Joe Dope Isn't Bughouse or Lazy, an Army Ordnance verse about a brake line

Joe Dope isn't bughouse or lazy is a 1944 Ordnance Department poster for U.S. Army soldiers. A truck and trailer jackknife into a utility pole and throw a military policeman over the trailer, under a rhyming verse about a brake-line connection that needed fixing (NAID 514694).

The crash and the verse

The archive describes a cartoon wreck. A truck pulling a trailer has folded into a jackknife and struck a utility pole, and a military policeman is thrown over the trailer. With it runs a rhyming verse, with a footnote that spells out an abbreviation and a command after it.

Joe Dope isn't bug-
house or lazy,
When he stopped...the
trailer went crazy,
The brake line connection,
Merely needed correction,
On vital P.M.* ...he's
quite hazy.

* Preventive
Maintenance

Don't be a dope!

HANDLE
EQUIPMENT
RIGHT

[signature: ORDNANCE]

[imprint:] U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1944-O-62235

An army talking to itself

The issuer is the Ordnance Department of the U.S. Army, and the sheet signs off simply "ORDNANCE." The archive lists the audience as the Army's own forces and the purpose as to warn or inform. The Government Printing Office job number dates the printing to 1944. The record says nothing about how many copies were made.

That audience sets this sheet apart from the home-front posters. It does not ask civilians to buy, save, enlist, or keep quiet. It is a service telling the men who drive its trucks to check the brakes.

Name-calling as a teaching tool

Fear appeal and name-calling are the record's tags. Both are present and both are mild. The fear is the wreck, with a military policeman sent flying. The name is "dope," and the reader is told not to be one. A comic rhyme carries the instruction, and the instruction is concrete: one connection, one correction.

This is the kind of persuasion a reader can judge on its merits. The claim is specific, the fix is named, and the speaker is identified. Compare the sheets in the Roosevelt administration essay that asked civilians for silence or for hatred; those asked for something far harder to check. A soldier told to inspect his brake line can look at it himself.

For another 1944 sheet addressed to people doing war work rather than to the general public, see the Army's Stay on the Job to Finish the Job.