National Symbols-Who Was Uncle Sam?

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 127, 1 June 1942, Page 4

National SymbolsWho Was Uncle Sam?

Nothing that the United States Minister to New Zealand has said since he came to this country has taken the public fancy more than his reference on St. George's Day to St. George and the dragon. If, he said, St. George, St. Andrew, St. David and St. Patrick, all together, couldn't do the job of killing the dragon, he offered them "one fellow who has not been canonised— Sam." The reference, of course, was

By Cyrano

understood by everybody. No national designation has ever been more closely identified with a people than "Uncle Sam" is with the people of the United States. It may be asked why this is, and how the name arose.

Was He Real?

It is a striking example of the need people feel for a designation, a label, that is easily recognisable. And if the story connecting Uncle Sam with a definite person is true, we have an example of an obscure person givinpr his name to something vast. Vespucci Amerigo, who didn't discover America, beat Christopher Columbus, who did, in providing a name for two continents. The term "Uncle Sam'' dates back to the second war between Britain and the United States, that of 1812. The story goes that at Troy, New York, there was an army contractor named Elbert Anderson, and a Government inspector called Samuel Wilson, an eccentric, jovial, and very popular man, generally known as Uncle Sam. Stores passed for the army were labelled "E.A.—U.S.," that is, "Elbert Anderson—United States." By way of a joke, the letters "U.S." were explained as "Uncle Sam," and as workmen of the district were drafted into the army the name spread.

Unfortunately for romance, the best authorities, including Professor Ernest Weekley, an eminent English writer on such subjects, seem to reject the story, and hold that "Uncle Sam" is simply a facetious interpretation of the letters "U. 5.," with no reference to any real person.

An Old-time Type The name, however, was quickly adopted in the United States and abroad. American cartoonists developed the figure of Uncle Sam as the world came to know it, and Punch did much to fix the type. Some times Punch called him ''Brother Jonathan," and we do know with some certainty where "Brother Jonathan" came from. In Washington's day Jonathan Turnbull was Governor of Connecticut, and Washington depended on him largely for supplies. "We must consult Brother Jonathan" was a favourite saying of Washington's when he was in difficulties. The "Uncle Sam" of innumerable cartoons wears a cutaway tail coat, and trousers strapped over his boots in a style of very many years ago; his waistcoat may be the Stars and Stripes, or he may have stars on his top hat; he is tall and lean; his face is acquiline and his hair longish; he has a goatee beard and smokes a cigar. The whole world, from China to Peru, from Belfast to Invercargill knows this Uncle Sam. '

It is interesting to compare Uncle Ham with John Bull, and to consider to what degree they are faithful representations of a people. John Bull came out of a series of political pamphlets written at the beginning of the eighteenth century. John Bull was England, and he was described as 'in the main an honest, plaindealing fellow, choleric, bold, and of very uncertain temper." I wonder whether this description was a legacy from Elizabethan England, when Englishmen seem to have been a good deal more hot-blooded and impulsive than they have been for a century or more past. At any rate one would hardly describe the Englishman of the nineteenth or twentieth century as "choleric" or "of very uncertain temper." The English have long been noted for their "phlegm."

The heavy-weight, top-booted, tophatted John Bull of Ptinch doesn't bear much resemblance to any class in England. The lean, reticent, good-form-worshipping public school type is miles away from him, but no further, perhaps, than the London bus conductor or the Midland artisan. The truth is that John Bull is largely an old-time English farmer come to town. Similarly Uncle Sam is based on a frontier American of the pioneering age. He has little in common with, say, the New Zealand intellectual, the Rotarian, or the eitizen whose father came from Poland.

Symbols That Persist. This illustrates the persistence of political ideas despite changes in conditions, such as the symbolical use of the oil-lamp in an electric age, and the sword in a world of tanks. What the writer of an article on "Cartoons" in the Britannica says of Uncle Sam applies to John Bull. "The figure of Uncle Sam is the most overworked of all. Each day he looks sternly out on the world from his place in the editorial page, and views with alarm, warns, dictates, with political fervour. Rarely does he laugh, for he is the federal voice, and as such, deals only in weighty matters. He tells kings, potentates, labour unions, corrupt office-holders, swindling trusts (depending on whether he is a Republican or a Democratic Uncle Sam) where they 'get off.* In his gayer moments he welcomes trans-Atlantic flyers and Channel swimmers, or in his sadder moments, stands with bowed head at the death of a public man of importance. He is übiquitous, untiring, and a good deal of a bore, yet the management of a daily cartoon would be difficult witehout his noticeable services," Pity the Cartoonist. That is just it. The cartoonist must deal in symbols that everybody can recognise. He groans when a Prime Minister takes office who has no outstanding features or habits, and welcomes an umbrella or a cigar. Unfortunately he misleads the world by over-simplifying types and therefore issues. It is uart of the genius of David Low that he has thrown over such stock types and relied upon his own invention. I must confess that I feel about John Bull sometimes as this writer feels about Uncle Sam —John Bull, so stout and beefy and so often complacent. But then I don't draw cartoons for a living.

We have no such figure to represent New Zealand. Through game great event, or pome chance, this may arrive some day. Meanwhile we have to do what we can with the pointed hat of our soldiers, the fernleal and th.<s kiwi.