2010.54.15456

The Silent Majority
1969
22.875 in HIGH x 22 in WIDE
(58.1 cm HIGH x 55.88 cm WIDE)
All Of Us Or None Archive. Gift of the Rossman Family.
2010.54.15456

"W 184 The Silent Majority, San Francisco WESPAC Visual Communications, Inc. P.O. Box 2866, san Francisco, California 94126" in white at the bottom left corner.

Poster has a black printed background with a central black and white image of a graveyeard filled with white tombstones in orderly rows. Above the image is "The Silent Majority" in white.

This is perhaps Angeli’s most political piece; he has stated that it “portrayed the reality of war and was a touchstone for all sides for or against the war.”


Two huge antiwar marches in San Francisco took place on April 6 and November 20, 1969. The speech in which Richard Nixon most publicly used the term “silent majority” was given November 3, 1969, and firsthand accounts of the November 20demonstration recall copies of Angeli’s poster being distributed and displayed.

A subsequent poster, based on the same photo but bearing the bold headline “No Christmas as Usual” [http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/2010542071] and with a wreath on the foremost tombstone, was produced by the national organization New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. That meant that Angeli’s original poster ended up in the hands of someone responsible for the Mobilization poster by mid-December. That was tight timing, by pre-Internet standards, but such things happened. Posters went viral before “viral” existed. [LMC]

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