Artifact Spotlight: Raleigh WWII VD Juke Joint Sniper Poster
By Matthew M. Peek, Military Collection Archivist, State Archives of North Carolina
Editor’s Note: This blog post features a discussion of sexually-transmitted diseases and anti-venereal disease campaigns in WWII. It features some explicit content, which is not appropriate for younger readers. Viewer discretion is advised.
One of the best parts about being an archivist is seeing original materials and formats that you have never seen before. Most people in given time periods produce pretty much the same type of items in similar formats of materials. There will be the occasional oddly-printed photograph, hand-made journal, encoded letters, or specialty ephemera handed out for such things as political campaigns and wartime home front programming. These unique items often help to explain more about a period of history than the traditional items, and are insights into daily culture of a community.
In World War II, the plight of venereal diseases (VD) was a major concern for the U.S. Armed Forces and local communities near military installations around the country. Religious and community leaders began writing booklets, manuals, and handouts extolling the Judeo-Christian ethic of no sex outside of marriage, and imploring men to wait to have intercourse until they returned home. For men away from their loved ones for two to five years, this was not realistic. The U.S. Armed Forces recognized this, as they had during WWI, and worked with state health departments to plan anti-venereal disease campaigns. The goal was to keep U.S. servicemen (primarily) in good physical health, so they could put their effort into fighting the Axis Powers and not a sexually-transmitted disease. Anything that was unnecessary and took personnel out of the active service rotation was deemed undesirable and preventable by the Armed Forces.
In 1941, the rate of venereal disease was 40 out of every 1,000 in the Army, 80 in the Navy. The rates only increased as new recruits join the forces.[Resource #1]. The focus became on education and prevention of VD among servicemen. One of the problems the U.S. government faced in this was that the main printing office for federal wartime propaganda and educational materials — the U.S. Government Printing Office — focused more on quantity than quality. The lack of a quality educational program materials designed and printed by the federal government would limit the effectiveness of VD prevention programming.
Toward the end of forming national VD prevention program, the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office created the Venereal Disease Education Section of the Venereal Disease Control Division in WWII. But, the federal government and U.S. Army still had the issue of the quality and attention-getting nature of the anti-VD campaign materials. In North Carolina, the Reynolds Foundation of Winston-Salem, NC — from the Reynolds Tobacco Company — supported through funding the creation of a statewide non-profit organization called the Venereal Disease Education Institute of Raleigh, NC, worked out an agreement with the federal government to produce under a contract materials specifically designed to meet the U.S. Army’s educational needs. This institute operated under the auspices of the North Carolina State Board of Health during WWII.
As part of this new educational system produced by the Raleigh-based Venereal Disease Education Institute, a “series of monthly posters was developed for use during 1944 and 1945. All of these posters were designed by skilled artists who could meet the Army’s needs for high-quality effective materials, and they were produced on a quantity basis by civilian printers. The arrangements with the institute called for the design, production, shipment, and handling of these posters directly to Army installations and commands. The subjects for the posters, the copy of on the posters, and the general theme and plan for the artwork were supplied by the Venereal Disease Education Branch of the Venereal Disease Control Division and later, after its establishment, by the Health Education Unit of the Surgeon General’s Office” [Resource #2].
Because the posters were printed locally, they were often smaller than the larger, more recognizable WWII propaganda posters. They were also printed on thinner paper intended for short-term use than compared with, say Army or Marine Corps propaganda and recruiting posters.
One of the issues with these posters and the VD education of the time is focus on the woman as the cause of spread of disease. Women were sexualized as the instrument of spreading VD doom among U.S. servicemen, thereby weakening the U.S. Armed Forces. Although in the culture of the time, churches, schools, and families preached modesty and propriety for young women, propaganda posters, newsletters, wartime cartoons, pinup photographs, and other such materials produced overly sexualized women in such a way as to “meet and fill the appetite” of lonely U.S. servicemen who were sacrificing for their country.
Such sexualization was seen as a necessary, patriot duty for women to perform. The State Archives of North Carolina’s Military Collection holds home front newsletters The Home Front News,the monthly newsletter for servicemen published by the Tarboro Rotary Club during WWII. Many of the covers feature sexually suggestive or even bondage-style drawings of women reflective of the major holidays or recognized markers of each month. But, these drawings were largely made by young female artists — such was the pervasive sexualization of the imagery of women in WWII.
The posters were fed into the machine of social pressure on women that was in songs, movies, and magazines of the WWII-era. The Venereal Disease Education Institute also portrayed women as the cause of problems, but the answer for men. They were the temptresses, but the U.S. Armed Forces would specifically fly in young women to overseas military camps to “raise the men’s morale” as a regular happening in non-combat periods.
Few of these original posters survive from the Raleigh-based Venereal Disease Education Institute survive, as they were thin and prone to water damage. But, in a recently-donated archival collection, the Military Collection of the State Archives of North Carolina acquired one such poster, which features a Raleigh young woman in one of the more unusual stories you might hear, that places concerns on the imagery used by the federal government for VD campaigns. Also, what follows is the story of how two archivists with the State Archives identified this poster as being part of the Venereal Disease Education Institute’s poster series.
