A Picture of Uncle Sam

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

Inexhaustible are his activities, and of endless variety the moments of thought and of action in which the soul of the nation has been thus caught and fixed. Uncle Sam, farmer, householder, and landed proprietor, has domestic responsibilities upon a scale never known before. One sees him, too complacently,—in a rich-Jonathan moment,—riding the reapers and gathering in inexhaustible harvests; one sees him waking sleepily from a Rip-van-Winkle drowsiness, to guard his forests and waterfalls from despoiling hands; or, with a face less firm than it should have been, settling a dispute among the children, perhaps in a threatened nation-wide strike. There is often a fatherly or grandfatherly touch about him; guardian of western lands and seas, he has not only his own but 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, of human expression is there.

Honestly he tries to secure a right balancing of the scales of justice for his multifarious offspring, yet often finds this delicate adjustment puzzling beyond his power to endure. Swift are the changes whereby his Hamlet moments of indecision slip into his Napoleonic moments of great 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 his arm, 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.