Politics on Paper: Election Posters and Ephemera from The Wolfsonian–FIU Collection

September 24–October 26, 2012
The Wolfsonian–FIU @ 1001 Washington Avenue

In election campaigns today, candidates and parties rely on electronic media to deliver their messages, and no major campaign can succeed without strategies for television and radio advertisements, websites, and social media. Before the Second World War, however, candidates for office depended on other modes of mass communication to reach large numbers of voters. Posters—inexpensive to produce and display in public places, where they would be seen by thousands of people daily—were a particularly important instrument of political conflict during the early twentieth century.

Politics on Paper, presented on the occasion of the 2012 presidential election, featured election posters and other political ephemera from the United States and Europe between 1918 and 1945, all drawn from the museum’s collection and that of the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Study Centre. Many of the posters and other items in this installation used graphic strategies widely employed by propaganda agencies during the First World War (1914–1918): the visual demonization of opponents, the use of symbolically meaningful color, and the manipulation of scale to indicate strength and weakness. Political Advertisement VII (1952–2008), a compilation of American television campaign spots by Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese, raised intriguing parallels between U.S. presidential politics of the past and today’s political discourse. As the works demonstrated, election campaigns after the war adopted these and other means to command the attention of viewers and present them with vivid, simple, and stirring narratives of conflict between good and bad, friend and enemy.