Stamp out black markets... with your ration stamps is a 1943 U.S. government poster with no agency named. A giant thumb presses down on a red "A" ration stamp while a scowling green-skinned man in a green suit tumbles off its edge, over "Pay no more than legal prices" (NAID 515474).
Thumb, stamp and marketeer
A huge thumb presses down on a red ration stamp marked "A." Falling off the stamp's edge is a scowling man with green skin in a green suit, the black marketeer of the slogan. The words are a pun on "stamp" and a rule about prices.
Stamp Out
BLACK MARKETS
...WITH YOUR RATION STAMPS
PAY NO MORE THAN LEGAL PRICES
[on the stamp: A]
[imprint: U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1943—O—530806]
[imprint: 422—154]
An unsigned government sheet
No office is named on the sheet. It carries a Government Printing Office job number from 1943 and a second printed number, shown in the transcription above, that the record does not explain. The archive lists the issuer as the U.S. government, the audience as the domestic public, and the purpose as securing compliance. The National Archives holds it in the World War II Posters series of Record Group 44. No artist or print run is recorded.
Who the villain is
The archive tags name-calling, here done by caricature, and transfer from the ration stamp. The black marketeer is drawn as a green, scowling outsider, a figure nobody would mistake for a neighbor or a grocer. The stamp, a government document, becomes the weapon that knocks him down, and the shopper's thumb does the work.
The poster asks for two things: use your stamps, and pay no more than the legal price. Both were rules of a controlled wartime market, and the sheet treats compliance as civic action. What it does not show is the buyer. Every black-market sale needs one, and the sheet casts the shopper only as the enforcer. Drawing the seller as an inhuman figure makes the problem look like a few villains rather than a set of rules that some people chose to evade. Where the reading is open, this site takes the one that names the power involved: a legal price and a ration stamp meant the state was setting the terms of ordinary buying, and the poster asks citizens to enforce those terms themselves.
The Office of Price Administration made the fairness case directly in Rationing Means a Fair Share for All of Us and Rationing Safeguards Your Share. Its 1946 sheet Don't Feed Black Market Greed turned the marketeer into a giant mouth.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Stamp out black markets with your ration stamps. Pay no more than legal prices, 1943. U.S. government (issuer not named; Government Printing Office imprint).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, NAID 515474, local id 44-PA-1796, catalog record, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
