“This man is your FRIEND / Chinese / He fights for FREEDOM” — Office of Facts and Figures poster, 1942

The objectphotographed as held, uncropped

Catalogue description

A single printed sheet. A dark blue panel with rounded corners runs across the top and carries the line “This man is your FRIEND”; a matching panel across the bottom carries “He fights for FREEDOM” above three stars. Between them, cut out against the bare cream paper with no border or ground, is a photograph of a young man in uniform, head and shoulders, turned three-quarters to the camera. He wears a soft peaked field cap with a circular badge with radiating points at the side, a light tunic, and a strap running diagonally across his chest. He is smiling, looking down and past the lens rather than at it. To the right of his shoulder, in a thin blue rule box of its own, sits one word: “Chinese”.

The two lines at the very foot of the sheet are the object’s working instructions. One gives the Graphics Division of the Office of Facts and Figures in Washington as the place to write for more copies and supplies the Government Printing Office jacket number to quote when ordering; the other is the GPO imprint with the year 1942. Who ordered copies of this sheet, and where they were hung, is not established here. The same design was issued for other allied countries: the Victoria and Albert Museum catalogues its copy as one of a series of six — Russia, Australia, China, Ethiopia, the Netherlands and Canada — and the archive has not established the full extent of that series.

The design works by naming. The man in the photograph is given no name, no unit, no place and no date, and neither the photographer nor the designer is credited anywhere on the sheet. What the rule box supplies instead is the single word “Chinese”, and the two blue panels then vouch for the man so labelled: friend above, fighting for freedom below. The grammar states its audience plainly — “this man is your friend” is addressed to an American who is assumed not to know it, and assumed to need telling. The government that printed the assurance had at the same time not repealed the exclusion laws, which began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspending the immigration of Chinese labourers, were renewed by the Geary Act in 1892, were expanded in 1902 to cover Hawaii and the Philippines, were afterwards extended indefinitely, and were not repealed until 1943.

The face of this copy carries no tape, no repairs, no stamp and no inscription. In the cream margin near the corners there are small light marks in the paper — clearly at both upper corners and at the lower right, faintly at the lower left — at a consistent offset from the panels’ rounded corners in both exposures; whether these are pinholes, tack marks or paper loss is not established, and neither is whether the sheet was ever displayed. The archive holds it as one object photographed twice under different light, matched on damage rather than on design: the same hook-shaped light abrasion in the lower blue panel above the “s” of “fights”, with the same dark speck at its right end, and the same pair of pale scratches in the left margin, appear in both at the same position relative to the type.

Transcriptiontext on the object, as printed

[Top panel, cream type on dark blue, rounded corners:]
This man is your FRIEND

[Centre: photograph of a man in uniform. No caption, credit or lettering printed on or beneath it.]

[Ruled box at the right of the photograph, low on the sheet, black type on cream:]
Chinese

[Bottom panel, cream type on dark blue:]
He fights for FREEDOM
[three five-pointed stars, centred within the panel below the line]

[Below the bottom panel, lower left, small black type:]
For additional copies write to Graphics Division, Office of Facts and Figures, Washington, D. C. . . . Specify GPO Jacket No. 455918.

[Below the bottom panel, lower right, small black type:]
U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1942—O

[No other text on the face: no stamps, cancellations, accession numbers, pencil notes or signatures. The verso was not photographed. Text belonging to other material caught at the edges of the frames — “[P]ittsburg, Penn[,]” / “[?] M. Magee” at the top of IMG_6064, and “… fights for FREEDOM” on a sheet at the right of IMG_6091 — is not printed on this object and is not transcribed here.]

