Saving Daylight! (1918), a United Cigar Stores cartoon that sets the clock for the war

Saving Daylight! is a 1918 poster from the United Cigar Stores Company. A cartoon Uncle Sam wakes in bed while figures labelled Germany and Austria already work at a forge, and the caption asks him when he will wake up. NARA RG 4 copy.

The cartoon

Uncle Sam is stretching awake in bed, in the archive's description. Through his window, caricatured figures labelled Germany and Austria are already at work at a forge in the morning sun. Outside stands a clock in a soldier's hat, labelled with the extra hour. The caption speaks to Uncle Sam directly.

SAVING DAYLIGHT!

"SET THE CLOCK AHEAD ONE HOUR AND WIN THE WAR!"

[Within the picture:] GERMANY / AUSTRIA / MIDDLE EUROPE / ONE HOUR OF EXTRA DAYLIGHT / U.S.

UNCLE SAM, YOUR ENEMIES HAVE BEEN UP AND ARE AT WORK ON THE EXTRA HOUR OF DAYLIGHT -- WHEN WILL YOU WAKE UP ?

United Cigar Stores Company

(3) [circled number, lower left]

[Artist's monogram, right of the picture: illegible]

A shop chain on the clock

The issuer is a business. The record classes the United Cigar Stores Company as a corporation, the audience as the domestic public, and the purpose as "Mobilize or secure compliance." The themes are the home front, war and the military, and economy and finance. The artist's monogram cannot be read. The National Archives copy is in Record Group 4, the Food Administration's World War I Posters series (NAID 512439), local identifier 4-P-251.

What it claims

The archive tags fear appeal and name-calling. The joke has an edge: the enemy is industrious and awake, the American still in bed. Turning a clock forward becomes a measure of whether a citizen is serious about the war. The sheet does not explain how one hour wins anything, and it does not say whether the change is a law, a request, or a local custom. It names no public office at all.

That gap matters. A private company is free to urge its customers to back the war, and this one signed its name. When the same pressure arrives with no statute named, a reader cannot tell what is asked of him and what is required. The World War I home-front hub sorts the period's Food Administration, Liberty Loan and recruiting posters by issuing office. A later private poster in the archive, J. P. Seeburg's 1942 Save Your Scraps, also turned a war request into a cartoon, that one built on an ethnic slur.