American Propaganda
Can't you read!, 1943 US poster: Four-panel cartoon on one sheet

Can't you read! (Danger, do not feed the bears)

Can't You Read! (1943), the four-panel bear cartoon marked © Leon Schlesinger

A 1943 four-panel cartoon marked © Leon Schlesinger: a tourist feeds a bear under a "DO NOT FEED THE BEARS" sign and pays for it. "CAN'T YOU READ!" NAID

Techniques named on the archive record

Fear appeal
Date
1943
Made by
Office of War Information (cartoon by Leon Schlesinger)
Medium
Poster
Country
United States
Regime
Roosevelt Administration
NARA
NAID 513939; Record Group 44
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters , retrieved October 4, 2026
Source
Public domain (U.S. government work) Office of War Information (cartoon by Leon Schlesinger). National Archives and Records Administration, RG 44, 44-PA-469 (NAID 513939).

Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

Full record at propagandaarchive.org

Four panels on one 1943 sheet show a tourist in a pith helmet feeding a sandwich to a bear beside a sign reading "DANGER DO NOT FEED THE BEARS", and then the bear knocking him flat. The caption asks "CAN'T YOU READ!" The art is marked © Leon Schlesinger, and the archive files the sheet under the Office of War Information (NAID 513939).

Four panels and a sign

The same warning sign stands in every panel. Per the archive, a tourist in a pith helmet holds out a sandwich to a bear next to it; by the end the bear has knocked him down and is snarling over him. One caption runs below. The sheet's words fit in a few lines.

DANGER

DO NOT FEED

THE

BEARS

(repeated on the sign in each of four panels)

"CAN'T YOU READ!"

[signature:] © Leon Schlesinger

[imprint:] U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE · 1943 · [remainder illegible]

A copyrighted cartoon on a government press

Two credits share the sheet. The art carries a copyright mark in Leon Schlesinger's name. The imprint is the Government Printing Office, dated 1943, with the rest of the job line unreadable. FRAME lists the maker as the Office of War Information and records the sheet as a public-domain government work. Purpose in the tombstone: "Warn or inform."

A warning with the war left out

The archive is candid about the gap: the sheet's war-related message is not stated in the visible text. Nothing on it names the enemy, a rule, a product, or a campaign. What survives is a joke about a man who ignores a plain instruction and gets hurt for it. The archive's technique tag is fear appeal, delivered by comic consequence.

It would be easy to read the bear as a symbol. The record does not say what it stands for. Read on its own, it asks people to obey posted warnings, and it makes the person who disobeys the butt of the joke.

Other cartoon-style instruction sheets on this site include Are You Like Benny?, No. 8 in an antiaircraft command's series on "Benny the Bungler." The Office of War Information hub and its poster index list the OWI sheets in the snapshot.

Sources

  • FRAME object record, Can't you read! (Danger, do not feed the bears), 1943. Office of War Information (cartoon by Leon Schlesinger). Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
  • U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-469, NAID 513939, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026.