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Item Number: 133470
Title: Posters for Peace : Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action
Author: Benson, Thomas W
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9780271065861
Description: University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. 26cm., hardcover, 200pp., 65 color, 54 b&w illus. Summary: By the spring of 1970, Americans were frustrated by continuing war in Vietnam and turmoil in the inner cities. Students on American college campuses opposed the war in growing numbers and joined with other citizens in ever-larger public demonstrations against the war. Some politicians exploited the situation to cultivate anger against students. Republican governor Ronald Reagan of California, who had already sent troops into Berkeley in 1969, threatened the students in the spring of 1970 with the words “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” Vice President Spiro T. Agnew referred to protesting students as an “effete corps of impudent snobs.” President Richard Nixon called the students “a bunch of bums.” At the end of April 1970, Nixon went on national television to announce the invasion of Cambodia, a widening of the war in Vietnam. Student and citizen protests multiplied. In Ohio, Republican governor James Rhodes said that protesting students at Kent State University were “the worst type of people that we harbor in America” and sent in the National Guard. On May 4, the Guard shot and killed four students. As protests spread, universities and colleges shut down. At the University of California at Berkeley, student leaders defied a shut-down order with the slogan “On Strike—Keep It Open,” and they devoted themselves, along with many sympathetic faculty, to studying the war and working for peace. A group of art students produced thousands of antiwar posters. Posters for Peace tells the story of those Berkeley posters, bringing to life the rhetorical iconography of the posters and restoring them to their place in the history of poster art and political street art. The posters are vivid, simple, direct, ironic, and often graphically beautiful. Thomas Benson shows that, contrary to depictions of students by Nixon, Agnew, and Reagan, the student posters from Berkeley appealed to core patriotic values and to the legitimacy of democratic deliberation in a democracy—even in a time of war.
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