Farmers! Uncle Sam Asks You to Get Ready for the Census Taker (1944)

Farmers! Uncle Sam asks you to get ready for the census taker is a 1944 U.S. Census Bureau notice credited to the artist Jerome Rozen. A smiling Uncle Sam writes in a ledger in front of tractors and crops, and the text says the law that requires farmers' reports also keeps them confidential (NAID 514239).

Uncle Sam with a ledger

Uncle Sam, in a star-spangled vest, smiles and writes in a ledger. Behind him are rows of tractors and crops. The poster tells farmers what the Census Bureau will ask them in January, lists the subjects, and closes its text with a line about the law, printed in capitals.

FARMERS!

Uncle Sam asks you...

to get ready for the census taker

In January the U.S. Census Bureau will ask you about 1944 crops-amount-value-acres-livestock-tractors-labor hired and tenure

THE LAW REQUIRING YOUR REPORTS MAKES THEM CONFIDENTIAL

[signature: JEROME [partly illegible]]

[imprint: ☆ U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1944—O—615702]

The Census Bureau, with a signature half read

The archive credits the U.S. Census Bureau and the artist Jerome Rozen. On the sheet, only the first name of the signature can be read with confidence. The Government Printing Office imprint dates it to 1944. FRAME files the issuer type as "State", the audience as "Domestic public" and the purpose as "Mobilize or secure compliance". The National Archives holds it in Record Group 44 with the World War II posters.

A poster that names a legal duty

This poster tells the reader that a law requires his report. It does so in passing, inside a sentence whose main point is a promise: the same law makes the reports confidential. FRAME's technique tags are transfer, for borrowing Uncle Sam's familiar authority for a routine survey, and glittering generalities.

The sheet is candid. It says what will be asked, when, and under what rule, and it tells the farmer what protection the rule gives him. A citizen can weigh that. Whether the confidentiality held is a separate question, and the poster cannot answer it; the record says nothing about how the 1944 answers were used.

The friendly Uncle Sam is still worth noticing. A legal obligation to report one's crops, livestock, hired labor and tenure is a real use of state power, however ordinary. Drawing the census taker's boss as a smiling uncle with a pen makes a duty look like a favor. That is the soft side of compulsion, and it stays honest here because the sheet names the law.

The 1944 campaign poster I Want You F.D.R. gives the same national figure a different face: James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam, pointing at the viewer. The Roosevelt administration essay sets the period's posters beside the powers the government actually held.