The Greatest Mother in the World is a 1918 American Red Cross poster by Alonzo Earl Foringer for the Christmas Roll Call of December 16 to 23. A giant veiled nurse holds a small wounded soldier on a stretcher across her lap.
What the sheet prints
A nurse, enormous and seated, veiled in white. Across her knees lies a stretcher, and on it a wounded soldier drawn at a much smaller scale. A large red cross stands behind. The text is short.
Red Cross
Christmas
Roll Call
Dec. 16-23rd
The GREATEST MOTHER in the World
Who issued it
The American Red Cross, with art by Alonzo Earl Foringer (1878–1948), 1918. The image is the Library of Congress copy, LC-USZC4-10241, public domain in the United States as a pre-1931 publication. The record gives no NAID.
The issuer is the Red Cross, not the Treasury or the Food Administration, and a roll call was a membership drive. That separates this sheet from the government's own loan and food posters of the same war.
How to read it
The FRAME record reads the composition as a borrowing from the Pietà, the mother holding her dead son. The scale does the work: the nurse is a monument and the soldier a child in her arms. Reverence meant for a sacred image is pointed at a charity's enrolment week.
That is a technique, and it is also a fair one to use for a fair cause. Volunteer nursing and relief were real, and so was the need. What the poster leaves out is anything specific: no ward, no supply list, no account of where a member's dollar went. It asks for trust on the strength of a feeling. For a relief society asking for voluntary support, that is a smaller problem than it would be for a state asking for compliance, but it is the same method.
Other Red Cross and relief appeals sit alongside the war-finance posters, such as the Second Liberty Loan sheet. The difference to keep in mind is who was asking.
Sources
- FRAME object record, The Greatest Mother in the World: Red Cross Christmas Roll Call, 1918. American Red Cross; artist Alonzo Earl Foringer.
- Library of Congress, item 2002712338, LC-USZC4-10241, retrieved by the archive 27 September 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain in the U.S. (published before 1931).
