Uncle Sam has wanted YOU! for many different things over the last three decades.
Just how many can be seen in a new exhibition of 22 Uncle Sam posters from the Prints and Photographs Division, "Everybody's Uncle Sam: Alternative Propaganda Posters, 1967-1994," which runs through July 21.
The propaganda posters are representative of movements from the radical right to the far left. "The exhibition doesn't take any one stand. Like a poster, it's posted. It lets you be the deciding vote," said Elena Millie, curator of posters in the Prints and Photographs Division.
The exhibition examines the origin and uses of Uncle Sam in poster art. Uncle Sam was a real person. Born Sam Wilson in 1766 in Arlington, Mass., he later ran a meat packing plant in Troy, N.Y. During the War of 1812, he shipped meat to the troops in crates stamped "U.S.," and soldiers said it came from Uncle Sam.
Sam Wilson was known in his day as an honest, forthright and dependable man, according to contemporary portrayals by printmakers and cartoonists such as Thomas Nast, who also depicted a gaunt man with long legs.
The most popular and best-known picture of Uncle Sam was painted for the July 6, 1916, cover of Leslie's Illustrated Weekly Newspaper by James Montgomery Flagg. When the United States entered World War I the next year, Flagg made a lithograph with Uncle Sam pointing his finger. He borrowed the pose from a 1914 British military recruiting poster of the British secretary of war saying, "Your Country Needs You." Uncle Sam's words became "I Want You for U.S. Army."
"It's interesting, because if you read it [closely], it's really ungrammatical," said Ms. Millie.
Grammatical or not, 4 million copies were printed before the war was over, and there was a reprint of equal number for World War II. Between those wars, Uncle Sam pointed out that people should remember daylight-saving time and the 1940 census. Between World War II and the Vietnam War, for which no Uncle Sam recruiting posters were printed, the well-known visage was used by advertisers to sell real estate and household products.
In the Vietnam era, Uncle Sam reemerged, but now a strange mix of anti-establishment sentiment, the civil rights movement and the influences of a pop-art poster craze bowdlerized his once patriotic image.
"What a lot of poster artists were trying to do then is to make a difference, to alert as many people as they could as inexpensively as they could of certain things going on [and] to get people thinking along a common, radical line," Ms. Millie said.
So an image that originated from soldier's jokes about crates of meat sent off to strengthen soldiers for war came to symbolize a country weakened as soldiers came home in coffins from another, more harrowing war, she said.
The most shocking image is that of a skeleton in top hat and tatters bursting through a traditional Uncle Sam war poster. The most harrowing is that of a bandaged soldier with a crumpled hat under one arm. His other hand is outstretched in supplication. "I Want Out," he says. Both posters are anonymous. "Not too many people wanted to be known, possibly because of the FBI wiretapping of radical student protesters," Ms. Millie said.
"These are some of the harshest, most shocking posters you will see," said Ms. Millie. More lighthearted approaches from the same era include a long-nosed Richard Nixon saying "Let's End This War" and MAD Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman asking with his typical acerbic wit, "Who Needs You?"
In a poster marking the sexual revolution, an unadulterated Uncle Sam asks blandly, "Have You Had Your Pill Today?"
Civil rights activists used a subtle treatment in 1976, showing a black Uncle Sam wearing a widely flared top hat and equally wide lapels. He looks at the camera as if to ask: "'We got the civil rights legislation, why hasn't anything changed?' " Ms Millie said.
"The exhibition gives you a feeling of issues through the decades. We have gay issues and AIDS in this decade, the hostage crisis in the last, the radical right is represented. ... As you go around you can see the different issues."
Ms. Millie's favorite is also the most recent: a nationwide recruitment ad in which ice cream moguls Ben and Jerry point, commanding readers to enter their "Yo! I'm Your CEO" contest.
Said Ms. Millie: "Uncle Sam has that historical symbolism behind him. When you see Uncle Sam personified, you ask automatically 'What does he want?' He's calling us for some sort of action. That's why he was such a popular symbol for protest art, the underground press and guerrilla art."
"Everybody's Uncle Sam: Alternative Propaganda Posters, 1967- 1994" runs through July 21 in the Oval Gallery on the sixth floor of the Madison Building, Monday through Friday only, 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m.
