שפייז וועט געווינען דיא קריעג! (Food Will Win the War!), Yiddish edition
Food Will Win the War (1917), the Yiddish printing of Charles Edward Chambers's poster
The U.S. Food Administration's 1917 Yiddish poster, art by Charles Edward Chambers, tells new arrivals that they came for freedom and must now save wheat.
Techniques named on the archive record
Transfer
Date
1917
Made by
U.S. Food Administration; Charles Edward Chambers (artist)
Medium
Poster
Country
United States
Regime
Wilson Administration
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
Library of Congress , retrieved September 27, 2026
Source
Public domain in the U.S. (published before 1931) Chambers, Charles Edward, approximately 1883-1941, artist. 1917. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-05651.
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.
A 1917 U.S. Food Administration poster in Yiddish, with art by Charles Edward Chambers, shows immigrants at a ship's rail passing the Statue of Liberty and asks them to save wheat for the Allies because they came to America to find freedom.
What the sheet prints
A crowd of immigrants at a ship's rail, the Statue of Liberty, the New York skyline, and a rainbow made of flag stripes. Under it, four short lines in Yiddish and the agency's name spelled out in Yiddish letters.
שפייז וועט געווינען דיא קריעג!
איהר קומט אהער צו געפינען פרייהייט.
יעצט מוזט איהר העלפען זיא צו בעשיצען
מיר מוזען דיא עלליים פערזארגען מיט ווייץ.
לאזט קיין זאך ניט גיין אין ניוועץ.
יונייטעד סטייטס שפייז פערוואלטונג.
Who issued it
The issuer is the U.S. Food Administration, with art by Charles Edward Chambers, 1917. The image is the Library of Congress copy, LC-DIG-ppmsca-05651, public domain in the United States as a pre-1931 publication. The record gives no NAID for this printing.
How to read it
The government printed this in the language its readers used at home. That is worth noticing in a war when other officials treated German and other foreign-language print as suspect; the Detroit Abend-Post front page of 1918 shows a German-language paper defending its right to exist. Here Washington went to Yiddish readers in Yiddish.
The argument is a bargain. You came for freedom; now protect it by saving wheat. Food conservation was mostly voluntary in form, built on pledges, and asking a newcomer to join it is fair. The line that deserves a second look is the implied debt. Freedom was not a gift the newcomer received on the dock and now has to pay back in flour. It was his by the same law as everyone else's. The poster's warmth is real, and so is the hint that loyalty from immigrants had to be shown in a way it did not from others.
The archive also holds an English printing of the same design in the FRAME collection. Other English-language food posters, such as Food Is Ammunition, make the same request without the arrival scene. The enforcement side is the Closed notice. The Wilson administration essay covers Hoover's Food Administration as a separate agency from Creel's committee, and its bet on voluntary saving over a compulsory ration.
Sources
FRAME object record, Food Will Win the War! (Yiddish edition), 1917. U.S. Food Administration; artist Charles Edward Chambers. Transcription and machine translation as given there.
Library of Congress, item 2002720472, LC-DIG-ppmsca-05651, retrieved by the archive 27 September 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain in the U.S. (published before 1931).
