Hold Up Your End ! By William P. King

Typically, people use their personal views and intelligence to motivate their actions and to make important decisions. However, during troubling times such as war people are far more easily coax into making rash choices and behavior. One of the easiest ways to inference people to a biased conclusion is using propaganda.
One use of propaganda is by posters such as, “Hold up your end!”, made by William P. King during WWI in 1914–1918 to increase the aid support during the first war. And another WWI poster made by Lindsay Norman and W. E. Smith in 1918, called, “Will you fight now or wait for this”, that was used to show the necessity of additional troops. Posters such as these were made in an attempt to make citizens contribute to the war by either donating money or joining the war force by using methods such as oversimplification and parade of horrors to stir emotions such as guilt and fear into the public to enhance assistance in the military. The poster made by William P. King, “Hold up your end!”, is the fallacy of oversimplification
due to the simplicity of the message describing the scarcity and an extreme urgency for aid within the warfare. The image has a nurse holding one end of a stretcher and looking directly at whoever is looking at the poster with a sadden expression with the text “Hold up your end!”, the only other detail in the image is a small explosion in the background to indicate a battlefield. By using this illustration, the poster creates a sense of guilt on citizens by telling them that people in the armed forces are fighting and dying for them while they did nothing to provide aid to the military. However, the propaganda does not give any detail in how to fund the army despite telling people to put in their share and depends purely on the simple portrayal of a nurse who needs another person to hold a stretcher. Due to the lack of description, the residents will donate to multiple funds of the army to hold up their end of the situation such as providing money, supplies, or joining the force thus strengthen their side of the war. Lindsay Norman and W. E. Smith 1918 propaganda poster, “Will you fight now or wait for this”, is an example of parade of horrors due to the indentation of enemy soldiers attacking citizens while builds burn in the background. This is to strike fear and panic in the public by showing a future that the poster is saying will happen if more people do not join the war. The text “Will you fight now or wait for this”, is to indicate that because you did not enroll in the army that a series of events will occur leading to your loss of freedom or even your life. The propaganda undoubtedly shows that the enemy has no empathy for the weak and will eliminate everything in the path useless you personally join in the conflict. The usage of horrific images and thoughts is the only proof given to convince citizens that their very way of life is in danger unless they act and fight for your freedom like those in the army are doing for them already. Propaganda during war uses the sense of distress that people have and using it to its advantage by making citizens go to their side and support their movements.
Both posters show death as the consequence of lack of support but used different methods to active their goal. King’s poster used overcomplication to show the complexity of the aid need in war showing a solution with a simple answer of just helping out the military that is obviously made known in the poster by the nurse needed more than one person. And Norman and Smith’s propaganda poster used parade of horror to make it seem that if the army does not gather more soldiers they will lose and be enslave and slaughter by the enemy. Both images are successful in their attempt to encourage the population by using the extreme emotion of fear and terror that is generate during times of conflict to convince the citizens to convert to their ideals and
beliefs. The use of propaganda within fallacies may seem ineffective during times of harmony but once the country is within chaos, the emotion of fear towards an enemy is enough to sway people to unite together for the great good. The “Hold up your end!” poster motivate others into joining the support groups to aid the soldiers during WWI where the nation required the support of their citizens the most. And for “Will you fight now or wait for this” shows that each individual who joins in the fight can have an effect that can lead to triumph and even one more person can make the greatest difference between victory and defeat. Both propagandas were used for the benefit of the country’s wellbeing and showed that working as one great nation is our greatest strength in times of confrontation.