End Bad Breath^25
Seymour Chwast,DesignerThe Vietnam War polarized the American people
like no other conflict since the Civil War.
Domestic battles between hawk and dove, right
and left, and young and old were passionately
waged in the media and on the streets, through
words, music, and pictures. The nightly news
barrage of film and video directly from Vietnam
battlefields impressed the horrific image of this
war on America’s consciousness and inspired the
prodigious amount of protest posters aimed at
leaders and policies. Not since after World War I,
when pacifist organizations on both sides of the
Atlantic launched what was called a “war against
war,” have artists and designers produced as many
testaments of conscience.
The most ubiquitous icon of antiwar dissent, known simply as
the peace symbol and designed by Gerald Holtom in 1954 as the logo of
England’s CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), appeared on
countless Vietnam War–era flyers and posters and turned up in evening
news footage emblazoned on some American soldiers’ helmets. Other
well-known poster images include the following: Lorraine Schneider’s 1969
War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things, originally used as
an announcement for the California-based organization Another Mother
for Peace; Tomi Ungerer’s series of satiric posters, especially Eat, which
showed a prostrate Vietnamese forced to lick the ass of an American
soldier;I Want Out, by Steve Horn and Larry Dunst, a parody of the
famous James Montgomery Flagg I Want Youposter showing Uncle Sam
dressed in bandages with his outstretched hand begging for peace; Edward
Sorel’s caustic Pass the Lord and Praise the Ammunition, showing New York’s
Cardinal Spellman, vicar of the U.S. Army, charging into battle with rifle
and bayonet;And Babies? Yes Babies!the poster with a color photograph of
the My Lai massacre (an American platoon’s savage attack on civilian
villagers); and End Bad Breathby Seymour Chwast, a comic woodcut
portrait of Uncle Sam with his mouth wide open, revealing airplanes
bombing Vietnam.
End Bad Breath, designed in 1968 , was not as emotionally