricker, “Health in the New Deal.”