American Wheat to the Aid of the Jordanians, an Arabic photo poster

An Arabic photo-set poster in the U.S. Information Agency series for the Middle East, catalog date 17 December 1953. Nine pictures and a boxed text report that the American steamer Albion landed 9,670 tons of wheat at Aqaba as a gift from the United States to the Jordanian people (NAID 6948772).

What the sheet reports

This is news in poster form. The archive counts nine pictures and a boxed text: the ship, workers on the quay, sacks carried ashore, lorries, and bread being made in Amman. The ship's name, ALBION, is legible on the hull. The boxed text gives the figures.

القمح الأميركي في نجدة الأردنيين

[...] رست في مياه العقبة - الميناء الأردني على البحر الاحمر - في الاسبوع الماضي، الباخرة الاميركية (البيون) وعليها ٩٦٧٠ طناً من القمح ، هدية من الولايات المتحدة الى الشعب الاردني [...]

AMERICAN WHEAT TO THE AID OF THE JORDANIANS

[...] Last week there anchored in the waters of Aqaba - the Jordanian port on the Red Sea - the American steamer (Albion) carrying 9,670 tons of wheat, a gift from the United States to the Jordanian people [...]

In the archive's translation the boxed text goes on to say the wheat was meant to relieve a "severe crisis" in the southern region after failed grain seasons, that Jordanian ministers, the American ambassador and the press met the ship, that unloading ran at eight hundred tons a day, and that this was the first American commercial steamer to call at Aqaba. One caption says the workers in the holds were Palestinians "brought from Nablus and Hebron."

Who made it

The sheet belongs to the U.S. Information Agency's file of posters for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East; the maker line also names the agency's State Department predecessor program. The archive's audience field is "Foreign public," and it classes the source as unidentified. No American office signs the sheet in the transcription; the gift is credited to "the United States." How many copies went up, and where, is not recorded.

How to read it

FRAME tags it transfer: relief of a grain shortage is attached to the United States as donor, with officials named as receiving it. That is the whole design, and it is not hidden. The tonnage, the port and the rate of unloading are checkable claims of the kind a newspaper prints. The sheet asks the reader to think well of the giver and asks nothing else.

Aid publicity of this sort is still persuasion, paid for by the taxpayers of one country to win goodwill in another. It is a mild kind. Set it beside a later Jordan health poster on this site, Destroy the Insects That Carry Disease, issued by the Jordanian Ministry of Health with the American Operations Mission in Jordan, or the CARE milk gift poster for Ceylon. More are on the U.S. Information Agency hub.