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On the Cover
Now he belongs to the ages.” Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s words at Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed are also true of the Lincoln Memorial, the Doric temple in Washington where a sculpture of the president sits in eternal contemplation. The monument, visited by millions every year, was dedicated a hundred years ago on Memorial Day weekend. The 1955 poster featured on this Hoover Digest cover communicates, as does the memorial itself, both the power of Lincoln’s ideas and an undercurrent of humanity. At the same time, it does something the Great Emancipator never did: it urges the viewer to Fly United.
Joseph Binder (1898–1972) was among the best graphic and commercial artists of his day. He created a series of advertising posters for United Air Lines with vivid, inviting images of some of America’s most iconic scenes. They featured a distant airliner cruising beyond the sunlit facade of Mission Santa Barbara or a Boston steeple; gliding over San Francisco’s colorful Chinatown or a fly-fishing stream in Colorado; or looking down at the verdigris lions guarding the Art Institute of Chicago. A golden age of commercial air travel was dawning, and many graphic artists of the time were similarly inspired by these friendly skies.
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Binder, an Austrian who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s, was the master of a sleek, clean, hard-edged style. A German writer in 1928 called him “a born poster artist” and praised his style for its “optical simplicity and quick comprehensibility.” In Austria he had created a signature branding look for his employer, an importer of tea and household goods. Binder’s recognizable style sold beer, women’s swimsuits, ski trips, and coffee. Later he would draw a series of biblical illustrations in which the saints seem to be robed in shards of stained glass. He could even make a jar of marmalade look heroic.
“Realism should be left to photography,” Binder wrote in a book about his line and color technique. “The artist must not compete with the camera.”
Binder flourished in the United States, creating a poster for the 1939 New York World’s Fair (“the world of tomorrow”), with beams of light thrusting upward, skyscrapers glowing, a single star hanging in the sky. He had a long, fruitful relationship with the US military, starting with a 1941 prize-winning poster that advertised the Army Air Corps by teasing a single, multicolored wingtip. For the Navy, he made recruiting posters featuring fighter jets (“supersonic”) and looming aircraft carriers (“JOIN”). He signed many of his works with a tiny, lowercase b-i-n-d-e-r that crept along the edge of the poster.
Binder’s streamlined art “harmonized with the tempo of our times,” as a contemporary observer put it. His Lincoln poster fulfilled the artistic challenge of honoring both the sacred space of the memorial and the commercial needs of his employer. Yet there is a modern twist. The Lincoln Memorial is more than its marble statue by Daniel Chester French: it is the martyred president’s words. They are “an unusually important component of the Lincoln Memorial’s architecture,” Allan Greenberg wrote in City Journal in 2013. Lines from the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural cover the walls. Thus, Lincoln speaks. Characteristically for an artist of such potent visual vocabulary, Binder’s portrayal of Lincoln offers the same figure, the same reverence, the same message—but he offers no words at all. —Charles Lindsey
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Thomas F. Stephenson
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Susan R. McCaw
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Frederick L. Allen Joseph W. Donner Robert J. Swain
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HOOVER DIGEST SUMMER 2022 NO. 3
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