Uncle Sam Day

What the day is

Uncle Sam Day is observed on September 13, the birthday of the meat packer generally credited with the name.

Origin and background

The usual account runs like this. During the war of 1812 a supplier in Troy, New York shipped barrels of salted meat to the army, stamped U.S. for United States. Soldiers who knew him joked that the initials stood for Uncle Sam, his familiar name, and the joke spread through the ranks and then beyond them. Congress passed a resolution in 1961 recognizing him as the namesake. The evidence is thinner than the confidence with which it is repeated, but the man and the contracts were real.

The figure took a long time to settle. Nineteenth century cartoonists drew him in many forms, gradually converging on the tall thin man with a white beard, striped trousers and a star-spangled hat, partly by borrowing features from an older figure called Brother Jonathan and partly from caricatures of Lincoln.

The image almost everyone pictures is a single recruiting poster from 1917, showing Uncle Sam pointing directly out at the viewer. Its artist used his own face as the model, and the composition was adapted from a British recruiting poster of 1914 showing Lord Kitchener in the same pose with the same device of the pointing finger and the direct address. That poster in turn made the pose a standard of wartime persuasion, and it has been copied ever since.

What makes it work is the second person. The picture looks at you specifically and addresses you alone, which is the oldest trick in advertising and was fairly new in 1914.

How to take part

• Compare the 1917 poster with the 1914 British one and note the borrowing.
• Look at nineteenth century cartoons to see the figure before it settled.
• Notice how much modern advertising still points straight at you.
• Read about Brother Jonathan, the character Uncle Sam displaced.