"Lest We Perish" — Near East Relief campaign poster by Ethel Franklin Betts, ca. 1918

Item Detail

United States, ca. 1918. A campaign poster issued for the American Committee for Relief in the Near East $30,000,000 drive, with a half-length charcoal-and-wash drawing by Ethel Franklin Betts of a gaunt Armenian child set against a barren landscape. Headline: "LEST WE PERISH" / "Campaign for $30,000,000."

Context

One of the central images of the 1918 $30,000,000 fundraising campaign for the American Committee for Relief in the Near East. The poster's title placed the moral burden squarely on American viewers: failure to act would equal complicity in the deaths it depicts. Posters like this one were displayed in train stations, post offices, schoolhouses, and shop windows, bringing the Armenian crisis into the everyday spaces of American life.

The image was created by Ethel Franklin Betts Bains (1877–1959), a prominent children's book illustrator and a former student of Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute. The poster was commissioned by the Division of Pictorial Publicity, the volunteer arm of artists led by Charles Dana Gibson that produced wartime and post-war propaganda for the U.S. government and aligned organizations. Printed by Conwell Graphic Companies, New York. Also held at the Library of Congress and Imperial War Museums.