2Other donors included Local #4 of the Amalgamated Lithographers of America, the New York City Works Progress Administration, and Sheldon Claire Company, a manufacturer of employee motivational materials.
11As one U.S. Office of War Information official put it, "We want to see posters on fences, on the walls of buildings, on village greens, on boards in front of the City Hall and the Post Office, in hotel lobbies, in the windows of vacant stores--not limited to the present neat conventional frames which make them look like advertising, but shouting at people from unexpected places with all the urgency which this war demands." "Ideally," another confirmed, "it should be possible to post America every night. People should wake up to find a visual message everywhere, like new snow--every man, woman, and child should be reached and moved by the message."
12At the local level, OWI arranged distribution through volunteer defense councils, whose members selected appropriate posting places, established posting routes, ordered posters from supply catalogs, and took the "Poster Pledge." The "Poster Pledge" urged volunteers to "avoid waste," treat posters "as real war ammunition," "never let a poster lie idle," and "make every one count to the fullest extent."
27In January 1942, the advertising industry offered its services to the government. The newly organized War Advertising Council, made up of leading Madison Avenue advertising agencies, national advertisers, and mass-media outlets, placed its members' staff and facilities at the disposal of any and all government information agencies. At the behest of Charles J. LaRoche, War Advertising Council chairman and vice president of Young & Rubicam, Inc., the graphics bureau of the government's Office of Facts and Figures (OFF) set up a National Advisory Council on Government Posters composed of prominent advertising-agency art directors.
51The government agencies and businesses that created these images did so not to celebrate a new working relationship, but to overcome deep-seated problems in defense factories that threatened conversion to wartime production. Government planners hoped that through public-relation campaigns that relied heavily on posters, they would create an atmosphere of urgency, participation, and factory discipline.
58Many of the nation's largest industrial corporations engaged their unions in public-relations contests leading to claims and counterclaims. The case of General Motors (GM) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) was significant, because many businesses followed the tenor and tone of GM's public- and employee-relations practices. In the spring of 1942, GM learned that the UAW had prepared an advertisement attributing the auto industry's war-production achievements to labor, and specifically to UAW's plan for wartime conversion. Literally overnight GM prepared an advertisement entitled "Good News from the Production Front" that ran nationally the next day. The GM advertisement undercut the UAW's claim and set in motion the company's wartime public relations campaign. GM's advertisement sought to erase from public memory the corporation's reluctant support of early defense efforts by demonstrating its willingness to sacrifice all for the war. Campbell-Ewald, the advertising agency that prepared the response and advised GM during the war, proudly summed up its wartime approach in 1950: "The paradox created is this: That by generous cooperation with government and skillful attunement to the popularized sentiments, business helps government in the long run to defeat itself in the continuing effort to control business.
74To help facilitate a new era of labor-management relations, on March 2, 1942, Donald M. Nelson, director of the War Production Board, called for companies to voluntarily establish joint labor-management committees. Nelson opposed giving union leaders a role in industrial planning. He did, however, reluctantly accept the idea that labor could play a part in increasing productivity. The labor-management committees were to focus on increasing production on the shop floor, encouraging suggestions from workers, eliminating rejects, advocating conservation, reducing absenteeism, and promoting tool care and safety. About five thousand companies registered committees, covering about seven million employees, but many of these met only once or twice. Approximately three thousand committees actually functioned at a time. About half limited their activities to bond drives and war propaganda, and only a small number actually met to improve production.
In promoting these committees, T.K. Quinn, Director General of the War Production Drive, tied their existence to larger American principles and war aims. "To deny this opportunity is in effect to deny the principles of freedom and democracy." He went on to write: "A labor-management Committee in a Nazi or Jap factory is unthinkable as it is admirable in one of ours." To that the labor-management committee idea to businesses, Quinn repeatedly assured them that the committees would not encroach on managerial prerogatives. He stated, "Any talk or fear of labor wanting to replace management is largely nonsense.
78Although new cooperative relationships in industry between management and labor helped to win the war, American business leaders successfully resisted lasting efforts to restructure basic relationships in the workplace. While 80 percent of the managers felt that the labor-management committees had helped in the war effort, fewer than 10 percent retained them by 1948.