Remember Your First Thrill of American Liberty (1917), a Second Liberty Loan appeal to immigrants

A 1917 Treasury poster for the Second Liberty Loan shows immigrant families on a ship's deck looking toward the Statue of Liberty. The caption asks them to remember that moment, then names their duty: buy United States Government bonds.

What the sheet prints

A crowded deck: families with bundles and children, faces turned toward the statue in the harbor. The words are few, and the order matters. The memory comes first, then the duty, then the loan.

Remember Your First Thrill of

AMERICAN LIBERTY

YOUR DUTY - Buy

United States Government Bonds

2nd Liberty Loan of 1917

Who made it

The archive's maker line reads U.S. Treasury Department, Second Liberty Loan, 1917; FRAME classes the source as openly identified. The National Archives copy is in Record Group 4, World War I Posters (series NAID 512439), catalog item 512676, local identifier 4-P-238. The printer named on the sheet is the Sackett & Wilhelms Corporation of New York. The record does not explain the "No 9" at lower left. No artist is named in the record.

How to read it

The poster speaks to a particular reader: someone who arrived by ship and remembers it. The same picture, a crowd at the rail and the statue ahead, was used that year by the Food Administration in Food Will Win the War, which the archive holds in a Yiddish printing and an English one titled "You Came Here Seeking Freedom." Two agencies reached for one image of the newcomer and asked him for two different things.

The techniques FRAME assigns are transfer and glittering generalities. The statue and the word Liberty carry the weight; the loan's terms do not appear at all. Set it beside All About Liberty Bonds from the first drive, which was nothing but terms, and the contrast is plain.

There is something generous in the sheet. It tells immigrants that the liberty they saw from the deck belongs to them, and that they have a share in defending it. In 1917 that was not a message every official was sending. The president had told Congress in 1915 that some citizens "born under other flags" had poured "the poison of disloyalty" into the country's life, and from October 1917 the Trading with the Enemy Act made foreign-language papers file English translations of their war coverage or obtain a permit. Both facts, with sources, are on the Wilson administration page.

The objection, from the side of the citizen, is to one word, "duty." A Treasury loan is a fair thing to ask of any resident, but it is an offer with terms, and the sheet prints none of them. What it prints instead is an obligation. The poster threatens no one. It does make a purchase the proof of belonging, addressed to the readers whose loyalty other officials were questioning.