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Title: Mechanical Training: Enlist in the Air Service
Description: Mechanical training is a useful skill in both war and peacetime. The poster’s message works on two levels—learn how to fix an airplane for the war effort, but also, use those skills during peacetime too. Poster Artist Otho Cushing, a noted American watercolorist and professor of drawing, had first hand experience with the benefits of wartime training. Having served in the Army Air Service himself, Cushing illustrations of airplanes and the men who flew and maintained them were especially accurate and effective. Offering valuable work skills was an especially useful angle for the Air Service, which was not yet a tried and true or well-funded branch of the U. S. military in the early years of the twentieth century. When America entered into World War I, in 1917, the nation lagged greatly behind Europe in both aircraft manufactured and in personnel trained and ready. |
The Service was open only to young, unmarried men and with no definitive promotional path for officers. This situation would quickly change as American involvement in the conflict deepened, especially after Congress voted for hundreds of millions of dollars to produce aircraft and train pilots and mechanics. Expectations for the air service were high. The French hoped that an influx of 5,000 American pilots and 50,000 American mechanics would change the course of the war in their favor. Posters like “Mechanical Training” helped recruit 38,000 men and graduate over 5,000 trained aviation personnel from aerial training schools by the war’s end in 1918. The frenetic atmosphere of the spring and summer of 1917 for the Air Service is belied by the seemingly placid demeanor of the two mechanics in the poster. The craft they are servicing could be a Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” or a Standard J-1, both biplanes, both popular trainers, and thus very likely the airplanes on which new mechanics would “cut their teeth.” Work on airplanes would have carried with it excitement for the young men sought by the poster, as airplanes were the newest in technology and spectacle, and mastering their complexities would provide a man with a skills sure to serve him well when hostilities ended. The poster’s artist, Otho Cushing (1871-1942) was born in Maryland and received formal training in the arts in Boston and Paris. Cushing taught drawing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then worked as the art editor for the Herald-Tribune in Europe. In 1906 he offered some of his cartoon work to Life magazine, which resulted in him being hired on in a staff position. Cushing enlisted with the Army Air Service (giving his rank as captain in the poster here) during World War I. He spent his retirement in New York state, where he died in 1942, having become a noted watercolorist. His style tended toward formal and mannered rigidity, and he also utilized imagery from the Greek pantheon (or evoked it in his figures). This style may be discerned in the poster’s figures, who appear more as stylized persons rather than renderings intended to seem natural. Still, the figures do present strong images, the cropping of the frame such that the dominate lines are clear: the distinct horizontal of the propeller balances the twin vertical lines of the mechanics, as well as the secondary lines of the aircraft in both axes. Although somewhat static, the image is still compelling, touting a new career in the thrilling new field of aviation for any young man willing to take the plunge. |
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