Rationing Means a Fair Share for All of Us is a 1943 Office of Price Administration poster. Two panels contrast a grocery "without rationing," where a well-dressed shopper carries off a box of cans, with one "with rationing," where the grocer serves two women alike (NAID 515275).
Two panels, one argument
The poster is a before-and-after. In the archive's description the top panel, labeled "without rationing," shows a woman in a fur-collared coat walking off with a carton of canned goods while the grocer and a second customer watch, worried. The lower panel, "with rationing," shows the grocer smiling as he hands cans to both women. The slogan sits between them.
WITHOUT RATIONING
Rationing means
a fair share for all of us
WITH RATIONING
Office of Price Administration
Washington, D. C.
[imprint: U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1943—O—514175]
Who issued it
The Office of Price Administration in Washington signs the sheet. The record names no artist. The archive also holds a cartoon version of the same slogan as a separate object.
How to read it
The archive tags the method as card stacking and bandwagon, and both fit. The fur collar does a lot of quiet work. It tells the viewer who the hoarder is before anyone reads a word, and it casts the program as protection for ordinary shoppers against a richer one. "All of us" then folds the reader into the side of the smiling panel.
The fairness case for rationing in a supply shortage is a real argument. The poster does not make that argument, though. It shows a single scene that favors the program and leaves out everything else: the ration board, the coupons, the rules on what grocers could sell and at what price, and the black markets that other 1943 government sheets in the same archive warn about. Rationing was a government program with legal force, not a neighborly agreement. A reader can grant that wartime scarcity was real and still notice that the sheet presents compulsion as courtesy.
For other home-front sheets of the year, see Use It Up, Wear It Out and Save Waste Fats for Explosives, and the Office of War Information hub. Rationing posters came from one corner of a large war government; the Roosevelt administration essay describes the rest, censorship office and exclusion order included.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Rationing means a fair share for all of us, 1943. Office of Price Administration.
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, NAID 515275, local id 44-PA-1610, catalog record, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
