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¬¬The government used posters to advertise as technique during the First World War. The posters bridged a gap between the government and the people by using direct and simple messages. The government’s plan of advertising via posters was to stir the nation into action by engaging its people’s hearts and minds. Quite simply, the posters were meant to inform, influence and guide Americans’ behavior toward a certain political ideology. Because these posters were to be a part of the urban environment, they could be placed anywhere. Moreover, artists were told to use objects that could stand for a whole, like a flag signifying a nation or a bomb meaning war, so that they would not require any text on the poster. No poster text was deemed a more effective and efficient technique of advertising. Specifically, posters were to “tell the truth” because they engaged all Americans and fostered a social movement among Americans. Sympathetic and realistic representations of the common solider encouraged American nationalism, such that the common lives of persons were made to be heroic during the war.

Two different schools of art did work during this time: Regionalists and Social Realist. Both groups of art had vastly different views, but they did share the common idea of the championing the common man. Therefore if either group was to make art to persuade people it needed to be done in this manner. John Steuart Curry was commissioned for two different war bond posters during World War II. His first poster was Our Good Earth and Abbott Laboratories commissioned it in1942. His second poster, The Farm Is a Battleground, Too, came as an official request from the Office of War Information shortly after he finished his first one.

In October of 1942, shortly after he finished Our Good Earth, Curry received an official request from the Office of War Information to make another poster. He was asked to have the poster completed by November 5th of that year. Based upon The Writers’ War Board’s directive, Curry was to convey was that if America lost the war to the Nazis, then the famers of the nation would become enslaved. Curry, however, argued that the idea to be expressed was a correct assumption of how life was in rural America. He is quoted in a letter to his dealer, Reeves Lewenthal, as saying, “Farmers are exerting all-out effort and working 70 and 80 hours a week. There is no problem as we see it out here in getting farmers to work as hard as they can, for they are doing exactly this.” Curry then requested that the board consider developing a more positive rural theme and offered to help think of one, too.

In doing so, Curry came up with an idea from a sketch he had used in a previous mural idea for the Wisconsin State Fair called, Wisconsin Agriculture Leads to Victory. He believed such a representation would be a better and more positive idea for a poster. Lewenthal agreed. Thus, in The Farm Is a Battleground, Too, he depicts a gigantic farmer who resembles the one in Our Good Earth. He is holding a pitchfork and is standing before two soldiers. He is visually connecting the activities of the farmer to those on the war front. In the background, Curry was shown a tractor and tank, both mobile, and therefore representative of the war and their respective missions. Because he wanted to keep his work as authentic as possible, Curry rejected any ideas that might go against the realities of the farmers’ work. For example, one idea that was suggested by Lewenthal was that the pitchfork be held in the same advancing motion as the soldiers’ guns. Curry objected and said that farming is a skilled profession. Having the pitchfork in such a way would seem strange and wrong.

During the war, a lot of young farm men were drafted, thereby leaving few to take care and grow the needed crops. Because of the few number of farmers, the government allowed agricultural deference which allowed young farm men to be exempt from the draft. Unfortunately, in doing so, there was a backlash on those who stayed behind because others thought that these young farmers were not fulfilling their patriotic duties. Curry wanted to address this issue in his poster. By painting the famer as a leader of the military charge, he communicates the idea that the activities going on in rural American farms are urgent and critical parts of the United States’ participation in the war. Curry wanted viewers to be engulfed by the agricultural landscape and feel pride in the Midwest’s involvement to the wartime efforts.