Czechoslovaks! Join Our Free Colours!

The most famous of the propaganda posters produced by Preissig for the Wentworth Institute during World War I calling on Czechoslovaks living abroad to join the Czech legion fighting in Europe. The posters exist in different languages (Czech, Slovak and English) and formats (the images also appear on postcards).

The flags depicted in the poster represent the four regions which would, in 1918, comprise Czechoslovakia: Bohemia (the red lion); Moravia (the red and white checked eagle); Silesia (the black eagle); and Slovakia (with the Slovak double cross, similar to the French cross of Loraine). The red, white and blue flag, with the stars in the middle, was the Resistance flag of the Czechoslovak Independence movement which Preissig had designed for the Czech Government while in Exile. It was supposed to have become the Czech national flag, but was somehow overlooked in 1918 when Czechoslovakia was officially formed.

Printed by The School of Printing and Graphic Arts of Wentworth Institute, for Czechoslovak Recruiting Office.

After war was declared, protest rallies of Czech and Slovak countrymen were organized in main centres of the United States under American flags. A revolutionary club called ‘Ceskoslovenská republika’ (Czechoslovak Republic) was established in Chicago on 8 November 1914. The effort to coordinate collective action in America reached a peak in the establishment of the Bohemian (Czech) National Alliance in September 1914. Together with the Slovak League they supported the major representative of the resistance movement—the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris (recognized as a provisional government in 1918).