One Sheet: Joint Chiefs, "Pluribus Tokum Up"

One Sheet is a series about single objects from the boxes.

Two jokes at once

“Joint Chiefs — Pluribus Tokum Up.”

The first joke is the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The second is E pluribus unum, the motto on every American coin since 1795. Both landed in about four words on a novelty t-shirt sheet.

That’s a level of wordplay you don’t expect from a rack next to the beer slogans, and it’s one of several sheets that made us reconsider who was actually writing this material.

The company it keeps

The same corner of the wall carried a mock badge reading “US Narcotics Division, Treasury Department.” That one only works if you know federal drug enforcement genuinely did sit under the Treasury until 1968.

Somebody writing t-shirt slogans in the seventies knew where the Bureau of Narcotics used to live. That is not a fact you pick up by accident.

Why it matters

The iron-on trade is remembered as cheap and disposable, and commercially it was — a quarter a sheet, ironed on, thrown away.

But somewhere behind it were people who read the news, watched the advertising, and could write. We’ve found parodies of Avis, Paul Masson, Budweiser and Olympia in these boxes. This sheet belongs to that group: it’s political satire, priced as a novelty.

See the sheet · The copywriters nobody knew were there