Vintage Poster Archives
WW2 War Bonds 1944 | Saalburg Good Earth Poster
WW2 War Bonds 1944 | Saalburg Good Earth Poster
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A bombed-out European farmstead under a dark, cloud-streaked sky: two ruined whitewashed stone buildings, a shattered grain silo, a broken wagon wheel in churned mud. Across the sky in cursive cream lettering, the headline reads 'This was once good Earth!'. At the foot, a flat teal-green band carries 'BUY MORE WAR BONDS' in bold slab-serif type. The palette is deliberately sombre, charcoal grey and warm brown, with the ruins held in pale tones against the dark ground.
Illustrated by Allen Saalburg (1899–1987) for the US Treasury War Finance Division, published in 1944 as official Treasury publication SuDoc T 66.8:B 64/22. Saalburg had exhibited paintings at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in 1929 before returning to New York, where the Federal Art Project commissioned murals from him in Central Park and elsewhere. His wartime bond-drive posters favour a painterly, atmospheric approach over the flat graphic language of contemporaries such as Jean Carlu: landscape rather than slogan, loss rather than heroism.
The choice of a ruined farm, food, soil, the ordinary, as the persuasive image sets this poster apart from the bulk of the US Treasury's wartime output. Eight War Loan drives ran between 1942 and 1945; this design belongs to the later phase, when the visual rhetoric of destruction had become as familiar a tool as the recruitment appeal.
Reproduced on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, restoring the tonal range of Saalburg's original illustration. A natural fit for anyone interested in American wartime illustration, the history of government communication design, or the relationship between fine art practice and wartime propaganda.
