Wake Up, America! Civilization Calls Every Man, Woman and Child!
Mayor's Committee on National Defense, New York1917
“Wake Up, America! Civilization Calls Every Man, Woman and Child!” is a 1917 poster (colour lithograph) for Mayor's Committee on National Defense, New York.
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The line
Wake up, America!
Why it works
The United States declared war on 6 April 1917, and thirteen days later New York staged "Wake Up, America" Day with this poster by James Montgomery Flagg. Rather than a soldier or a pointing finger, Flagg painted Columbia, the female personification of the nation, asleep in a stars-and-stripes gown and a liberty cap while dark storm clouds gather behind her. The persuasion is a rebuke: the country is dozing, the headline is the alarm, and the call goes out to every man, woman and child, not only to men of fighting age. The Library of Congress's exhibition caption records that the actress Mary Arthur posed for Columbia and reads the fluted column she leans on as a nod to classical civilisation. It is studied as a model of allegory in advertising, compressing a national argument into one sleeping figure, and of a call to action addressed to an entire society. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco describe it as a general appeal to mobilise, equating liberty with civilisation.
Techniques
- Visual metaphor A sleeping Columbia stands for a dozing nation, so the single image carries the argument that America must wake up.
- Transfer Stars and stripes, a liberty cap and a classical column borrow the prestige of nation, liberty and civilisation for the call to mobilise.
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