Hun or Home? is a 1918 Treasury Liberty Loan poster. A charcoal-style drawing puts a girl holding a baby beside a spiked-helmet figure bent over a fallen person, and the headline offers two choices, one of them a slur.
What the sheet prints
Content note: the poster uses "Hun" for Germans and shows a threatened child and a fallen person. It is quoted here because it is what the Treasury printed.
The drawing is loose and dark. A girl stands holding a baby. Next to her a figure in a spiked helmet bends over someone on the ground. Nothing on the sheet says who the fallen person is or where the scene happens. The words do the rest.
HUN OR HOME?
BUY MORE
LIBERTY
BONDS
Who issued it
The record names the U.S. Treasury Department, Liberty Loan campaign, 1918. The artist's name cannot be read on the scan. The National Archives copy is in Record Group 4, World War I Posters (series NAID 512439), local identifier 4-P-226.
What it gets wrong
The question has two answers and only one is allowed. "Home" means buy. "Hun" means the scene in the drawing comes to your family. That is a false choice: a citizen could support the war and still decline a particular bond, or buy one for reasons that had nothing to do with fear. The poster removes those positions from the page.
The slur does the other half of the work. "Hun" is not a description of the German army or its conduct. It is a name that makes evidence unnecessary. The same word turns up on the Treasury's Halt the Hun! and in the Marine recruiting sheet Tell That to the Marines!, and the CPI case study notes it in the committee's "Spies and Lies" copy. Different offices, one vocabulary. The Wilson administration essay reads the Treasury's "Hun" posters beside Creel's own warning that unprovable atrocity tales would backfire.
None of this makes the loan illegitimate. Congress authorized it and Americans lent the money. What a free country should ask of its own posters is that the ask stand on its terms, and this one stands on a picture of what happens if you say no.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Hun or Home? Buy More Liberty Bonds, 1918. U.S. Treasury Department, Liberty Loan campaign.
- U.S. National Archives, RG 4, World War I Posters, series NAID 512439, catalog item 512664, local identifier 4-P-226, retrieved by the archive 3 October 2026. Rights as recorded: NARA unrestricted.
