Illustration, War and the Military in

Illustration, War and the Military in. What distinguishes art from illustration has long been a vexing problem, but it is less a judgment of relative quality than ultimate purpose. As the famous American illustrator Norman Rockwell pointed out, “The illustrator has, unlike the painter, a primary interest in telling a story.” Illustration in addition is almost always commissioned, and its ultimate purpose is reproduction and dissemination.

War and the military have long been subjects for both artists and illustrators. In the Revolutionary era, Paul Revere's widely disseminated engraving of the Boston Massacre of 1770 helped inflame public opinion. In 1775, Amos Doolittle (1754–1832) issued contemporary en gravings on the battles of Lexington and Concord; Bernard Romans did the same for the Battle of Bunker Hill. During the Revolution, the Continental army used illustrations on recruiting posters (usually showing sharply dressed professional soldiers going through the manual of arms).

By the War of 1812, hand‐colored engravings publicized U.S. naval victories in the Atlantic and on Lakes Erie and Champlain, the burning of the nation's capital, the successful resistance of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor, and Andrew Jackson's victory in New Orleans.

In the early nineteenth century, wood‐block engraving was increasingly displaced for producing inexpensive “news” and “history” prints for the general public by lithography, a process in which the illustration was drawn in reverse with crayon on a porous stone plate, which produced much finer gradations and values than sharp‐line wood‐block engraving. The most noted firm, Currier & Ives (initiated by Nathaniel Currier in 1834 and joined by James Ives in 1852), issued “news” prints of American military conflicts from the Mexican War to the Spanish‐American War. They issued thousands of copies of some 100 different prints of Civil War battles. Since the firm never sent any artists into the field, but relied upon newspaper accounts for their research, the prints have little value as firsthand visual accounts of particular battles. However, they did have considerable impact upon large numbers of Northerners as Union propaganda; the legends described every battle as a Union victory, regardless of the true outcome.

By the mid‐nineteenth century, photography began to emerge as a competitor in disseminating to the public scenes of war and the military (for example, the Civil War photographs of the teams headed by Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner). But the slow exposure time for photographic plates of the period made it impossible for cameras to capture action except as a blur.

It was artist‐illustrators as well as photographers who made the Civil War the most visually documented war up to that time. Developments in printing had led to new weekly and monthly illustrated magazines such as Harper's, Frank Leslie's, and Century, which sent teams of “visual reporters” to accompany the Union army on its campaigns. Among those sending back on‐the‐spot drawings of camp life and combat to the Northern magazines and weekly newspapers were Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Edwin Forbes (1839–1895), James E. Taylor (1839–1901), and Alfred R. Waud (1828–1891). Conrad Wise Chapman (1842–1910) was one of the well‐regarded illustrators on the Confederate side. In the 1880s, as nostalgia set in, there was another outpouring of Civil War battle illustrations, such as the famous Kurz and Allison thirty‐six–print set Battles of the Civil War and in the heavily illustrated four‐volume series Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.

Beginning in the late 1890s, the new photomechanical process of halftone printing contributed to an astounding growth of illustrated mass‐market newspapers and magazines. Sensationalist New York newspapers such as William Randolph Hearst's Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's World sent artist‐illustrators to Cuba to cover the Spanish‐American War, among them Frederic Remington (1861–1909), William Glackens (1870–1938), and the noted marine artist and naval officer, Henry Reuterdahl (1871–1925).

It was World War I, however, that expanded the wartime role of American illustrators, particularly via the medium of the poster. Emerging in France in the 1890s as a major commercial force through the combination of art and lithography, the large‐scale poster became widely used as a means for informing and persuading the urban masses. During World War I, all the belligerents employed posters for mobilization, not simply to recruit for the armed forces but also to encourage the public to buy war bonds, increase munitions production, conserve food, hate the enemy, and support the war effort. To mobilize public opinion when the United States entered the war in 1917, the Wilson administration created a Committee on Public Information, which in turn formed a Division of Pictorial Publicity headed by noted artist Charles Dana Gibson (1867–1944), president of the Society of Illustrators. Gibson obtained the services of some of the most famous illustrators, who worked almost exclusively in hand‐prepared, full‐color commercial lithography. Among them were Howard Chandler Christy (1873–1952), Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874–1951), Joseph Pennell (1860–1926), Edward Penfield (1866–1925), and James Montgomery Flagg (1877–1960), whose self‐image as “Uncle Sam” pointedly declaring: “I Want You for U.S. Army” is perhaps the best‐known poster in American history. The armed services also commissioned combat artists to record the war.

By World War II, motion picture and still photographers had taken over production of most of the visual record of war and the military for newspapers, magazines, and movie theaters. Nevertheless, well‐known artist‐illustrators continued to work in the field, including Flagg, Reuterdahl, and Leyendecker, who had produced such notable posters in World War I. Others like Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) produced both posters, such as his famous Four Freedoms series, and magazine illustrations, such as his well‐known Saturday Evening Post cover of “Rosie the Riveter.” Mead Schaeffer (1898–1980) did a series of action covers for that magazine to characterize personnel from the particular branches of the armed services; Noel Nickles (1911–1982) did a similar series for Life magazine. Walt Disney (1901–1966) contributed his artists' efforts in many ways, including the design of some 1,200 unit insignias. The armed forces also had combat artists, but the most widely reproduced battlefield illustrations were undoubtedly those of the bedraggled foxhole denizens “Willie” and “Joe,” in Bill Mauldin's cartoons for the army's overseas newspaper, Stars and Stripes.

With the extension of photographic and television coverage of war, illustrators participated to a much lesser extent in American conflicts after World War II. Political cartoonists drew caricatures in the Cold War and the “hot” wars of the period. The armed forces commissioned illustrators to record the Korean War, among them John Pike (1911–1979), Steve Kidd (b. 1911), Clayton Knight (1891–1969), William A. Smith (b. 1918), and Ward Brackett (b. 1914). The antinuclear organizations' peace and antiwar movements of the Vietnam War also used cartoons and posters. Robert T. McCall (b. 1919) and Robert Benney (b. 1904) recorded everyday military life in Vietnam, and Charles Waterhouse provided more than 500 combat drawings of the navy and Marines in Southeast Asia. By the end of the twentieth century, illustrators had been largely replaced by still and motion picture photographers in the on‐the‐scene portrayal of war and the military.
[See also Commemoration and Public Ritual; Culture, War, and the Military; Nuclear Weapons and War, Popular Images of; Propaganda and Public Relations, Government.]

Bibliography

Henry C. Pitz , 200 Years of American Illustration, 1977.
Walton H. Rawls , The Great Book of Currier & Ives America, 1979.
Marshall B. Davidson , The Drawing of America, 1983.
Walt and and Roger Reed , The Illustrator in America, 1880–1980, 1984.
Walton H. Rawls , Great Civil War Heroes and Their Battles, 1985.
Gloria Gilda Deák , Picturing America, 1494–1899, 2 vols., 1988.
Walton H. Rawls , Wake Up, America! World War I and the American Poster, 1988.
Walton H. Rawls , Disney Dons Dogtags, 1992.
Peter Paret,, Beth Irwin Lewis,, and and Paul Paret , Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Revolution, 1992.
Bill Mauldin , Up Front (50th Anniversary Edition), 1995.

Walton H. Rawls