Not by Word Alone

...and our own time when Sam in a suit of mail rides a bucking horse labeled "U.S...

...America, like Odysseus in other days, has found on its journey not only exhilarating new sights but also stinging disappointment, frustration, and disenchantment...

...By 1965 Valtman in the Hartford Times has an Uncle Sam who is no longer young but is elegant and still virile...

...The advent of internationalism as a national policy in 1917 deeply wounded some ancient sensibilities and conceptions of patriotism...

...Hesse in the St...

...Whatever the future may hold for Uncle Sam and his countrymen, the 50 years encompassed in this book recorded an end to illusion and daydreaming, as well as to isolation...

...Moreover, in the process of scwthing or energizing the beholder, they can make public policies seem tangible, simple, and even capable of being changed...

...What genius is operating in our history to make the Yes of one era the No of another, and to make right and wrong appear not only interchangeable but reversible too...

...If the cartoons that here elaborate the story of this education are uneven in quality and force, and obsolescent as an art-form, they nevertheless constitute an enduring record of moods and opinions useful for historians who think they can live by word alone...

...Batchelor in the '50s in the National Review drew a guilt-struck Uncle Sam carrying a banner marked "Co-existence" over the prostrate form of "Hungarian liberty...

...Why did Justus in the Minneapolis Star depict "United States foreign policy" as an ostrich with its head in the sand refusing to recognize "the reality of Red China," while in an earlier day so many of the cartoonists whose work is included here clearly recognized the threat that the totalitarian nations represented and summoned the United States to its duty...

...He was also the serene God of the Old Testament, slow to anger and rich in mercy—as when a feminine "democracy" kneels before him in an Orr oartoon from the Chicago Tribune and beseeches him to stay out of "war and Europe...

...Wake up, Uncle...

...Cartoons reveal better than any other form of communication, except allegory, how a people anthropomorphizes its institutions, and often they tell us what its deepest wishes are...

...And one must see the Marcus cartoon at the time of the Korean War showing a stream of hornets representing the "enraged world democracies" and compare its meaning with an Uncle Sam entangled, as Holland saw him relatively recently, in the ropes of "commitments all over the world...

...In 1960 Justus presented an abashed Sam with the stub of an exploded cigar, "Cuban Fiasco," clenched between his hps...

...The recent growth in American self-distrust, if not self-hate, is a marked phenomenon stimulated in no small measure by the war in Vietnam...

...Louis Globe-Democrat soon afterward did an Uncle Sam hobbling on one leg because the other was tied up and made useless by the "delay in resuming nuclear tests...

...In this unique cartoon history of recent United States foreign policy, many of these generalizations may be seen in historical context...

...Besides the about-faces in policy delineated in these pages, which tell us that the shifts in national alignments are kaleidoscopic, readers will notice how the depiction of the United States has been changing...

...As individuals, Americans have acquired a touch of unwonted pessimism...

...The heroes and devils, furthermore, even seem on occasion to be interchangeable...

...The book, with a brief introduction by Richard Rovere, was aimed at helping the Foreign Policy Association celebrate its 50th anniversary...

...Later Sam appears as a clumsier man...

...But it has long been in the making...

...In a free society, cartoons sometimes reflect better than any mirror the cruel choices that frequently are the only options of policy-makers...

...Looked at as a whole, however, this anthology says much more about the nation than merely how it has moved from episode to episode in its international intercourse...

...they have slowly relinquished their stubborn belief that nothing is impossible...

...What happened between the time when a supine Uncle Sam bound by Liliputians ("fifth columnists," "Nazi sympathizers," and the "hate England crowd" among others) was implored from afar, "Wake up...

...now they are chastened by their awareness of the limits of national power...

...If some people regard the Senate as containing the good guys today, it is important to be reminded, as we are in a Rollin Kirby cartoon of long ago, that the Senate (a man in a toga, of course) once stood with bloody dagger in hand as the murderer of the League of Nations...

...Power" and shouts frantically, "Of course I'm in charge—I think...

...Again and again the reader is struck by the thin margin separating a hero of policy from a prisoner of it...

...It reminds us how national leaders are trussed up by established policies as well as being the makers and shapers of them...

...Little in the Nashville Tennessean shows Sam with pockets inside out and empty after having been rolled at "Chiang's Place...

...In the '20s Uncle Sam was a well-meaning fellow, somewhat Main-Street and befuddled as he confronted the sophisticated world of diplomatic intrigue and disingenuousness...

...Yet the loss is great because a good cartoon can have the force of a clout on the head delivered by a truncheon...

...Pease in the Newark News limned him trying indifferently to bolster "Chiang's government" with the rods of a dollar sign...

...As a tool for historians they can strip off the cosmetics applied to public questions by governments and by editorial writers...

...Plainly the passing scene is perceived as too varied and complex to be embraced in caricature...

...Reviewed by HENRY F. GRAFF Professor of History, Columbia University The political cartoon has been eclipsed in our time by television reports and "news analyses" in the daily press that can cut more deeply —but far less sharply—into the stuff of public policy, particularly foreign policy...