We Have Gas... If You Have Legally Issued Coupons, Properly Endorsed is a 1944 Office of Price Administration card for filling stations. It has no picture, only type, and ends on a black bar asking customers to "help us smash the black market" (NAID 513627).
All type, no picture
This is a card for the counter of a filling station, and it is made of words alone. The archive records no illustration. The opening promise is qualified in the next line, and a line set on a black bar turns the condition into a request.
WE
HAVE GAS...
...IF you have
legally issued coupons,
properly endorsed
PLEASE HELP US SMASH THE BLACK MARKET !
[imprint:] OFFICE OF PRICE ADMINISTRATION
[imprint:] U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1944-O-599617
[imprint:] Form No. 302-826, 7-44
Who speaks, and to whom
The Office of Price Administration's name is on it, with a form number and a Government Printing Office job number from 1944. The "we" on the card, though, is the station. A federal agency wrote the words and the dealer was to put them up as his own. The archive files the audience as the domestic public and the purpose as mobilizing compliance, under home-front and economic themes.
That arrangement is the most interesting thing about the card. The card's own wording treats the coupon as a legal requirement, not a favour. It goes further and enlists the dealer to say so to his customers, in the first person, and then enlists the customer too: "help us." Enforcement of a federal rule becomes a request between neighbours at the pump.
The label
The archive notes that the technique here is faint and comes closest to name-calling, in the phrase "black market." The phrase sorts every sale outside the coupon system into one criminal category. A forged coupon and a private bargain between a willing buyer and seller would both fall under it. The card does not distinguish them.
Whether wartime fuel rationing was wise is a fair argument. What the card shows is how it was carried out: by asking private businesses to speak for the agency, and private customers to police one another. The dealer and the driver could both ignore the request. The coupon rule itself they could not ignore.
Other price and rationing sheets on this site: Rationing Safeguards Your Share (1942), Rationing Means a Fair Share for All of Us (1943), and Don't Feed Black Market Greed (1946).
Sources
- FRAME object record, We Have Gas... If You Have Legally Issued Coupons, Properly Endorsed, 1944. Office of Price Administration. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-181, NAID 513627, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026.
