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Title: Who Thought of That?
Description: "Who though of That?" is a 1923 poster from the Chicago Mather Printing Company's "Work Incentive" series. Mather & Company (also known as Mather & Co. or Mather Printing Company) produced the historic series between 1923-1929. |
Printed during the first production year, the poster is considered a particularly important work from the series. Owner Seth Seiders, operated the privately held company out of Chicago, but marketed to a national consumer base of factory managers and foremen. Mather & Company the posters as tools to inspire the "ideal workforce," and quickly developed a strong client base. By 1929, clients included some of America's largest corporations, such as Kodak, General Motors, and Kellogg Company, as well as international clients in England and Canada. For six years, Mather & Company distributed new 44 x 36 in. posters on a weekly basis. The posters, like this 1923 example, characteristically combined strong graphics and colloquial text. As Lauren DeFelippo explains, "Taking advantage of a visual format, they touted that their posters could transcend language or literacy barriers, getting each lesson across to a workforce that was radically changing during the 1920s, as immigrants to the U.S., African-Americans, and women became a true mainstay of the American factory workforce. Although these marginalized groups were largely absent from the images of the posters themselves, the text and images of each piece acted as a guide for the worker, with a weekly explanation of how to not only survive, but also succeed within his or her work-life." The series constitutes an important example of industrial propaganda from the early twentieth century. "Selling ideas rather than products," DeFelippo asserts, "Mather and Company posters set out to improve productivity and eliminate waste within each company…Mather and Company provided a product through which institutionalized modes of behavior could be taught. The posters repeatedly extol the virtues of hard work, efficiency, and - representative of their time - proper American behavior." In this particular example, the poster asks "Who Though of That? 'That' Idea may save the firm a lot of money and if you offered 'that' suggestion there's going to be a lot of favorable comment about you." Encouraging the workers to share new ideas, the poster deters timidity, bluntly declaring in block, capital letters, "DON'T BE AFRAID TO SUGGEST." While the text propagates a specific message, the poster's imagery tells a story as well. In a high contrast combination of blues, grays, black and orange, the poster illustrates a scene of downtown Chicago. Bustling with factories and office buildings, bellowing smoke stacks and illuminated office windows depict the city as a thriving center of commerce. One small (but notable) detail, a monoplane soaring across the Chicago skyline, tells a larger story. In the first half of the twentieth century, Chicago had a thriving aviation industry. The city was a site for both commercial activities and recreational events, including aviation competitions. In 1923, the same year the poster was published, Chicago's Midway Airport opened to serve as U.S. Air Mail center. Two decades later, between 1942-1943, O'Hare Airport was constructed to support WW-II operations. By that time, however, the greater Chicago had established 22 smaller, regional airports. Demonstrating the sheer vastness of Chicago's aviation scene, a local January 1945 publication by the Chicago Association of Commerce, entitled "Aircraft Industry in Chicago" is longer than 200 pages. That year the city had an Aviation Committee of 38 businessmen and boasted an aviation industry listing of "more than 1,500 sources of aircraft parts, instruments and components, as well as shops having machine tool equipment." It also listed impressed aviation statistics from 1944, documenting the travel of 915,645 passengers, 56,292 plane movements, and16,856,913 pounds of air mail through Chicago airports. |
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