|
|
 |
Title: For Action: Enlist in the Air Service
Description: This poster for the United States Army Air Service utilizes strong, direct imagery to entice potential recruits. Air Service recruits dominate the scene, the central man bending his body to give the propeller its first turns in order to start the engine. The action promised in the slogan seems fulfilled in the image. The aircraft shown appears to be a Standard J-1, manufactured by the Standard Aircraft Corporation, beginning in 1916. Used as a trainer like its more famous rival the Curtiss JN-4, the Standard served as a primary trainer for the new pilots of the Air Service. Due to an unreliable engine, the J-1 was phased out as the better Curtiss craft became available in greater numbers. The war presented a formidable set of goals to the nascent Aviation Section of the American arm—namely, producing 4,500 airplanes and the training of 5,000 pilots and 50,000 mechanics. |
For an aerial arm that had about 30 or so experienced pilots and for a nation that had manufactured fewer than 800 airplanes total, the numbers were daunting, especially given that the French were “anxious to know if the American government accepts [the] proposition [the aircraft and men enumerated], which would enable the Allies to win the supremacy of the air.” In 1917, Congress authorized $640 million appropriation for the U.S. Army’s air arm—an arm that until the appropriation was in all but name undefined. This sum was the greatest amount that the Congress had ever devoted to any one program. One observer wryly commented that with this Congressional action, “the greatest madhouse in air history was opened for business.” The poster, by contrast to reality, presents an organized and determined face: trained men servicing an airplane, with (it is to be assumed) a trained pilot on the stick, ready to take to the air on whatever mission was required. 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 do not appear entirely realistic (note the odd appearance of the man on the left’s arm as it disappears into his pocket), but they do fill the viewer’s eye, creating a potential link between those who might become members of the Air Service and those who, in the poster, already are. |
|
|
|
|
