Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty is OWI Poster No. 26, drawn by Bernard Perlin in 1943. Continental soldiers marked 1778 stand beside GIs marked 1943, over a slogan with "always" underlined.
What the sheet prints
The poster is split in time. On the left, worn and ragged Continental soldiers stand under a starred flag, with the year 1778. On the right, helmeted American soldiers of 1943 march past. One sentence joins them, and the word "always" is underlined.
1778 1943
AMERICANS
will always fight for liberty
[illegible — small printer's credit line, bottom center]
Who issued it
The U.S. Office of War Information issued the sheet as OWI Poster No. 26 in 1943, from a drawing by Bernard Perlin. The Library of Congress holds it (item 91784917, LC-DIG-ppmscd-05268) with no known restrictions; the archive retrieved it on 27 September 2026.
How to read it
The method is transfer. The Revolution carries great prestige in American memory, and placing its soldiers next to the new ones carries that respect forward. The underlined "always" turns a historical comparison into a national trait.
The comparison is honest in one way and loose in another. For much of the founding generation, liberty meant a limit on power, their own government's included, and the Constitution they wrote afterward is built on that idea. The soldiers on the right deserve the same respect as those on the left. But the poster does not say what liberty means in either year, and a word that does not have to be defined can be attached to any policy. A citizen looking at this sheet is entitled to ask which liberties the war was for, and whether they were being kept at home while it was fought.
The case study Famous bylines, a federal subsidy, and a novelist who told Americans to hate cites this poster beside United We Win. The original prints of the Revolution are read in their own case study, and related OWI sheets are at the Office of War Information hub.
Sources
- FRAME object record, "Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty," 1943. U.S. Office of War Information (OWI Poster No. 26; artist Bernard Perlin). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmscd-05268, retrieved by the archive 27 September 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work; no known restrictions on publication).
