Marketing Patriotism: Pennsylvania Railroad Advertising During World War II

In a scene from PRR’s 1943 wall calendar, artist Dean Cornwell painted an allegorical sky featuring Uncle Sam in a boxer’s stance, looming above a tableau of industry and railroading engaged in wartime production.
Collection of Dan Cupper

During World War II, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) spent lavishly on patriotic magazine advertising. No other railroad put so much effort, money or creative talent into a campaign to boost the war and create favorable public opinion for itself.

As the single largest railroad in the United States, the Philadelphia-based “Pennsy” carried 10 percent of all freight in America and 20 percent of all passengers across its 13-state, 11,000-mile system. It dominated the East Coast−Midwest transportation business, with main lines running from New York to Washington, Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh to Cleveland, Detroit, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Louisville, Chicago and St. Louis. It also operated secondary north–south corridors, including Buffalo to Erie, Harrisburg and Baltimore; Erie to Pittsburgh; and a line reaching to the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.

Being such a large corporation, PRR was a major employer. From a record high of 279,000 employees in 1920, the level dipped to a third of that figure near the end of the Great Depression, 94,000 in 1938. (By comparison, this was about 10 percent of the number of federal government employees at the time.) But in 1941 the railroad went on a hiring binge to gear up for national defense that would nearly double that number, averaging 170,000 employees for the war years of 1943–45.

PRR had conducted a successful magazine advertising campaign in the late 1920s, humanizing the massive corporation by telling stories about passengers, engineers, trackwalkers, switch-tower operators, porters, children and small-town America. These were institutional ads, designed to shape positive attitudes toward what was otherwise a faceless bureaucracy.

All of these ads were rendered in black and white, placed in such traditional national mainstream outlets as Life, Time, The New Yorker, Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post and The Literary Digest and specialty publications such as The Nation’s Business, Business Week and Traffic World. It’s significant that these ads were placed in national media, rather than regional outlets. Readers in California were hardly affected by the Pennsylvania Railroad, but the carrier wanted to foster a positive image of itself even in places where its tracks didn’t reach.

When the Depression hit, the railroad’s stock plummeted from $110 a share to $6. PRR cut all magazine advertising and spent little on newspaper advertising. The few print ads that ran focused on bargain coach fares or local promotional fares to tourist destinations such as Atlantic City.

As times got better, PRR began to dip its toe back into the magazine-advertising pool. The company inaugurated an armada of new streamlined passenger trains — the vaunted “Fleet of Modernism” — on June 15, 1938. This prompted an array of all-color ads promoting service on top trains such as the Broadway Limited, “The Spirit of St. Louis,” the Liberty Limited and the General.

A blast furnace typical of those in Pittsburgh, Steelton, Johnstown and Bethlehem served as a backdrop for this 1942 advertisement that highlighted the relationship between the steel and railroad industries.
Collection of Dan Cupper

Then in 1939–40 came the New York World’s Fair on Long Island. A PRR-owned connecting subsidiary, the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), ran “straight to the gate” of the fair, as the ads put it, and for two years, the Pennsy ran a stream of messages promoting the ease of getting there via the PRR-LIRR link, with a convenient change of trains at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. No other railroad could boast that advantage.

In 1940 and 1941 the railroad placed a series of magazine and newspaper ads touting one of three themes. For the economy market, the railroad advertised its new overnight all-coach trains Trail Blazer (New York–Philadelphia–Pittsburgh–Chicago) and Jeffersonian (New York–Philadelphia–Pittsburgh–Indianapolis–St. Louis). These trains were designed to appeal to budget travelers, with reclining-seat coaches in which to sleep, rather than paying extra fare for a berth or a bedroom in a Pullman sleeper.

For the business-traveler market, the themes were quite different: adoption of the then-modern all-room sleeping cars; or the all-weather dependability of train travel compared to driving or flying. These both were aimed at business travelers, who were then still in the habit of traveling overnight in Pullman sleeping cars to business appointments in distant cities. For instance, business travelers could pack their suitcases, board a train in New York or Philadelphia at the end of the business day, eat dinner in the dining car, and turn in for the night, arriving in the morning in time for the start of the business day in Chicago or other Midwestern cities. Likewise, a person could wind up business meetings in the Midwest by midday, board an overnight train back to the East, and arrive at destination in the morning.

