Henry Patrick Raleigh (American, 1880–1944)
Hunger, c. 1918
Lithograph
Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Misses Helen F. and Edith Robinson, P.1952.106.436

Using the campaign slogan “Food Will Win the War,” the U.S. Food Administration produced eye-catching propaganda that urged voluntary rationing during World War I. This poster calls for aid to Belgium, which suffered food shortages due to the German invasion and British naval blockades of grain and cereal. The figures of a woman, a baby and two gaunt children, formed by loose, craggy lines, are part of a long visual tradition of using mother-and-child imagery to trigger compassion, as seen in the work of Murillo and Goya in this exhibition. Underscored by the word hunger, the scene immediately conveys the family’s dire situation, followed by a plea to Americans to eat less so that the people of Belgium may survive.

When President Woodrow Wilson asked Herbert Clark Hoover, then head of the U.S. Food Administration, what role food played in securing a victory, Hoover replied that, “second only to military action, it was the dominant factor.” Before his political career, Hoover was a successful mining engineer working for companies in Australia and China. Though he supported exploitative labor practices in these regions, he had a humanitarian interest in the plight of Europeans during World War I, and he used his wealth to privately found the Commission for Relief in Belgium. Later, as a government official, he mobilized a national effort to send American food to the embattled continent. Other USFA posters produced under his leadership, such as Food Is Ammunition by John E. Sheridan (1918), encouraged the domestic consumption of fruits and vegetables over meat, grain and sugar, which Hoover jokingly said made him worry about his popularity with children (Figure 3).