During the boom years between World War I and the Great Depression, the American economy surged ahead on its war-tuned pistons, and the order of the day was production. Factories turned out radios, telephones, and Model A’s, while in the cities, high in the towers of commerce, armies of statisticians and managers, secretaries and speculators, produced the paper evidence of our national prosperity. Business was a matter of faith; business was men like Sinclair Lewis’s cigar-chewing capitalist hero Babbitt, extolling the office and railing against unions and socialism: “The sooner a man learns he isn’t going to be coddled and he needn’t expect a lot of free grub … the sooner he’ll get on the job and produce—produce—produce!”

But Lewis’s fictional boss faced the same problem his real-world counterparts did. Preaching production was one thing; motivating employees to actually produce was something else. It’s a problem as old as management itself: What can you do to keep workers working?

Back in the twenties, one way was to place an order with the Mather Company, of Chicago. Charles Mather, chief of his family’s printing house, was selling what he called “Constructive Organization Posters,” motivation-minded lithographs that united colorful graphics with inspirational messages ranging from the importance of teamwork (“All Together Pull: Pull Together When You Want to Win”) to the benefits of amiability (“Say It and Smile: Smiles Chase Grouches.”) Prominently placed on office and factory walls, the posters were thought to instruct, inspire, and “stop losses and build large profits for you.” Mather sold his posters by subscription, and between 1923 and 1929 he issued more than 350 varieties, each sharing the sort of go-get-’em style that might make one wonder if Babbitt himself weren’t doing the writing.

Mather’s messages drew their strength from their corresponding symbolic images: A train steams through the night, a sailboat crosses the finish line, a pole-vaulter clears the high bar.

“When you look at this allegorical attempt at good work and good relationships, this kind of wonderful naivete is virtually exclusively American,” observes the poster historian George Theofiles. “But we have to address the lack of what we have in abundance today, which is irony and cynicism. We’re so marinated in this mess that we can’t see that those messages were in fact normal in society.”

Workplace motivational posters weren’t exactly a new idea. During World War I, the government had papered factory walls with exhortations like “Hip-Hip! Another Ship.” Mather’s inspirational messages, moreover, likely weren’t drawn from his own inspiration. According to the poster dealer and Mather historian John Heller, it was a salesman named Charles Howard Rosenfeld who initially approached Mather with the idea of developing a series of incentive posters, for which he would do the writing.