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_.