During the height of Pullman sleeper travel, this amounted to 8,000 passengers per night in the United States, each paying extra for the privilege of a bed, mattress and pillow, with varying degrees of privacy. The great majority of these spaces were filled with business travelers. With the exception of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which opened on October 1, 1940, a national network of superhighways languished in the planning stages and commercial passenger aviation was still not as widely accepted as it would become a decade later with the development of the Boeing 707 jetliner.

When World War II broke out, the American railroads’ main worry was not whether they could handle the expected flow of troops and matériel. It was the fear that the federal government would nationalize the railroads again, as it had done in World War I. Transportation bottlenecks during that conflict prompted the formation of the United States Railroad Administration (USRA), which seized the system and nationalized it. The aim was to promote efficiency by placing operational control in centralized hands and to draw up standard plans for steam locomotives and freight cars, thus creating efficiencies for suppliers.

The owners and managers of the railroads almost universally considered USRA to be a misguided experiment in socialism, and the Transportation Act of 1920 corrected this situation by returning the carriers to their owners and managers. The tale of USRA has been told in numerous books and articles, but it’s enough to say here that the railroads wanted, at all costs, to prevent another government takeover.

In 1941 the Pennsylvania Railroad employed 1,300 women, mostly in clerical jobs. That figure grew nearly tenfold by the time this advertisement appeared, showing a woman doing the traditionally male job of a switchman.
Collection of Dan Cupper

As an industry giant, PRR took a leadership role in opposing that concept, but it had to tread carefully. While it wanted to keep the government at arm’s length, it also had to work closely with the government to coordinate hundreds of trains daily. If PRR and other roads couldn’t speedily and promptly move troops, munitions, tanks and aircraft parts, the specter of federal ownership might raise its head again.

As a result, the company’s advertising suddenly took a stridently boosterish tone, with PRR proudly supporting the war effort at every turn. The unspoken, underlying message to the public and the federal government was, “We are patriots . . . we are your partner . . . we can handle this . . . we are handling this . . . no need to think about a return to the days of USRA.”

While other railroads ran ads boosting the military and their role in transporting war goods and personnel, none jumped into it with the dazzling excitement of the Pennsy. Full-color ads, frequently changed out for new themes and artwork, became standard for PRR, while other railroads took out black-and-white or, at best, two-color ads. The Pullman Co. and the American Locomotive Co. commissioned some full-color ads, but even storied lines like the Santa Fe, the Baltimore & Ohio and the New York Central ran ads that were visually boring by comparison.

The Pennsy’s ad agency was Al Paul Lefton, also of Philadelphia. Founded in 1928, the company counted many other proud brands among its clients: Mack trucks, Michelin tires, RCA radios, Schmidt’s beer and Brillo scouring pads. Although PRR didn’t use artwork from its traditional wall-calendar artist, Grif Teller (1899–1993), it did commission illustrations from other artists working under Lefton’s wing. Among these were Dean Cornwell (1892–1960), Alexander Leydenfrost (1888–1961), and Jerome Rozen (1895–1987). The first two had painted wartime calendar scenes for PRR, which were reused in advertising.

After Japan’s surprise attack on U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, PRR’s advertising went dormant briefly. One full-color ad showed the railroad’s forte in hauling steel; two others promoted PRR’s partnership with the Navy in delivering supplies and sailors to dockside. Portside congestion caused by railroad (and government) inefficiency had been a problem in World War I.

But as the U.S. role in World War II escalated, PRR geared up its campaign to promote the war, bursting forth with a steady stream of full-color display ads in 1943, 1944 and 1945. These were concentrated in magazines with national, even international, circulation in the millions: Time, Life, National Geographic and The Saturday Evening Post. Many of these magazines grew in circulation despite wartime paper shortages. Note that PRR served just 13 states — populous states, to be sure, with eight of the 10 largest cities in America — but deliberately conducted a national advertising campaign, as it had during the 1920s.

An ad copywriter in 1943 reprised the name of folk hero Casey Jones to describe the valiant role of 12,000 women, “the majority of them in overalls and slacks,” as the Associated Press put it, who replaced PRR men who went off to war.
Collection of Dan Cupper

Among the PRR themes that emerged in magazines were the big job it was doing in moving troops quickly and efficiently; record movements of coal, steel, ore, wheat and rations; coordination with maritime connections; the role of tank-car trains in supplying oil and gas to the East Coast while German subs menaced commercial tanker-ship traffic in the Atlantic; tracking a single boxcar for a month as it made its way across and around the nation and back, hauling multiple wartime shipments; and the vital role women were performing by substituting for men in traditionally male railroad jobs.

