Help Your OPA Fight Inflation is a 1946 Office of Price Administration poster. Dollar signs fall across a dark field, a four-step chain runs from rising prices to lost jobs, and a lone man sits on a bench with a folded newspaper. It is sheet INF-P2369 (NAID 514468).
The argument on the sheet
The poster is built as a staircase of captions. Dollar signs fall down a dark field. Each line is one step in a sequence, and the last step lands on a green-tinted man seated alone on a bench with a folded newspaper. The archive reads that figure as the man who lost his job.
INFLATION
PRICES GO UP
THEN PEOPLE BUY LESS
BUSINESS SLUMPS
PEOPLE LOSE JOBS
HELP YOUR OPA FIGHT INFLATION
[imprint:] U. S. OFFICE OF PRICE ADMINISTRATION, WASHINGTON 25, D. C. INF-P2369
[imprint:] U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1946—O—687657
How it persuades
The archive tags the sheet as a fear appeal. No enemy appears. The fear is of a slide: four short steps from higher prices to unemployment, set out as if each followed from the last without exception. The sheet offers no figures, no dates, and no source for the chain. It ends on a request phrased as loyalty, "your OPA," which treats a federal price agency as something the reader owns and should defend.
Two things on the sheet deserve a careful reader's attention. First, the poster never says what the Office of Price Administration actually did to fight inflation, or what it asked of shopkeepers and buyers. The reader is asked to help an agency without being told its powers. Second, the possessive is doing persuasive work. Whether price controls helped or hurt is a question the poster does not try to answer. A citizen can support the goal and still ask how much authority over private prices a government should hold.
Other OPA sheets
The same agency's posters elsewhere on this site take other angles. Rationing Safeguards Your Share (1942) and Rationing Means a Fair Share for All of Us (1943) argue from fairness. Don't Feed Black Market Greed and Sucker! If You Pay Over Ceiling Prices, both from 1946, aim at the buyer who pays above the ceiling.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Help your OPA fight inflation, 1946. U.S. Office of Price Administration.
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, NAID 514468, local id 44-PA-962, catalog record, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