Artifact Spotlight: Juke Joint Sniper Poster
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Military Collection of the State Archives of North Carolina received the donation of the Everette H. Jones Papers (WWII 259), which we have already featured in a previously blog post in the NC Stories of Service blog. One of the most unique items in the collection is an original poster entitled “Juke Joint Sniper,” produced by the Venereal Disease Education Institute of the North Carolina State Board of Health warning against the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases syphilis and gonorrhea on the home front by U.S. servicemen during World War II.
The young woman featured in the poster was Gladys M. Robinson of Raleigh, NC. Before we go into more detail on her, let us note that because the VDEI was a Raleigh-based organization, it seems they used local, uncredited young women as the models for their artwork. At the time that Robinson modeled for the “Juke Joint Sniper” poster, she was a 16-year old teenage girl.
Gladys Mae Robinson was born in 1928. Her father died in Emporia, Virginia, when she was three years old. Her mother Minnie Robinson moved herself and her three children to the town of Macon in Warren County, NC, to be near her parents. During the Great Depression period, she left her children in Macon with her parents, Sid and Mattie Edwards, and moved to Raleigh around 1933 or 1934 to find a job. Minnie got a job as a seamstress in a department or woman’s clothing store, and later moved up to a salesperson sometime by 1940. Minnie Robinson remained in that occupation on Fayetteville Street in Raleigh until the late 1960s.
Gladys Robinson joined her mother in Raleigh when she was around eight or nine years old. With her mother working to support her children, Gladys Robinson had a lot of time to spend in downtown Raleigh on her own. Gladys attended the Murphy School, then Hugh Morson High School. As a teenager, Gladys Robinson modeled for some of the dress shops in Raleigh, and modeled shoes for catalogs and advertisements. She also worked in the ticket booth at the Ambassador Theater at some point while in school.
The poster overly sexualizes Robinson, who as a young woman did not look nearly as mature as this poster depicts. It also displays a teenage girl smoking, which was strongly looked down upon culturally in the United States at the time (though it did happen at a time before regulation of tobacco and cigarettes). It should be noted that many of the Venereal Disease Education Institute posters featured someone smoking in them, as the Institute was funded by the Reynolds Foundation of Winston-Salem, NC — from the Reynolds Tobacco Company.
The notion of a “Juke Joint Sniper” is of a woman who walks into a place with a juke box playing records or the radio — such as a pool hall, cafe, or in this case a dance hall — and captures the attention of men. A woman such as this who may be carrying a venereal disease during WWII was seen just as dangerous as an enemy sniper who shoots and kills U.S. servicemen in combat — the men will be out of service for some time. Gladys Robinson would marry to a serviceman in 1946 in Florida; later, she remarried to Everette H. Jones of Raleigh in 1951. We are told that she kept the poster she modeled for, but did not like to talk about it with her children.
But, the poster has no date and no production marks. There is an artist’s last name, but no agency or printing company to indicate who produced the poster or why. So, how did we identify the “Juke Joint Sniper” poster as being produced by the Venereal Disease Education Institute of the North Carolina State Board of Health?
Audiovisual Materials Archivist Vann Evans of the State Archives of North Carolina worked with Military Collection Archivist Matthew Peek, and noted that the State Archives had negatives of venereal disease WWII posters in a collection — the Albert Barden Collection. After reviewing scans of the images, we found the “Juke Joint Poster” copy negative created by Barden for the Venereal Disease Education Institute, and we were able to fill in the gaps. Also, since Barden took these images of the posters in 1944, the “Juke Joint Poster” dates from around 1943 to 1944.
Audiovisual Materials Unit processing assistant Ian Dunn recognized the poster’s orientation of Robinson as a photograph taken by Albert Barden, and found the image. Until February 11, 2022, this photograph was unidentified, and Barden’s caption for the image stated “Unidentified Young Woman Prob in Early 20s Photo Made July 1944”. After confirming with Robinson’s daughter that the photograph is indeed her — with a ring she is wearing in the photograph one she always wore — we now know that Albert Barden took the photograph of Gladys Robinson, which the artists for the Raleigh-based Venereal Disease Education Institute used to draw the “Juke Joint Sniper” poster. We never would have known that this was part of the process for these posters being created, and it seems that such a process may have been quite rare. We also now know the poster was created in 1944, and not before July 1944.
So what is the big deal of this poster? This is one of the only-known original color printings of a poster from the Venereal Disease Education Institute’s STD warning poster campaign known to be held in a North Carolina archives. It is also even more rare for such a locally-produced poster to know the name of the model for the poster, and to get the actual copy of the poster that the model kept in their possession since WWII. We are indebted to the Jones’ family for their donation of the collection and this poster, and hope you all enjoyed learning about a lesser-discussed aspect of WWII history in North Carolina.
Resources
1. Madeleine L. Gaiser, “The Other ‘VD’: The Educational Campaign to Reduce Venereal Disease Rate During World War II,” Student Publications, Gettysburg College, 2016, viewed online at https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1551&context=student_scholarship
2. U.S. Army Medical Department, Preventive Medicine in World War II: Volume IX — Special Fields, Office of the Surgeon General: Department of the Army, Washington, D.C., 1969, Pages 61–63.
3. Albert Barden. From the Albert Barden Collection, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, NC. State Archives’ Flickr album of Barden’s images is available here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/north-carolina-state-archives/albums/72157681748351705
4. Everette H. Jones Papers, WWII 259, WWII Papers, Military Collection, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, NC. Finding aid available online at https://axaem.archives.ncdcr.gov/findingaids/WWII_259_Everette_H__Jones_Paper.html
