Vintage Poster Archives
United Nations Fight for Freedom 1942 | WW2 Propaganda Poster
United Nations Fight for Freedom 1942 | WW2 Propaganda Poster
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Twenty-six Allied national flags, arranged in a grid on a flat black ground, face the raised torch of the Statue of Liberty. The four leading Allied powers hold the top row, United States, Great Britain, Soviet Russia, China, with a further twenty-two nations following alphabetically, each flag in accurate national colours beneath white small-caps lettering. The Statue of Liberty, rendered in a fine-line etching style and viewed from below, sweeps upward toward the bold slab-serif headline: THE UNITED NATIONS FIGHT FOR FREEDOM.
This is OWI Poster No. 19, designed by Steve Broder, a Montreal-born, San Francisco-based commercial artist, and published by the US Government Printing Office in 1942. The Office of War Information commissioned the work in the months immediately following 1 January 1942, when twenty-six nations signed the Declaration by United Nations in Washington, pledging their full war resources against the Axis powers. The headline phrase itself is historically notable: one of the earliest mass-circulation uses of the term 'United Nations', three years before the organisation of that name was formally constituted in 1945.
Broder's compositional logic is spare and clear. Individual sovereign flags, each visually distinct, are assembled into a unified field, their difference becomes the argument for their coalition. The Statue of Liberty grounds that argument in a shared principle rather than a shared geography. The design requires no explanatory text beyond its headline.
Reproduced on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, using pigment-based archival inks. A considered choice for anyone with an interest in the graphic communication of the Allied war effort, the design history of the American home front, or the visual politics of wartime international coalition-building.
