The WPA & the Golden Age · See America / The Parks
See America
Harry Herzog · United States Travel Bureau, 1940
What it is
A color silkscreen travel poster designed by Harry Herzog, issued through the United States Travel Bureau. The Library of Congress carries it under a 1936-1940 range, with a July 22, 1940 stamp on the verso.
Why it matters
"See America" was a New Deal pitch: get Depression-era Americans onto trains and into their own national parks, and put idle printers and designers to work doing it. The Travel Bureau ran the campaign as federal promotion, and Herzog worked in the flat, poster-ready idiom the WPA silkscreen shops made cheap to reproduce.
What to notice
Look at the cataract itself, reduced to stacked bands of opaque color, the trick silkscreen used to fake motion without a gradient.
The falling water holds still, band by band, so the country could be handed to you as a place to go.
Provenance
- School
- WPA — Federal Art Project (United States)
- Designer
- Harry Herzog
- Format
- Travel poster
- Poster published
- United States Travel Bureau, 1940
- Source
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division · LCCN 98518589 (digital ID cph.3b48733)
Rights: CLEAR. Public domain — U.S. government program work (WPA Federal Art Project), any year. Gated by the poster’s own publication year. Cleared by registry on 2026-07-18.
Format
The full-resolution, color-managed file — restored honestly, yours to print and keep.
Sized to protect print quality — this scan supports sizes up to 18x24" cleanly.
Size
$29.00
