A 1918 recruiting poster issued by the Czechoslovak Recruiting Office in New York and printed by the Wentworth Institute's school of printing in Boston. Helmeted silhouettes raise rifles and banners bearing the Czech lion, the Moravian and Silesian eagles and the Slovak double cross beside the Stars and Stripes.
Banners in a crowd of silhouettes
The picture is a crowd of helmeted figures in silhouette, rifles raised, carrying tattered banners. The archive identifies the emblems on them as the Czech lion, the Moravian and Silesian eagles, and the Slovak double cross, flown beside the Stars and Stripes. Some lettering on the banners is only partly legible.
ISSUED BY CZECHOSLOVAK RECRUITING OFFICE, TRIBUNE BUILDING, NEW YORK. DESIGNED AND PRINTED BY THE SCHOOL OF PRINTING AND GRAPHIC ARTS OF WENTWORTH INSTITUTE, BOSTON, MASS. U.S.A. WENTWORTH POSTER NO. 1
Who issued it, and who printed it
Two parties are named. The issuer is a Czechoslovak recruiting office in the Tribune Building in New York. The designer and printer is a school, the School of Printing and Graphic Arts of Wentworth Institute in Boston, and the imprint, in the archive's uncertain reading of its faint last line, calls this Wentworth Poster No. 1. The record classes the issuer as a movement, the audience as "Diaspora or minority," and the purpose as recruiting. The themes are war and the military, and migration. The National Archives copy is in Record Group 4, the Food Administration's World War I Posters series (NAID 512439), local identifier 4-P-203.
The appeal
The archive tags transfer and identity fusion. The headline speaks to one community by name, and the American flag in the same crowd lends the Czechoslovak standards the standing of the American colours beside them. "OUR FREE COLORS!" asks readers to see the banners as theirs.
The appeal was to volunteers. Nothing on the sheet threatens a reader or names a law; it asks a diaspora audience in America to join up, and a Boston printing school put its name to the work. The World War I home-front hub notes recruiting sheets for the Polish, Czechoslovak and British forces and leaves them out of its gallery. Another diaspora sheet printed on American soil, India's Martyrs, came from a San Francisco movement two years earlier.
Sources
FRAME object record, Czechoslovaks! Join Our Free Colors!, 1918. Czechoslovak Recruiting Office, New York; designed and printed by the School of Printing and Graphic Arts of Wentworth Institute, Boston. Source classed as openly identified.
U.S. National Archives, RG 4, World War I Posters, series NAID 512439, catalog item 512641, local identifier 4-P-203, retrieved by the archive 3 October 2026. Rights as recorded: NARA unrestricted.
