World War II Propoganda Posters
As Generation Y students are particularly attuned to visual culture, the images we present as teachers are likely to have a much more powerful and lasting impact than our words. World War II propaganda demonstrates the changing image of Asians in America especially well. The following posters produced by the Office for Emergency Management’s War Production Board and Office of War Information provide a strong sense of how racialized notions of the enemy “Japs” circulated through American popular culture.
The point that needs to be driven home is that the United States rationalized the mass internment of Japanese Americans by upholding an ethnoracial basis of suspicion. American fear of a Japanese “sneak attack” and resentment of Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor may have been unavoidable in early 1942, but what must be explained is why over 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry should have been indiscriminately subjected to exclusion and internment.
These wartime images should also be placed into a broader context. Before World War II, Japan’s military and political power helped to elevate the social status of Japanese immigrants above that of Chinese in America. However, with American propaganda stressing the importance of China as an ally during the war, new domestic measures were taken to combat discrimination against Chinese Americans. Furthermore, Filipinos had been portrayed as savages in need of domestication at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair—a celebration of colonization and manifest destiny. But American wartime propaganda depicted Filipinos as modern, democratic people fighting alongside Uncle Sam.
“Work as Hard and Fast as a Jap” Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.
“Japs Execute Doolittle Men” Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.
“Jap Trap” Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.
“Tokio Kid” Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.
“Whack the Jap” Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.
“Chinese: This Man Is Your Friend” Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.