As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap! (1951), a Philippine voter-registration poster

A Philippine voter-registration poster with a catalog date of 10 October 1951 pairs a farmer sowing seed with a man dropping a ballot into a locked box. Its printed credit names the National Movement for Free Elections and the League of Women Voters; the National Archives files it with State Department posters (NAID 5729913).

A proverb, and a second line built on it

In the archive's description the poster pairs two pictures: a farmer sowing seed, and a man dropping a ballot into a locked box. The text follows the same pairing, a Biblical proverb and then the same sentence rebuilt for elections.

AS YE SOW,

SO SHALL YE

REAP!

AS YE VOTE,

SO SHALL YE

BE GOVERNED

BALLOT BOX

Published by the National Movement for Free Elections and League of Women Voters

REGISTER and VOTE!

A printed credit and a U.S. file

The sheet names two Philippine civic groups as publishers. The archive's maker line adds that it belongs to the U.S. State Department's Asian poster series, and the National Archives holds it in Record Group 306, with the rights line crediting the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency. The record classes the issuer as a state, the audience as a foreign public, and the event as the Philippine elections of 1951. Its source field reads "Unidentified," with the gloss "Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure."

The record does not say who drew the poster, who paid for printing, or what role the State Department played beyond keeping it in its series. This page does not fill that gap.

Reading it

The archive tags transfer: the proverb carries moral weight, and the poster offers no argument beyond the analogy. As civic messages go, it is a good one. It asks people to register and vote, names no party or candidate, and puts responsibility for government on the voter.

The difficulty is the credit line. Urging free elections is honorable work. When a poster carries local groups' names and also sits in a foreign government's poster series, a reader cannot tell whose message it is. A citizen deciding whether to trust an appeal about his own elections deserves that answer.

A poster with the same printed credit, The Woman Who Votes, carries a catalog date two days earlier. The 1953 sheets Our God-Given Right to Vote and Don't Betray Your Heroes are also filed with the U.S. Information Agency's posters for Asia. The U.S. Information Agency hub covers the agency's posters abroad.