That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth (1918), Joseph Pennell's Fourth Liberty Loan poster

Joseph Pennell's 1918 poster for the Fourth Liberty Loan shows lower Manhattan in flames under aircraft, a submarine in the harbor, and the Statue of Liberty broken with her head in the water. The words borrow the end of the Gettysburg Address and ask for one thing: buy Liberty Bonds.

What it shows

The view is from the water. The towers of lower Manhattan burn under an orange sky. Aircraft cross overhead. A submarine runs through the harbor. In the foreground the Statue of Liberty stands without her head, which lies in the water at her base. The text sits along the foot of the picture.

THAT LIBERTY SHALL NOT

PERISH FROM THE EARTH

BUY LIBERTY BONDS

FOURTH LIBERTY LOAN

Who made it

Joseph Pennell drew it for the Treasury's Fourth Liberty Loan, as FRAME records it; Pennell lived from 1857 to 1926. The image is the Library of Congress copy, LC-DIG-ppmsca-18343, public domain in the United States as a pre-1931 publication. The record gives no National Archives identifier. The printer's line names Ketterlinus of Philadelphia, and the archive reads "2-B" as an edition or plate number.

How to read it

The line is Lincoln's, altered. A 1917 loan sheet in the same archive, with Lincoln's profile on it, quotes the Gettysburg Address as written: "that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." Pennell's poster keeps the close of the sentence and puts "liberty" where Lincoln had put self-government. The change is small and it matters. Lincoln was talking about who governs. The poster is talking about a statue.

In FRAME's terms the sheet works by fear appeal and transfer. The picture asks the viewer to imagine an attack on New York and then offers a single remedy. The sheet gives no evidence that such an attack could happen; it does not need to, because the viewer supplies the fear. Compared with the "Hun" posters of the same year, such as Halt the Hun, it is restrained: there is no slur and no threatened mother, only a city and a symbol. It is still a frightening picture used to sell a loan.

Two things can be said for it. Pennell signed it, the loan is named on it, and nobody could mistake who was asking. And the image asks for money without asking anyone to hate a people.

The libertarian reading goes back to Lincoln's words. The liberty the Gettysburg Address defended was "government of the people," which includes the people's right to judge a war and to argue about it. In the year this poster was printed, the Sedition Act of 16 May 1918 reached "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the government. That record is on the wartime censorship case study.