# I Want You F.D.R., James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam enlisted for a campaign

I Want You F.D.R. Stay and Finish the Job! is a 1944 campaign poster signed James Montgomery Flagg for the Independent Voters' Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt. An Uncle Sam figure points at the viewer beside a painted portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt (NAID 513640).

- Home
- Archive
- I Want You F.D.R., James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam enlisted for a campaign

      I Want You F.D.R. Stay and Finish the Job!

      I Want You F.D.R., James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam enlisted for a campaign
      A 1944 Roosevelt campaign poster signed James Montgomery Flagg: Uncle Sam points at the viewer beside FDR under "Stay and finish the job!" NAID 513640.

## Techniques named on the archive record

Transfer
      Date1944Made byIndependent Voters' Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt; art by James Montgomery FlaggMediumPosterCountryUnited StatesRegimeRoosevelt AdministrationNARANAID 513640; Record Group 44SourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceU.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters , retrieved October 4, 2026SourcePublic domain (U.S. government work) Independent Voters' Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt. National Archives and Records Administration, RG 44, 44-PA-195 (NAID 513640).
      Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

      Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  I Want You F.D.R. Stay and Finish the Job! is a 1944 campaign poster signed James Montgomery Flagg for the Independent Voters' Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt. An Uncle Sam figure points at the viewer beside a painted portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt (NAID 513640).

## What the sheet says

Two figures share the sheet. Uncle Sam points straight out at the reader, and beside him is a painted portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The words are few, and they speak to the president rather than to the voter.

I WANT YOU F.D.R.

STAY AND FINISH THE JOB!

[signature: James Montgomery Flagg]

INDEPENDENT VOTERS' COMMITTEE OF THE ARTS and SCIENCES for ROOSEVELT

[imprint: printer's mark, New York, 41]

Transcription in the FRAME record, read from the image and not independently checked. Full record at propagandaarchive.org. NAID 513640, local id 44-PA-195, Record Group 44.

## Who put it out

The issuer printed on the sheet is a private group, the Independent Voters' Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt. The archive classes it as a movement, not a state office, and files its theme as elections and party politics. The National Archives holds a copy among its World War II posters in Record Group 44. Neither a print run nor a place of display appears in the record.

## Borrowed authority

The archive's tag is transfer, and the label fits. The pointing Uncle Sam was the Army's recruiting image; this site's page on the 1940 Army printing traces the design to 1917. Here the same national figure is turned toward one candidate and asks him to stay. A symbol that belongs to every citizen is lent to one side of an election.

That is ordinary campaign speech, and a free country allows it. A committee of private citizens may paint Uncle Sam on any candidate it likes, and the other party may answer with its own poster. What deserves notice is the slogan. "Finish the job" treats a fourth term as the completion of a task already under way, not as a choice the voters were free to refuse.

The voters did choose. The Roosevelt administration essay gives the 1944 electoral count and notes that most newspapers by number endorsed the Republican that year. The same essay records that a cardiologist had found congestive heart failure in March 1944, and that the public was told the president's health was good. The record does not tie this poster to that silence. It ran in the same year, asking a man to stay and finish the job while the voters were not told what his doctors knew. Bruenn's notes, the essay adds, were not published until 1970.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, I Want You F.D.R. Stay and Finish the Job!, 1944. Independent Voters' Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt; art by James Montgomery Flagg. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).

- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-195, NAID 513640, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026.

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/i-want-you-fdr-stay-and-finish-the-job-1944/