All men are created equal, a 1954 Heroes Day poster of Lincoln

A two-colour Heroes Day poster from the U.S. Information Agency series distributed in Asia, catalog date 6 August 1954. A woodcut-style portrait of Abraham Lincoln sits above one line credited to him, "All men are created equal" (NAID 5729969).

What the sheet prints

Red and black ink. A large portrait cut in the style of a woodblock fills a red panel. Under it are five words and a name. Nothing else is on the sheet: no agency, no date, no explanation.

All men are created equal.

-Lincoln

Who issued it

The catalog places the poster in Record Group 306, the U.S. Information Agency's propaganda posters distributed in Asia, with a catalog date of 6 August 1954. The archive holds two companions in the same Heroes Day set, distributed in the Philippines: one credits Rizal with "Without liberty there is no light," the other credits Quezon with a line on "the good of mankind". The record does not name the post that printed or hung this one.

The attribution

The words are not Lincoln's to begin with. "All men are created equal" is from the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Lincoln quoted it and built on it; he did not write it. Crediting it to him is a small slip, and an understandable one in a poster about heroes. It is still worth correcting, because the line belongs to the founding document, not to one man.

How to read it

FRAME tags the sheet testimonial and transfer: a revered face lends weight to an idea. Here the idea is one an American can sign without reservation. The harder question is whether the country sending the poster lived up to it. In 1959 a crowd at the Arkansas State Capitol carried signs reading "Race mixing is Communism." Both objects are true records of the same republic. The poster states the standard. The photograph shows how far some citizens still were from it, and how openly they could say so.