Historical context

The Office of Facts and Figures was established by Executive Order 8922 of 24 October 1941, within the Office for Emergency Management in the Executive Office of the President, with Archibald MacLeish — concurrently Librarian of Congress — as its Director; Executive Order 9182 of 13 June 1942 combined it with other agencies into the Office of War Information. The ordering line at the foot of this sheet therefore names an agency that ceased to exist in the same year the sheet was printed. American law had not caught up with the alliance the sheet’s two panels assert. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended the immigration of Chinese labourers, skilled and unskilled, for ten years and required Chinese travellers to carry certificates identifying their status; Congress renewed exclusion for a further ten years in the Geary Act of 1892, expanded the prohibition in 1902 to cover Hawaii and the Philippines, and later extended the Exclusion Act indefinitely. The State Department’s own account of the period records that the exclusion acts “were not repealed until 1943, and then only in the interests of aiding the morale of a wartime ally during World War II” — which is to say that the laws were still in force when this sheet was printed, and that the alliance the sheet advertises was itself the argument that ended them.

What is not known

• No artist or photographer is named on the sheet, and none is established. The Victoria and Albert Museum catalogues the series artist as unknown; the archive has not identified the maker of either the design or the photograph.
• The man in the photograph is unidentified. Nothing on the object names him, his unit, or where and when the photograph was taken. His cap carries a circular badge with radiating points; the archive has not verified any identification of that badge against a source, and no identification of him rests on anything but the poster’s own one-word label.
• The photograph reproduced on the sheet is undated. Whether it was made in 1942 or earlier is not established; the printed year of the sheet is used for ordering.
• No dimensions were taken; the sheet was photographed without a scale, and no catalogue record the archive fetched gives the size of this design. The proportion stated in the object note is estimated from the photographs, not measured, and both frames carry some perspective skew.
• The verso was not photographed, so any pencil note, stamp or dealer mark on the back is unrecorded.
• The extent of the series is an open question. The V&A record describes a series of six (Russia, Australia, China, Ethiopia, the Netherlands and Canada); listings for a further sheet of the same design showing an Englishman appear in search results the archive did not fetch, so no count is stated in the archive’s voice.
• The year 1942 is the only date printed. Whether this particular printing was run before or after the Office of Facts and Figures was absorbed into the Office of War Information on 13 June 1942 cannot be told from the sheet.
• Small light marks sit in the cream margin near the corners — clearly at the two upper corners and the lower right, faintly at the lower left. Whether they are pinholes, tack marks or paper loss is not established, and so whether this sheet was ever displayed is not established either.
• The number of inks, the structure of the paper and the process by which the photograph was reproduced were not determined; they cannot be settled from two photographs of the recto under different light.
• Who requisitioned copies of this sheet and where they were displayed is not established. No distribution record was fetched, and the object says only where to write and which jacket number to quote.
• The same-object judgment rests on repeated surface marks. A light void in the blue ink could in principle be a defect shared by every sheet of the print run rather than damage to this one; the corroborating margin scratches and the matching corner marks make that less likely but do not exclude it, and the two photographs were not measured against each other.
• A second sheet in a clear plastic sleeve appears at the right edge of IMG_6091 carrying the same “He fights for FREEDOM” panel. Whether it is another copy of this poster or another country from the same series is not established, and it is not catalogued here.
• A printed mount lies under this sheet at the top edge of IMG_6064, reading “[P]ittsburg, Penn[,]” on one line and “[?] M. Magee” on the next, with a character before the M obscured by the poster. It is other accession material; no connection to this object is established, and none is denied.
• The chronology of the war between China and Japan and of the Sino-American alliance was not sourced within this record’s fetch budget, so historical_context confines itself to what the two listed institutional sources carry, and the subject term for the country is the “China” the fetched catalogue record uses rather than a state name the archive could source.
• The draft’s further details of the 1943 repeal — the name Magnuson Act, a signature date of 17 December 1943 and an annual quota of 105 — are not carried by any page the archive fetched, and have been cut. Only the repeal year and its stated wartime-ally rationale are sourced here.
• Reported holdings of other copies (University of North Texas, Smithsonian, Hoover Institution, Washington State University and others) were dropped: the fetches failed, the surviving evidence was search listings, and at least one of those records is for a different nationality of the series with a different GPO jacket number.