Description
The Step On It! poster
Step On It! was printed for General Motors as one of its Let’s Keep ’Em Pulling for Victory posters, a series of forty or more sheets made to hang in the plants where GM built army trucks during the Second World War. A giant boot in Uncle Sam’s red-and-white striped trousers comes down on an enemy soldier, whose cap flies off on a spring of motion lines, while the headline tells the workforce what to do: step on it. In the oval at the lower right, a GMC 2½-ton 6×6 army truck tows a field howitzer through shell bursts. That was the product. GM and its truck plants at Pontiac, Michigan, and St. Louis built more than half a million of these trucks, the “Jimmy” or “Deuce and a Half”, the vehicle that carried the Army across Europe and the Pacific.
The sheet is coded GMC—H, the eighth in the series’ lettered run, and marked “Litho in U.S.A.” The artist and printer are not recorded. Collections date it only to the war years; its place early in the series and the early closed-cab truck point to about 1942–1943, the year of the government’s War Production Drive, when labor-management committees in war plants put up posters like this one to push output.
The poster uses the racist caricature of the Japanese enemy that ran through American wartime propaganda. We reproduce it unchanged, as a document of how the war was sold on the factory floor.
Read the full history of the poster.
Restored edition
Restored from a photograph of an original print. The faded yellow and the off-white paper were brought back to the colours of the printed inks, and wear and marks were removed. The drawing, the lettering and the GMC—H sheet code are kept as printed. Compare the original and the restored edition in the before and after slider below.
Sizes and options
- Paper print: 11.7 × 16.5 in, 20 × 28 in or 23.4 × 33.1 in
- Framed print: 12 × 17 in, 20 × 28 in or 23 × 33 in, in a black, white or natural wood frame, ready to hang
Printed to order in the USA on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Art paper. Free Standard shipping to the US. Compare the print sizes.
More factory-floor posters
See Give ’Em Both Barrels and Production: America’s Answer!, or browse the industry and transportation collection.
