THE MENTOR 1919.07.15, No. 183,
Uncle Sam

A Picture of Uncle Sam

Best of all the cartoons which both reveal and point the wayin our national existence, and certainly the best among thesymbols which represent great nations, stands Uncle Sam. Inno other representative character is personality so clearlydefined; in no other is the range of expression and of action so great.

Inexhaustible are his activities, and of endless variety the moments ofthought and of action in which the soul of the nation has been thuscaught and fixed. Uncle Sam, farmer, householder, and landed proprietor,has domestic responsibilities upon a scale never known before. Onesees him, too complacently,—in a rich-Jonathan moment,—riding thereapers and gathering in inexhaustible harvests; one sees him wakingsleepily from a Rip-van-Winkle drowsiness, to guard his forests andwaterfalls from despoiling hands; or, with a face less firm than it shouldhave been, settling a dispute among the children, perhaps in a threatenednation-wide strike. There is often a fatherly or grandfatherly touchabout him; guardian of western lands and seas, he has not only his ownbut his step-children to look after.

One cannot touch the many aspects of his whimsical, doubting, determined,sensitive face. Nearly the whole range of human feeling, ofhuman expression is there.

Honestly he tries to secure a right balancing of the scales of justice forhis multifarious offspring, yet often finds this delicate adjustment puzzlingbeyond his power to endure. Swift are the changes whereby hisHamlet moments of indecision slip into his Napoleonic moments ofgreat deeds. Something of woman’s intuition is in him, and sometimes,too, woman’s over-ready action in the line of eager and sudden conviction;yet again, sinewy, virile, he shows the muscles stiffening along hisarm, and he is become the very incarnation of lean and powerful masculinity,moving determinedly to a goal seen steadily from the beginning.

Margaret Sherwood in The Atlantic Monthly.