At the bottom of most of the ads, in smaller type, the railroad kept a running tally of the number of former PRR employees serving in the military, as well as the number of those who had died in the war. Toward the end of the war the number of PRR employees in the service rose to 53,000, with 906 killed. (After the war ended, the confirmed count of the latter rose to 1,307.)

And always, this slogan closed the message: “Serving the Nation,” once again emphasizing the theme of supporting the nation, and by inference, the government.

Some of the most striking advertisements featured people. “Meet Mrs. Casey Jones,” one headline urged, alluding to the hero engineer Casey Jones, about whom a folk song had been written. The artwork shows a middle-aged woman dressed in bib overalls, ready to maintain PRR steam locomotive No. 6883, an M1-class freight engine. She is wearing safety goggles, and slung over her shoulders are a heavy wrench, a hammer and a maul. The parallel is clear: Casey Jones was a hero for saving the lives of passengers on his train in 1900; this woman is a hero for doing a man’s physical railroad work while he’s off to war. Other figures surround the central character, showing women at work washing the engine or cleaning its headlight.

Another ad praising women for “keep[ing] them rolling on the Pennsylvania Railroad” illustrated a female trainman collecting tickets in a day coach. Arrayed on the same layout were vignettes of women serving as a station usher, an information clerk and a brakeman.

A woman working as a switchman in a railroad yard was the theme of yet another advertisement. Beneath the headline “Molly Pitcher, 1944,” a grim-faced woman operates a track switch while holding a red flag used to signal train crews. Around her are more images of women at work — at a drill press, in the smokebox of a steam engine, on track main tenance, cleaning a GG1 electric locomotive, and unloading a boxcar.

The need to move “8 tons” of freight—tanks, jeeps, guns, ammunition, airplane parts—for every soldier, sailor or marine engaged in combat is highlighted in this 1944 advertisement.
Collection of Dan Cupper

On the other end of the gender spectrum, another 1944 ad features a single male soldier, shirtless, arms crossed, with his Army helmet and ammunition belt strapped on. “This fighter weighs in at 8 tons!” screams the headline, while the copy explains that the railroad moves eight tons of equipment and supplies for each fighting servicemember.

Another male-oriented display from 1944 shows a trainload of soldiers who are “On their way” to troop ships and then distant battlefields. Some look thoughtful, reading a letter from home, or writing one; others look jovial as they share photos. Some inspect a rifle; some nod off. What is striking about the portrayal is that it shows Army men who are anywhere from 25 to 40 years old, a clear fiction, since most recruits and draftees were 18 and 19 years old. As the fighting began to wind down, the Pennsy kept up its drumbeat of patriotism but began to foreshadow a postwar future. It ran ads showing an experimental new Class S2 steam turbine locomotive and other exotic projected locomotive designs (but as it turned out, they were never built).

A couple of 1945 advertisements reprised the theme of people. One showed a scene depicting trainside homecoming reunions, with the foreground dominated by a young woman about to embrace a sailor. Another headline asks, “How do I look in blue?” as a wife and daughter admire a husband dressed in a PRR conductor’s blue suit instead of a khaki soldier’s uniform.

Then, with V-J Day occurring in September 1945, PRR turned its attention to celebrating the 100th anniversary of its 1846 founding, quickly leaving behind military themes for advertising, even as it hauled thousands upon thousands of homebound servicemen en route to discharge for civilian life.

In the late 1940s, the railroad ramped up its appeal to holiday and vacation travelers, since business travel was starting to slip away to private autos on new, government-funded superhighways. Commercial airlines, too, were eating into the railroad share of intercity passenger travel.

A reprise of the wartime ad campaign came in 1951 when the U.S. was fighting the Korean War. A PRR ad showed a 1943 layout indicating “What it takes to move a division,” and updated the illustration with the tagline “True then, truer now.” Another 1951 ad, with all-new illustrations, showed PRR workers building new freight cars above the headline “Assembly Line for Defense!”

Details of railroad troop movements—where, when and why—were considered top secret, as reflected by the drawn window shades of the coach interior in this 1944 painting.
Collection of Dan Cupper

PRR made its last full-color appeal for passengers in 1952, with a pair of advertisements. One celebrated the 50th anniversary of the New York–Philadelphia–Pittsburgh–Chicago flagship Broadway Limited. The other announced a fleet of new stainless steel–sided streamliners built by the Budd Company of Philadelphia. Assigned to Boston–Washington and New York–Washington service, they were named The Senator and The Congressionals.

