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The WPA & the Golden Age · The Public Good
The only safe weapons against cancer are surgery, x-rays (and) radium
Anthony Velonis · Work Projects Administration / United States Public Health Service, 1938
What it is
A 1938 silkscreen public-health poster designed by Anthony Velonis for the WPA's Federal Art Project and the U.S. Public Health Service. It states the only cancer treatments the government would endorse: surgery, x-rays, and radium.
Why it matters
The poster was a shot at the quack-remedy trade, drawing a hard line between medicine the state would stand behind and everything else being sold to the desperate. Velonis was the technician who taught the WPA poster division to silkscreen at scale, converting a commercial sign-shop process into the medium behind thousands of these government sheets. Made in New York City, it belongs to the moment the Federal Art Project put persuasion into ordinary people's hands as cheap, printed public argument.
What to notice
Read the message as it was built to be read: a flat, declarative silkscreen sheet that names three treatments and refuses to name a fourth.
The government drew a line and printed it: this far, and no further.
Provenance
- School
- WPA — Federal Art Project (United States)
- Designer
- Anthony Velonis
- Format
- Political poster
- Poster published
- Work Projects Administration / United States Public Health Service, 1938
- Source
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division · LCCN 98517525 (digital ID cph.3g05902)
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
