"Special Delivery for Freedom!", Charles Alston's merchant seaman for Maritime Day 1944

"Special Delivery for Freedom!" is a 1944 Office of War Information pencil drawing by Charles Alston for Maritime Day, May 22, 1944. A giant bare-chested merchant seaman points ahead behind the bow of a ship marked "U.S. Merchant Marine," with the Statue of Liberty at left (NAID 535660).

The drawing

This is a pencil drawing. The archive describes a merchant seaman drawn at giant scale, bare-chested, pointing forward from behind the bow of a ship. The ship carries the name of the service. The Statue of Liberty stands at the left. The lettering names the day the drawing was made for.

"SPECIAL DELIVERY FOR FREEDOM!"

MARITIME DAY

MAY 22 - 1944

U.S. MERCHANT MARINE

Where it sits in the record

The record credits the Office of War Information and names the artist as Charles Alston. The National Archives keeps it in Record Group 208, the records of that office, in a series of artworks and mockups for cartoons promoting the war effort. The archive classes the medium as a cartoon and the issuer as the state, aimed at the domestic public, under war, labor, and home-front themes.

The record does not say which papers, if any, printed the drawing, or how many people saw it. This page does not claim a circulation it cannot show.

Cargo and a statue

The archive tags transfer and glittering generalities. The statue and the word "freedom" are attached to a ship and its crew, and the cargo becomes a parcel addressed to liberty itself. The title is a postal joke with a serious point: in the drawing's terms, the merchant ships were the delivery service of the war.

Of the two tags, transfer is the gentler charge here. The drawing honors a group of workers on a day set aside for them, and it puts the national symbol next to people who were doing the work it describes. The glittering generality is the bigger word: "freedom" is the cargo, and the drawing does not say whose freedom or of what kind. For a Maritime Day tribute, that is a small fault.

The Office of War Information hub and the domestic branch case study cover the office whose files hold this drawing. A Navy sheet of the same year built around a landing ship is Deliver for "D" Day!