Antique Eagle Shield Broom Label 🧹 NOS 1930s 1940s Art Deco Patriotic Americana Litho USA Unused Original

Why Is There No Name on This Eagle Broom Label? 🦅 No Name On This One

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

Only one line of type appears anywhere on this label: "LITHO. IN U.S.A." in the lower corner. No design number, no brand, no maker, no town, and whoever drew that eagle never signed it. It was a stock design sold blank, for a broom company to buy the run and print its own name in the plain blue bands across the top and bottom. This run never got a name, so it's New Old Stock, still in the shape it left the press. On a finished broom, a label like this got glued over the fastening, where it covered the clamp marks the wiring machine left behind and put the brand name right up front.

🎨 What's Actually Printed

The eagle's body is shaped like a five-point star, its head turned in sharp profile with a hooked beak. The wings step out in bands, a shield sits on the chest, a fanned tail spreads below, and two olive branches reach out to the sides, the whole bird set in a downward chevron of red, white and blue. About four inks did all of this, and it's plain ink giving the eagle its glow, not gold leaf: there's no metallic ink anywhere on this label.

⚡ Thunderbird or Eagle?

That star-shaped body and fanned tail give the bird an angular, thunderbird look, and the artist blended it with the heraldic eagle's shield and olive branches. The thunderbird itself is a spirit bird from Native American tradition. It turns up in the art, songs and stories of many Pacific Northwest Coast peoples, and among some peoples of the Great Lakes and the Great Plains too, and in the Algonquian tellings the flap of its wings is the thunder. It was no odd thing to hang American pride on back then, either: in 1939 the 45th Infantry Division took a Thunderbird drawn by Woody Big Bow, a Kiowa artist from Carnegie, Oklahoma, as its shoulder patch. Whatever you call it, it's a striking piece of commercial art.

📐 Reading the Style

Nothing on the label gives a year, but the flat Deco geometry and that bold red-white-blue chevron are 1930s-40s commercial style, the kind of patriotic imagery that got extra mileage as the country headed into the war years. Art Deco took its name from the big 1925 decorative arts exhibition in Paris, but it didn't stay in the fancy shops. It ended up on cinemas, radios and, I get a kick out of this one, vacuum cleaners, the very machines that were cutting into the broom business. Label collectors will tell you eagle-and-shield designs like this one surged during World War II and right after it.

🌾 A Stock Design, Waiting for a Name

Local legend in the smaller broom-producing towns has it that a new season's labels arriving from the lithography house were treated almost like the arrival of new seed stock - looked over, compared to last year's run, argued about at the counter of the general store by whoever ran the broom shop. The old shop-counter story goes that a customer who couldn't remember a broom maker's name could always remember the bird, and would just ask for "the one with the eagle." This one, whichever town it was headed for, never got claimed.

🏭 Broom Country

Labels like this went to broom factories all over the country, and the biggest broom town of all was Amsterdam, New York. A 1925 history of the Mohawk Valley called it "the first American broom-making city," and the city's own seal showed a carpet, a spool of thread and a couple of brooms. Broom corn grew right along the Mohawk River, and Amsterdam wasn't the only broom town on it - that same 1925 history lists brooms among what Fonda and Fultonville were turning out too. Julius Wasserman opened his Amsterdam Broom Co. on Brookside Avenue in 1884, his son David joined him in 1889, and by 1907 the firm had 169 men working a 60-hour week. Then the vacuum cleaner came along, and "during the 1930s, the popularity of vacuum cleaners shrank the broom industry," as Amsterdam's local historian put it, just about the time a label like this one was coming off the press.

By then the American broom trade was well over a century old. It goes back to 1797, when Levi Dickenson, a farmer in Hadley, Massachusetts, made his wife a broom from sorghum tassels, the plant we call broom corn. The foot-treadle broom machine came along in 1810, and by one count the country went from 303 broom factories in 1839 to a peak of 1,039 in 1919. Out in Illinois, the Arcola area came to grow nearly half the broom corn in the United States, and folks there are still proud to call it the Broomcorn Capital of the World.