Keep'em Green, a 1946 forest-fire poster from the Forest Service and Washington State

Keep'em Green is a 1946 fire-prevention poster signed by Bergen and issued jointly by the U.S. Forest Service and the Keep Washington Green Committee. It shows mountains, lake, pines, and a stag, and asks for the reader's care rather than warning of a fire (NAID 514776).

What the sheet prints

This is a landscape first and a message second. A snow-covered range rises behind a lake and tall pines. A stag stands in the foreground. The only hint of danger is a small camp with a thin line of smoke, and that line splits the title in two.

keep'em green

Your care will help PREVENT FOREST FIRES

U. S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service

State of Washington Keep Washington Green Committee

Two issuers on one sheet

The credit line names a federal agency and a state committee side by side: the Forest Service of the Department of Agriculture, and the Keep Washington Green Committee of the State of Washington. The printing was done by the federal Government Printing Office. A reader in 1946 saw a national agency and a home-state group making the same request.

How to read it

The archive tags it with glittering generalities and plain folks, and notes that the technique is faint. Most of the persuasion is in the painting. The sheet shows what would be lost and lets the viewer do the arithmetic. The words make the request personal with "your care," and they do not threaten or blame. Compare the same year's OPA black-market sheet, which picks a villain; this one picks a view.

Fire prevention is about as uncontroversial as public messaging gets. The liberty question here is small: the poster asks for voluntary care on land the public shares and names no rule or penalty. It is a useful baseline for judging the harder sheets in this collection, because it shows that a government poster can ask for something without inventing an enemy to ask against.