Hit the Bull's Eye! These Are Volunteers (1917), a New York recruiting bulletin

A 1917 bulletin from New York's Mayor's Committee on National Defense prints the names of the week's volunteers for the Army, National Guard, Navy, Naval Reserve, Marine Corps and Naval Militia inside the rings of a target, and asks the reader, "Are you one of them?"

What the sheet prints

A target of orange and blue rings sits under an eagle. Inside the rings are columns of names in type too small to read in the scan, grouped by service. Four news photographs fill the corners: a machine-gun pit, men getting used to barbed wire, an inspection, and rifle practice, each credited to Leslie's Weekly.

HIT THE BULL'S EYE !

THESE ARE

VOLUNTEERS

ARE YOU ONE OF THEM?

U. S. ARMY

Week ending June 9th, 1917

[…]

BULLETIN No. 6

[…]

Make your mind up. Put your name down. Come across and see it through

[…]

THE MAYOR'S COMMITTEE ON NATIONAL DEFENSE:—THE RECRUITING COMMITTEE, 280 Broadway, New York City.

Who made it

FRAME credits the Mayor's Committee on National Defense and its Recruiting Committee, New York City, 1917, and classes the source as openly identified. The National Archives copy is in Record Group 4, World War I Posters (series NAID 512439), catalog item 512479, local identifier 4-P-40. This is a city committee's sheet, not a federal one, though it recruits for federal services and lists their stations.

It is one of a numbered run. The archive also holds Bulletin No. 2, headed "2285 New Yorkers Volunteered in One Week," with an address at 50 East 42nd Street, and These New Yorkers Volunteered Last Week, listing Army names from 28 May to 2 June 1917. The committee printed its rolls week by week.

How to read it

Bandwagon and transfer are the techniques FRAME names. The names are the argument: here are your neighbors, already signed, and the only question is whether your name will be in next week's rings. The target turns enlistment into a game of aim, and the photographs are of camp and drill.

What the sheet honors is real. These men chose to serve, and their names were printed under the word "volunteers." A republic that raises its forces from people who sign up has something to be proud of.

The date adds a complication the sheet does not mention. Congress had passed the Selective Service Act on 18 May 1917, a few weeks before the week this bulletin reports; the site's page on I Want You for U.S. Army notes the same act. In those weeks the city was still asking men to come forward on their own, with the draft already law behind the request. "Make your mind up" was a real choice about when and in which service, and, for men the draft could reach, a narrower one about whether.