U.S.I.S. Presents: a fill-in-the-blank poster for Seoul, 1959

A Korean and English template poster in the U.S. Information Agency file, catalog date 29 May 1959. A large blank panel headed "U.S.I.S. Presents" is framed by line drawings of crowds at a film van, a VOA microphone, a lecture, exhibitions and a television set, left open for a local post to fill in (NAID 6949006).

An empty centre

Most of this poster is blank on purpose. A big white panel takes the middle, waiting for an event to be written or pasted in. Around it, blue line drawings show what the U.S. Information Service did: crowds at a mobile film van, a radio or VOA microphone, a lecture, art and photograph exhibitions, and a television set. The heading is in English. A vertical line of Korean runs one syllable to a row; the archive's machine translation, which it marks as not verified by a fluent reader, renders it as "Provided by the U.S. Information Service."

U.S.I.S. Presents

미

국

공

보

원

제

공

In-picture lettering: USIS MOTION PICTURES SERVICE; VOA; [illegible small Korean and English labels]

[English, as given by the archive:] U.S.I.S. Presents. (Korean, read vertically:) Provided by the U.S. Information Service.

The name on the door

The National Archives files the sheet in Record Group 306 with the agency's posters for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, catalog date 29 May 1959. FRAME credits the agency and its State Department predecessor program. This is one of the sheets the archive classes as openly sourced, and the face of the sheet matches: the sender's name is the headline, in two languages, and the drawings label its own film service and radio.

Crowds as the message

The archive tags one technique, bandwagon. What the drawings advertise is attendance; in the archive's reading, crowded audiences are shown as the normal response to the service's programs. The viewer is told, before he knows what the event is, that it is the kind of thing everybody goes to.

As propaganda goes, it is mild. The poster makes no claim about anyone else and asks only that people come and see. It also shows the program as it presented itself: films, broadcasts, talks and pictures, offered in public, under a name a Korean passer-by could read. A citizen may still ask why his taxes paid for it. The U.S. Information Agency hub argues that a program working under its own name can at least be answered, audited and voted on.

The radio side of the same operation appears in the 1951 Everybody's Listening poster, which advertises a Voice of America program for the Philippines. A finished exhibition bill from the same file, the Atom for Peace poster for Beirut, names the Lebanese Atomic Energy Committee and the American Embassy as sponsors. More sheets are in the USIA poster gallery.