A Think American poster puts spy orders in the mouths of three dictators

A Think American Institute poster catalogued at 1941, signed C X R Miller and copyrighted by Kelly-Read and Co. of Rochester, quotes "Divide labor and management, turn class against class and spread religious hatred" as orders signed by Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini, over a submarine landing men by boat (NAID 515143).

The scene

A submarine in silhouette, a swastika on its conning tower, puts men and a box ashore in a rubber boat. Over it hangs a white sheet with red script, set out like a written order. Three signatures close it.

Our enemies' orders to their spies in the U.S.A.

"Divide labor and management, turn class against class and spread religious hatred"

A. Hitler / Hirohito / B. Mussolini

FIGHT un-American propaganda

[imprint:] THINKAMERICAN REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. No. 157 - COPYRIGHT - KELLY-READ & CO., ROCHESTER, N.Y. THINKAMERICAN INSTITUTE

[signature:] C X R MILLER

Whose words are these?

The poster prints a sentence in quotation marks and signs it with three names. It cites no document, speech or date, and the FRAME record does not identify a source. The archive describes it as a text credited to the three leaders and presented as spy orders. This page cannot confirm that any of them wrote or said it, and a reader should not treat it as a quotation until someone shows where it comes from.

The archive tags fear appeal and transfer. The landing party supplies the fear. The borrowed form of a signed order lends the sentence an authority it has not earned.

The risk in the label

The message is that division at home serves the enemy. Some of that is fair. Espionage was a grave crime, as the text-only espionage-law poster in the same file warns. But the three things the sheet names are labor disputes, arguments between classes, and religious quarrels. Those are also what a free country argues about every day. A poster that files them under "un-American propaganda" invites a reader to hear a union meeting or a sermon as an enemy operation. The sheet asks for vigilance and names no law, and it carries a private firm's copyright, but the label it teaches can outlast the war. The labor case study shows a 1918 cartoon that put a union in the same sack as spies and traitors; this poster's sentence works the same way.

The maker

The imprint numbers the sheet 157 in the Think American series and carries a Kelly-Read & Co. copyright. The archive's rights line nonetheless records it as a U.S. government work; the record does not explain the difference. Another sheet from the same series has a page here: the pay-check poster, also signed by Miller.