Eisenhower's cabinet on a 1953 Japanese-language poster

A Japanese-language poster filed with U.S. Information Agency posters distributed in Asia, catalog date 6 February 1953. Photographs of Eisenhower signing at a desk and of the House taking its oath sit beside nine cabinet portraits, and the text explains who chose whom (NAID 5730035).

What the sheet shows

The archive describes two photographs and nine portraits. In one photograph Dwight D. Eisenhower signs at a desk in front of a flag. In the other, members of the House of Representatives take the oath. Beside them sit the cabinet portraits, each with a small icon for the officer's department. Each name is printed in Japanese katakana with the title, and the English surname runs underneath.

米国の新政府

[...] 六千万のアメリカ有権者は、最近の選挙において数人の候補者の中から、一人の大統領と一人の副大統領、三十二名の上院議員及び四百三十五名の下院議員を同時に選出した。[...]

[Archive's English translation:] The New Government of the United States [...] Sixty million American voters recently, in an election, chose from among several candidates one president and one vice-president, and at the same time thirty-two senators and four hundred and thirty-five representatives. After being elected president, Mr. Eisenhower appointed the cabinet officers (heads of departments) who make up his cabinet.

Whose poster it was

The National Archives holds the sheet in Record Group 306, in the series of propaganda posters distributed in Asia (series NAID 1767935). The maker line names the U.S. Information Agency and, as its predecessor, the State Department's International Information and Educational Exchange Program. The transcription carries no agency name or imprint, and FRAME classes the source as blurred. The record gives no print run and no post.

A chain of consent, with the sender left off

FRAME tags it transfer: the ballot, the flag and the oath lend their authority to a new administration. That is a fair tag. It is also, for a propaganda poster, an unusually civic one. The text names no party and attacks no one. It explains a chain of consent: voters choose the president, the vice-president and members of Congress; the president then picks the department heads. A Japanese-language reader was told where the power came from, not only who held it.

The libertarian test is whether the reader knew who was talking. Here the answer is no. A poster praising elected government did not say on its face that a government had sent it. A 1956 sheet in the agency's files printed both 1956 tickets at the same size. The wider program is described on the USIA posters abroad hub, with the poster gallery.