The State of This Nation Is Good is OWI Poster No. 40, printed in 1943. A text-only dark blue sheet sets four lines from Franklin D. Roosevelt's message to Congress of January 7, 1943, under a small eagle-and-shield emblem (NAID 515478).
What the poster prints
There is no picture beyond a small eagle and shield. The archive describes a dark blue sheet carrying four parallel lines of type, credited to the President and dated.
...the state of this nation is good
the heart of this nation is sound
the spirit of this nation is strong
the faith of this nation is eternal.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
from his message to Congress, January 7, 1943
OWI Poster No. 40. Additional copies may be obtained upon request from the Division of Public Inquiries, Office of War Information, Washington, D. C.
[imprint: U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1943—O—507621]
Who issued it
The Office of War Information printed it as No. 40. The words are Roosevelt's, attributed on the sheet to his message to Congress of January 7, 1943. The opening ellipsis is on the poster itself: the OWI lifted four lines out of a longer address. This page quotes only what the sheet prints and has not compared it to the full text of the message.
How to read it
The archive tags it as glittering generalities and testimonial, and the fit is exact. Good, sound, strong, eternal: none of the four can be tested, and none is meant to be. The President's name supplies the authority.
The more interesting fact is the form. A constitutional report, the one the President owes Congress on the state of the Union, was cut down to a slogan and hung on walls by an executive agency. The message itself went to the legislature, which could question it. The poster went to the public, with the questions left out. That is not sinister; presidents have always quoted themselves. It is a small example of how the wartime executive spoke past the other branches to the people directly, and a citizen reading it should remember where the original words were addressed.
For the President's best-known wartime phrases in poster form, see the Four Freedoms page and Rockwell's Freedom of Speech. The Office of War Information hub and the Why We Fight case study show other ways the administration explained the war. The Roosevelt administration essay reads the president's own words, from the first fireside chat on, beside the offices that carried them.
Sources
- FRAME object record, The state of this nation is good, 1943. Office of War Information (OWI Poster No. 40). Text attributed on the sheet to Franklin D. Roosevelt, message to Congress, January 7, 1943.
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, NAID 515478, local id 44-PA-1800, catalog record, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
