Gift Through CARE: milk for the schoolchildren of Ceylon, 1957

An English-language poster distributed in Colombo, catalog date 28 March 1957, from the U.S. Information Agency series. A hand pours milk into a cup on a school slate over maps of the Americas and Ceylon, with the line "Gift through CARE from the people of the United States to the schoolchildren of Ceylon" (NAID 6948965).

What the sheet prints

A shirt cuff and a hand tip a milk bottle. The milk runs into a cup that stands on a child's writing slate. Behind them is a map of North and South America, and a yellow outline of the island of Ceylon. The text is a dedication followed by three numbers.

GIFT through CARE FROM THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES TO THE SCHOOLCHILDREN OF CEYLON

MILK FOR OVER 1,250,000 CHILDREN IN MORE THAN 6000 SCHOOLS IN CEYLON

7000 TONS OF MILK

Who issued it

The sheet names two parties: CARE, the channel, and "the people of the United States," the giver. The National Archives files it in Record Group 306 with the U.S. Information Agency's posters for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East (series NAID 5051202), catalog date 28 March 1957. The archive holds Sinhalese and Tamil editions of the same poster. FRAME classes the source as open, since the sheet says plainly where the milk came from.

The figures are the poster's own. This page repeats them as printed and does not audit them.

How to read it

FRAME tags it transfer and glittering generalities. The hand, the map and the slate tie a good deed to a country, and the tonnage is the evidence offered. It is persuasion, and it is also a receipt.

Of the sheets in this group, this one is closest to straightforward. A gift is named, a quantity is given, and the recipients are children in school. The phrase "from the people" is worth noticing. If the milk was bought with tax money, the people did give it, through their representatives, which is a different thing from giving it by choice. If private donors paid through CARE, the phrase is literal. The poster does not say which, and the reader in Colombo could not tell. Compare the People's Capitalism poster from the same year, and a public-health sheet from Jordan that names both governments.