The National Archives at Kansas City’s latest exhibit Say It With Snap!: Motivating Workers by Design, 1923-1929 is on view now through Jan. 7, 2015. Can posters inspire employees to improve their work habits and increase productivity? This exhibit highlights historic work place posters created by the Chicago-based Mather & Company in the 1920s. These posters answered the needs of a rapidly changing American work force through the use of dynamic color and catchy slogans designed to cajole, coax, and even admonish employees to perform at their best.
Exhibits Specialist Dee A. Harris calls the exhibition a glimpse of American culture that can be juxtaposed with today’s contemporary motivational posters. “It is interesting to see what worked before the Great Depression and what helps us to be productive 85 years later.” While the exhibition looks at just a few years, there are clear shifts in the target audiences.”
Some of the posters are iconic with famous and recognizable faces such as George Washington or almost mythical locations such as castles. “Whatever the poster depicts, there is also a clear emphasis of the Art Deco movement.” The ideal 1920s man is striding forward, smiling and neat in his appearance. Each poster has a three-pronged message. There is a bold-faced caption, a descriptive statement and final moral instruction. “Over this short span, the three-part message tightened up, but clearly the concept remained constant,” she explains.
The exhibition shows how the direction of the graphic messages changed over time, shifting from incentives targeting white-collar workers and their managers in the early years to a greater focus on factory workers. There is even one woman depicted on a poster. “By the 1920, there was a rise of women in the work place. Concerns in the work place centered on safety and employee challenges such as controlling tempers and smiling,” Harris says.
Mather tapped into veins of popular entertainment such as sports, music, and the circus to craft dramatic posters that both motivated and schooled employees in appropriate workplace behavior. During the company’s most successful years, in the late 1920s, Mather claimed his business supplied more than 40,000 firms nationwide. While the content of some of these posters – such as “Do You Explode?,” or “What Are Loafers Paid?” – may seem naïve today, they captured a moment in time not unlike our own: when changes in society and employment trends upended the relationship between workers and management.
Although the theme of workplace motivation may not seem like an inspirational topic, co-curator Dulce Roman of the University of Florida’s Harn Museum sees Mather’s images as signposts of a unique kind of optimism. These original lithograph posters are an exhibition a program of ExhibitsUSA, a national division of Mid-America Arts Alliance with The Missouri Arts Council and The National Endowment for the Arts. Harris sees them as a sort of propaganda. “They are designed to change behavior,” she says. “We have already had high school students looking at the messaging; students from KCAI specifically analyzing the design aesthetic including the fonts and use of color. There is something for all us here,” explains Harris.
Along with the exhibit, the National Archives is an agency with many public events as well as research tools for genealogy and historical research. The agency was established in 1934 – during the Roosevelt administration as a part of the WPA initiative. The local office was established in the late 1940s as a Federal Records Center and the entire operation moved south to the GSA complex until 2009. The local office, with the official moniker of National Archives at Kansas City, moved to the Union Station complex.