PRR continued to place advertisements, but they were increasingly devoted to freight service and to fighting government strictures. Ad placements moved away from National Geographic to trade and business journals such as Traffic World and Business Week. As rail passenger traffic fell victim to the postwar boom in auto ownership, PRR no longer saw any reason to try to influence the general public, or even speak to it.

Ad topics from this period included construction of a new quarter-mile-long shop to build new freight cars in Hollidaysburg; trailer-on-flatcar intermodal service, which ran under the brand name “Tructrain” on the PRR; the company’s success in attracting businesses to locate new plants on its lines, such as Ford, Chrysler, IBM, American Can, Brockway Glass and Johnson & Johnson; a new $9 million ore pier on the Delaware River at Philadelphia; and a shortcut eliminating height restrictions for freight loads on the Pittsburgh–Columbus, Ohio, main line.

The convoys, the troops, the tanks, the women in men’s jobs, all were left behind as the railroad struggled through the 1950s to meet new realities. And while these realities — overregulation and billions in federal subsidies for competing modes — stemmed from decisions over public policy, they no longer commanded the attention of the American public itself. There was no longer a need for PRR to advertise anything at all.

Dean Cornwell’s calendar painting for 1944 showed the teamwork of agriculture, railroading and military might necessary to feed a nation—and its troops—while engaging in modern warfare.
Collection of Dan Cupper

Recycling Calendar Art

The rumblings of war were apparent in the fall of 1941, when the Pennsylvania Railroad was finishing up details to distribute its 1942 wall calendar, which showed a coal mine scene painted by veteran PRR calendar artist Grif Teller. Although it displayed an industrial rather than a military theme, the painting was titled Partners in National Defense. PRR annually distributed 300,000 large wall calendars (28 inches square), but, despite the title, did not recycle this painting for magazine use.

That changed in 1943. Teller was by this time quite adept at portraying trains in scenic settings, having done so since his first PRR painting in 1928. But for wartime themes, the railroad chose work by other artists whose styles were more patriotic and militaristic.

The 1943 painting by muralist Dean Cornwell portrayed an allegorical Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeves, standing above a steel mill with PRR trains in front, led by M1a-class steam engine No. 6713. Prominently shown are flatcars loaded with Army tanks. The painting bore the title Serving the Nation. But for magazine use, it was changed to Spirit of 1943, a play on the theme of The Spirit of ’76, a noted circa 1875 oil painting by artist Archibald M. Willard that depicted drummers and a fife player accompanying Continental troops into battle during the American Revolution.

For 1944 the PRR calendar painting, also produced by Cornwell, likewise depicted an allegorical scene. Advancing tanks and troops were suspended in a sky above a modern PRR J1a-class freight locomotive and a farmer on a tractor. The title of the calendar painting was Forward, amended for magazine use by adding the tagline “All along the line,” referring to the front lines of combat.

The 1945 calendar painting was produced by Alexander Leydenfrost. He showed an Art Deco–styled streamlined passenger steam locomotive — the then-experimental T1-class type — in front of steel mills belching clouds of multicolored smoke as they engaged in defense work. It was titled Power but was amended to Power to Pace the Future for magazine use. By mid-1945 the war in Europe was won and the Pacific war nearly so. PRR looked forward to 1946, when it would celebrate the centennial of its 1846 founding, hiring artist Frank Reilly to paint a multipanel scene with antique and new locomotives. That tableau was used for magazine ads, but with no mention of the war. From 1947 to the end of the wall-calendar series in 1958, the company returned to Teller, reverting to scenic images with trains passing through. None were used for PRR magazine advertising, which was then taking a different course altogether.

Further Reading

Blardone, Chuck. Pennsylvania Railroad Advertising Art, 1859–1968. Pennsylvania Railroad Technical & Historical Society, 2013. / Cupper, Dan. Crossroads of Commerce: The Pennsylvania Railroad Calendar Art of Grif Teller. Rev. ed. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003. / Runte, Alfred. “Promoting the Golden West: Advertising and the Railroad.” California History 70, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 62–75. / Watkins, Julian Lewis. The 100 Greatest Advertisements, 1852–1958: Who Wrote Them and What They Did. Rev. ed. New York: Dover, 2012.

Dan Cupper is a transportation historian from Harrisburg, Dauphin County, who is descended from a family of railroaders and is a retired locomotive engineer for Norfolk Southern Railroad. He has written numerous books and articles on railroad history. His previous contribution to Pennsylvania Heritage, “WWII Target: Altoona,” appeared in the Winter 2020 issue.