Lester Beall. Rural Electrification Administration. 1937. Lithograph, 40 x 30″ (101.6 x 76.2 cm). Gift of the designer
I won’t be naming any names, but recently someone admitted to me that they just don’t “get” posters. I don’t get what’s not to get. Posters are all about “getting it”; they’re about telling us anything and everything in the most immediate visual language of text and imagery. Take the series of posters that Lester Beall designed for the U.S. government’s Rural Electrification Administration (REA), for example.
You don’t need to know anything about the REA to “get” Beall’s message in the poster Rural Electrification Administration: bringing a bright and shiny future to the youth of America, (particularly those wholesome youth still down on the farm—the mainstay of America’s bright and shiny future). Another poster, Power on the Farm, tells us that farmers aren’t yokels. They operate complicated machinery—complicated electrical machinery that needs power—and what’s good for farms is good for America. Rural electrification is going to be good for America.