People Who Stand on Swivel Chairs End Up in Wheel Chairs is V.A. Poster 5-4, a 1946 Veterans Administration office-safety sheet signed WB. A woman topples backward off a rolling chair as a filing cabinet and a stack of books tip over beside her (NAID 515172).
The sheet
An office worker in a dark dress has climbed onto a swivel chair, and the chair has rolled. In the archive's description she is falling backward while a filing cabinet and a pile of books tip over next to her. The headline does the rest with a rhyme on "chairs."
PEOPLE WHO
STAND ON SWIVEL CHAIRS
END UP IN WHEEL CHAIRS
[signature: WB]
[imprint: V.A. POSTER 5-4]
[imprint: VETERANS ADMINISTRATION, WASHINGTON D.C.]
[imprint: U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1946-O-693787]
Who issued it
The imprint names the Veterans Administration in Washington and numbers the sheet V.A. Poster 5-4. The subject is a filing-room accident, which suggests a poster meant for offices rather than for the public, though the record does not say where copies hung. The artist signed only with initials, WB, and the record gives no fuller name.
Fear with a laugh
The archive tags the sheet as a fear appeal: a comic picture paired with a stated consequence. The consequence is stark. A wheel chair is not a bruise, and the rhyme makes a serious injury sound like the natural end of a silly habit. That is exaggeration in service of a sensible point. Nobody's rights are at stake when a poster tells office workers to use a stepladder.
The sheet is worth keeping beside the louder material in the collection because it shows the same tools at a low setting. A government office used a joke, a fall, and a frightening last word to change behavior, and here the behavior was standing on furniture. The method is the same one that, on other posters, was aimed at enemies, neighbors, or shoppers.
Other postwar federal sheets on this site include the Veterans' Housing Program poster Homecoming - To No Home? and the Federal Housing Administration card Ask Us About FHA Loans to Remodel for Veterans, both from 1946. The Office of Price Administration's Sucker! sheet from the same year aims the same mix of mockery and warning at shoppers.
Sources
- FRAME object record, People who stand on swivel chairs end up in wheel chairs, 1946. Veterans Administration (artist: WB).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, NAID 515172, local id 44-PA-1507, catalog record, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
