Who Is Uncle Sam?

This stern, patriotic character goes back to the early 1800s, but became an icon thanks to American propaganda during WWI. Learn more about Uncle Sam in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/uncle-sam-man-myth-legend.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, when Uncle Sam leans forward from the page,
fixing his penetrating gaze upon you and pointing at your heart,
there's nowhere to hide. He's a man with authority, white
haired and dressed in an old fashioned suit and top hat,

(00:24):
all in red, white and blue. He's got the full
weight of the United States of America behind him. But
who is this Uncle Sam guy? Where did he come from?
The most famous image of Uncle Sam is from a
poster created in nineteen seventeen. It had the painting described above,
with the slogan I want you for the US Army

(00:45):
enlist now. It's the work of artist James Montgomery Flagg,
a painter and illustrator who was asked to create propaganda
posters during World War One. Flag was inspired by a
British army recruitment poster by Alfred Leet from nineteen four
which featured the British Minister of War pointing at the
audience with the slogan join your Country's army. Flagg used

(01:07):
his own face as a model, adding wrinkles and a beard.
The poster was printed more than four million times in
the last year of the war, but Uncle Sam had
a life long before that. The character was long thought
to derive from one Uncle Sam Wilson, a Troy, New
York meat packer who supplied barrels of beef to the

(01:28):
army during the War of eighteen twelve. The barrels were
stamped US indicating they were government property, and the soldiers
called them Uncle Sam's. The New York Gazette popularized this
story in nineteen thirty. The explanation had such credence that
Congress passed a resolution in nineteen sixty one recognizing Sam
Wilson as being the origin of the name. But historians

(01:53):
find this tale to be flawed for several reasons. One
is that in twenty thirteen, the USS Constitution Museum uncovered
a diary entry from eighteen ten written by a slightly
disgruntled sixteen year old sailor serving on the USS Wasp.
The sailor wrote that he had been so seasick he
would have gone ashore if you could. He wrote, I

(02:15):
swear that Uncle Sam, as they call him, would certainly
forever have lost the services of at least one sailor.
This reference shows that Uncle Sam was already a cultural
reference before the War of eighteen twelve. A few other
references that show early uses of the term also tend
to discredit the Sam Wilson origin story, though Wilson may

(02:38):
have helped popularize an existing character. It turns out that
the minister who led Sam Wilson's funeral once wrote a
letter saying that he had spoken often with Wilson about
the circumstances of his name getting attached to a larger idea.
Uncle Sam's flashy appearance has evolved over time as cartoonists
have envisioned and re envisioned him. Sam's antecedent was probably

(03:02):
Brother Jonathan, a character who appeared in plays, stories, and
verse personifying the United States in the late seventeen hundreds.
In contrast with the character John Bull, who personified Great
Britain around eighteen twelve, Brother Jonathan began appearing in cartoons.
He was dressed as an American revolutionary with a long
military jacket and tri cornered hat. Simultaneously, there was Columbia,

(03:26):
a majestic, neoclassical female personification of America popular through the
seventeen and eighteen hundreds. She often wore a breastplate and
a long swirling skirt. Uncle Sam first appeared in the
cartoon in the eighteen thirties. He and brother Jonathan were
used from the eighteen thirties until the start of the
Civil War to represent the United States. They usually wore

(03:50):
striped pants, top hats, and whiskers. They also appeared in
the British magazine Punch, illustrated by cartoonists Sir John Tenniel
and John Leech. Brother Jonathan disappeared by the eighteen sixties,
but Uncle Sam was taken up by cartoonist Thomas Nast,
who often drew him with big boots and flyaway hair fixing.

(04:10):
The modern image then came World War One and Flagg's
well known posters. He created forty four in all, at
many featuring Uncle Sam. The US government used Uncle Sam's
image during both World Wars. Since then, he's been appropriated
for various advocacy messages. For example, a conservative cartoon shows

(04:33):
him reduced to a beggar, a message that the US
government is spending too much, an anti war cartoon shows
him as a bloodthirsty warmonger, and in twenty twenty five,
Samuel L. Jackson portrayed him in Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl
halftime show, playing the character as a sort of Uncle Tom,
scolding Lamar's presumed lack of propriety on a national stage.

(04:57):
Uncle Tom is a different episode, but it's clear that
Uncle Sam remains a vivid presence in our cultural lexicon.
Today's episode is based on the article Uncle Sam, the Band,
the Myth, the Legend on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by
Stelle Simon pen brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in

(05:19):
partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com and is produced by Tyler
Klangfore More podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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