The World War I Posters of Charles Livingston Bull (1874-1932):  A New Jersey Wildlife Illustrator

by Nicholas Ciotola

The two-acre lot behind Charles Livingston Bull’s Oradell home was not your typical New Jersey backyard.It featured a forest of mature trees, an immaculate plant garden and a menagerie of live animals, including deer, peacock, sheep, turkey, geese and many species of fish. For Bull, the backyard was not only a place for leisure. It was a place for research, study and work.

Born in 1874, Bull’s interest in the natural world stemmed from his early career as a taxidermist at Ward’s Museum in his hometown of Rochester, New York. In the 1890s, his expertise earned him a coveted taxidermist position at the United States National Museum. While living in Washington, D.C., Bull enrolled in evening art classes at the Corcoran Gallery of Art – a decision that initiated his second career as a wildlife illustrator. In 1910, he moved to Oradell (Bergen County) in order to be closer to the New York-based publishing industry that hungered for his unique artwork.

From a studio inside his home on the northwest corner of Woodland Avenue and Seminole Street, Bull executed the world’s finest examples of wildlife art. Some of his illustrations documented the specimens found in his own backyard. Others were drawn from zoology books and research travels around the country. Bull’s wildlife illustrations frequently graced the covers of American Boy, Boy’s Life, Collier’s and other popular magazines of the day, as well as the pages of best-selling books including Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Bull also executed oil on canvas commissions depicting wildlife specimens in their native habitats. A veritable workaholic who started his workday at 4:00 PM and toiled nonstop through the wee hours of the morning, six days a week, Bull’s artistic output was indeed prolific. He created more than seven thousand wildlife sketches, illustrations and paintings during the course of his career.

When the United States entered World War I in April of 1917, Bull heeded the federal government’s call for assistance with its massive publicity campaign to garner support for the war effort. Having been re-elected on a platform featuring the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” President Woodrow Wilson realized the need to convince the American people that entry into the war was necessary and just. To do so, he created a morale and propaganda department called the Committee on Public Information (CPI) and named George Creel as its head. One of the CPI’s departments, the Division of Pictorial Publicity (DPP), convened the nation’s top illustrators in order to discuss ways in which art could function to unify Americans around the cause of war. One of their key tools turned out to be illustrated posters. Printed in the tens of millions, World War I propaganda posters could be found in municipal buildings, on telephone poles and in storefront windows nationwide. Some were blown up and placed on massive billboards. Others were reduced in size and printed in newspapers and magazines.

Between 1917 and 1918, the government selected three of Bull’s wildlife-themed designs for production as full-color lithographic posters supporting the war effort. Keep Him Free (1917) depicts a bald eagle – America in animal form – staunchly guarding its aerie. The perch on which it sits is no ordinary nest. It is a bustling hangar from which the planes of the fledgling Army Air Service are unleashed. Their mission is self-defense, to protect their home from an unseen aggressor. The poster implores the viewer to buy War Savings Stamps from the Treasury Department. Designed for people with modest incomes, War Savings Stamps cost as little as twenty-five cents each. Once a person accumulated a designated number of so-called “thrift stamps,” they could trade them in for a Liberty Bond that would earn interest. War Savings Stamps and Liberty Bonds helped raise twenty billion dollars for the American war effort, offsetting the need for new taxes.

Commissioned by the U.S. Food Administration, Save the Products of the Land (1917) advocated for food conservation on the home front. Depicting a species that he knew well from his passion for fishing, Bull’s poster transports the viewer to a murky, underwater habitat filled with smallmouth bass. The poster asks people to eat more fish – an act that would save the grain needed to feed the cattle that provided beef to soldiers on the battle front. Beef could be easily preserved, packed and shipped in a compact form, making it perfect for wartime rations. If American families replaced some of their meals with fish, more beef could be reserved for shipment overseas. Almost immediately after its printing, Bull’s widely-distributed poster increased fish consumption in many parts of the country as patriotic Americans added bass, catfish, trout and other wild-caught fish to their diets. Bull’s poster even encouraged people to start eating carp, a non-native, previously-unpopular eating fish that became plentiful in American waters in the nineteenth century.

Bull’s final poster, Be an American Eagle! (1918), depicts an American bald eagle, talons fully extended, in a vicious, mid-air battle with another bird. Representing the Germans, the darker-toned enemy eagle appears to be losing the fight. Its defensive posture suggests weakness and retreat; its open beak suggests a shriek of pain and fear. As the first major conflict in which planes featured as large-scale tactical military tools, World War I spawned the U.S. Army Air Service in 1918 – the forerunner of the modern-day Air Force.  Bull’s vibrantly-colored recruiting poster featuring one of his favorite animal subjects encouraged some of the first Air Service enlistees.

Today, the legacy of New Jersey resident Charles Livingston Bull lives on in the art and archival collections of the Oradell Local History Collection at Oradell Public Library. For more information, visit http://oradell.bccls.org/.

Original posters by Charles Livingston Bull can be seen in the New Jersey State Museum’s exhibition marking the centennial of the American intervention in World War I. Embattled Emblems: Posters and Flags of the First World War. September 16, 2017 – August 19, 2018. For more information, visit http://www.state.nj.us/state/museum/.

Nicholas P. Ciotola is Curator of Cultural History at the New Jersey State Museum