On the Cover
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ow 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. 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 sig-
nature 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.”
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H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2022
