Produce for Victory! is a 1942 color photographic plant poster published by The Sheldon-Claire Co. of Chicago. An unnamed worker's quotation says the Bill of Rights makes Americans free men and that guns, tanks, planes and ships will keep them that way (NAID 515234).
What the sheet prints
The top half is a photograph of a lined, sun-worn face under a brimmed hat, the man in a plaid work shirt. Behind him the printer set a red-orange field of riveted steel plate. Under the picture is a sentence in quotation marks, and under that the order the series is named for.
"Our Bill of Rights says we are free men. Our guns, tanks, planes and ships say . . . we're going to remain free men!"
PRODUCE FOR VICTORY!
Copyright 1942 - The Sheldon-Claire Co., 520 North Michigan Ave., Chicago
Lithographed in U.S.A. Form No. 21
Who published it
The imprint names a private Chicago lithographer, not a federal office. Sheldon-Claire sold plant posters, and this one is "Form No. 21." The National Archives now files it with the World War II posters in Record Group 44. The archive's rights line calls it a public-domain U.S. government work, while the sheet itself prints a 1942 commercial copyright. This page reports both and does not settle which governs.
The quotation names no speaker, and the FRAME record does not supply one. The words are presented as the worker's own, but nothing on the sheet says who he was or whether he said them. Several other 1942 sheets in the archive carry the same "Produce for Victory!" headline.
How to read it
The first sentence is accurate. The Bill of Rights is a written list of things government may not do to a citizen, and in 1942 it was in force. The second sentence moves the guarantee from law to hardware. Weapons can keep a foreign army off American soil. They do not keep a citizen's own government inside its limits; courts, juries, a free press and elections do that work.
That gap was not theoretical in 1942. That April, an Army command ordered people of Japanese ancestry out of part of San Francisco by posted notice (the exclusion order). Output did not protect them. A reader can admire the worker, accept the production drive, and still notice that the poster's logic hands the Bill of Rights to the arsenal.
Related pages: the Four Freedoms posters, which make a similar appeal to founding ideas, and the Office of War Information poster index for the federal side of the same year.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Produce for Victory!, 1942. The Sheldon-Claire Co., Chicago. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-1569, NAID 515234, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026.
