When You Ride Alone You Ride with Hitler!
Office of Price Administration (US)1943
When You Ride Alone You Ride with Hitler! is a 1943 public-information poster (offset lithograph) for Office of Price Administration.
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The line
When you ride alone you ride with Hitler!
Why it works
A government request to share car journeys, turned into a ghost story in a single frame. Weimer Pursell's 1943 design for the Office of Price Administration shows a well-dressed man driving his open-top car alone, except that the passenger seat holds a ghostly white outline of Adolf Hitler. The copy spells out the logic: "When you ride ALONE you ride with Hitler! Join a car-sharing club today!" The background was a genuine shortage. Japan's advance had cut the United States off from the rubber plantations of Southeast Asia, gasoline was rationed, and every half-empty car was using up tyres and fuel the military needed. The poster turns a private habit into unwitting collaboration with the enemy without showing the enemy doing anything at all. The National Archives features it in the rationing and conservation section of its Powers of Persuasion exhibition. It is studied as a vivid fear-and-guilt appeal applied to an everyday behaviour.
Techniques
- Visual metaphor A ghostly outline of Hitler in the empty passenger seat turns driving alone into riding with the enemy.
- Fear appeal Equating a half-empty car with collaboration makes wasting scarce fuel and tyres feel like helping the enemy win.
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