preview

##arison Of Political Cartoons In 'School Begins And' Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving Dinner?

Better Essays

Two political cartoons, “School Begins” by Puck and “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” by G.F Keller, both published in the late nineteenth century, avail of distinct examples in order to reveal America's attempt to civilize immigrants and non-white groups as a means of granting them social acceptance throughout the nineteenth century. “School Begins” exhibits Uncle Sam, a popular U.S. cartoon figure throughout history, as the dominant white American male in the center. In the cartoon, the class is made up of well-disciplined students studying books labeled with their state’s name, juxtaposed with the disorderly class seated in the front made up of the “Philippines, Hawaii, Porto Rico, and Cuba.” The territories are depicted as uncivilized, serving the racist and denigrating image that justified the right to govern the new territories gained after the Spanish-American War of 1898. In “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner”, immigrants and Americans of different backgrounds sit around a table, prepared for the feast . The groups represented at the dinner reveal unruly characteristics and stereotypical representations of each group’s food to highlight their conflicting differences in American society. By looking at how the artists utilize the exaggeration of non-white and immigrant groups, we can see the dominant civilizing narrative the U.S. secured through imperialism and assimilation, and this is salient because it exhibits a racist hierarchy that justified Western civilization

Get Access