Gil Thorp, 9/2/24

Happy Labor Day, everybody! I guess it's now an annual tradition for a continuity strip character to appear as Rosie the Riveter to promote the American labor movement. I'm going to take this opportunity to be a bit of a killjoy and point out that the now-iconic "We Can Do It!" poster was actually a piece of internal propoganda produced by Westinghouse Electric in 1942 in an attempt to get its employees to work harder; another poster from the same series provides pretty good evidence of where on the labor/capital divide the ultimate sympathies of the campaign lay. "We Can Do It!" was not associated with the "Rosie the Riveter" concept at the time, was not widely seen outside Westinghouse during the war, and was largely forgotten until the Washington Post Magazine did an article about patriotic wartime art in 1982. Much more famous at the time -- and perhaps more in tune with the labor movement -- was Norman Rockwell's 1943 Rosie the Riveter cover for the Saturday Evening Post, which features Rosie chowing down on a sandwich on her lunch break while grinding a copy of Mein Kampf under her foot. Perhaps we can get Abbey Spencer or Sarah Morgan to do this pose next year.

Alice, 9/2/24