Uncle Sam Wants You: The Man Behind the Poster
Illustrator James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960) keeps popping up in places where I don’t expect him. Each time I have to look him up, because I don’t remember who he is. Each time he looks a little more interesting.
Most recently I stumbled across him on HathiTrust. I had given into the temptation to search for the name of the person I am researching—which is fun and easy—instead of squeezing out a few more sentences on a book proposal about her—which on that particular day was neither fun nor easy. There on the search list was book titled The Well-Knowns as seen by James Montgomery Flagg. Published in 1914, it is a collection of caricatures drawn by Flagg of famous people, including She Who Will Not Be Named, in some cases with a sharp-penned caption.[1]
Since I was in HathiTrust anyway, I did a quick search on Flagg. Whereas before I had gone “ho-hum” each time I looked him up, this time I was hooked.
The piece James Montgomery Flagg is best known for is the World War I recruiting poster in which a stern Uncle Sam looks out at the viewer and proclaims “I Want You for U.S. Army.” But that poster was simply one moment in a successful and varied career.
“Monty,”as he was called, started early. His first published work appeared when he was twelve: a page of comical drawings in the popular children’s magazine St. Nicholas.[2] By his teens he was already working as regular freelance contributor for well known weekly magazines.
Flagg studied at the Art Students League[3] in New York for several years and then went on to study in London and Paris. Once back in the United States, his career as an illustrator took off.[4] He was facile and hard-working, producing an illustration a day in his studio on West 67th Street. His work appeared most often in the comic magazine Life, but he was also published in many other magazines, including Colliers, Cosmopolitan, Judge (another popular comic magazine), McClure’s, Redbook, and The Saturday Evening Post. He drew cartoons, including a series with a tramp character named Nervy Nat that ran in Judge magazine.[5] He illustrated serialized novels and short stories, most notably P. .G. Wodehouse’s “ Jeeves” stories, which appeared in Colliers. He produced magazine covers. He also illustrated popular books, including an early satirical novel by Edna Ferber, and created a series of posters with the combined title Girls You Know, featuring leading actresses of the time, as a promotion for short, silent films produced by Thomas Edison’s film company.[6]
In addition to illustrating the works of others, Flagg was also a writer:
- He created a series of illustrated books, with titles like Tomfoolery, Why They Married, and, my personal favorite, If: A Guide to Bad Manners. These books combined satirical rhymes on social issues with closely observed caricatures.
- After illustrating a number of popular romantic novels, he wrote a romance story of his own, The Adventures of Kitty Cobb, which told the story of a young woman making a life for herself in the big city. (Personally, I would say it is a gentle parody of the more serious, more romantic novels he illustrated.) It was serialized over twenty-five weeks in major newspapers across the United States before being collected into what would now be described as a graphic novel.[7] The serial was so popular that advertisers used her name to promote their products.[8] He followed Kitty Cobb’s success two years later with another illustrated serial titled A Girl You Know.
- His experiences with the Edison Studios led him to write several dozen silent movie scripts, including one for a movie in 1914 based on the Adventures of Kitty Cobb, in which Flagg played a cameo role as himself in the opening scene. A contemporary reviewer in Motion Picture News described him as sitting “at his drawing table executing a sketch of the heroine at his usual mile a minute clip.”
When the United States entered World War I, Flagg was one of the illustrators who joined Charles Dana Gibson in his unofficial propaganda agency, the Division of Pictorial Publicity. Over the course of the war, Flagg created forty-six war posters for the United States government, the best known of which is the famous image of Uncle Same declaring “I Want You.” The image first appeared on the cover of the popular illustrated news magazine Leslie’s Weekly in 1916 over the caption “What Are You Doing for Preparedness?” It was inspired by an earlier poster by Alfred Leete featuring the British general Lord Kitchener in a similar pose. Flagg based Uncle Sam on his own face in this and other posters, reportedly because he didn’t want to bother with finding a model. If you look at them side by side, the resemblance is pretty obvious.
After Pearl Harbor, Flagg once again devoted his talents to the war effort, creating posters aimed at recruiting soldiers and war workers and selling war bonds. The government also resurrected the Uncle Sam poster: why mess with a good thing?
When the war was over, Flagg, like other illustrators, found there was less demand for his work as magazines began to replace pen and ink drawings with color photographs. He pivoted to painting portraits until his eyes failed him shortly before his death at 83.
[1] I only recognized the names of about half of them, and even fewer of their faces. Such is the fleeting nature of fame.
[2] This occurred at least ten years before the magazine established the St. Nicholas League, a department that published the best work submitted by its young readers. E.B. White would later claim that “The fierce desire to write and paint that burns in our land today, the incredible amount of writing and painting that still goes on in the face of heavy odds, are directly traceable to St Nicholas.” A number of well known writers, including Bennet Cerf , William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E.B. White himself , were publsihed for the first time when they won a St. Nicholas League competition.
[3] If you think the Art Students League sounds familiar, that’s because it has shown up in several previous posts dealing with American illustrators. The school is hard to avoid if you are interested in 20th century American artists.
[4] He also received commissions for serious portraits, thanks to his wife, wealthy socialite Nellie McCormick, who happily pulled strings on his behalf until her untimely death in 1923, at the age of 56. She was eleven years older than Flagg and some of the sources snicker about the age and social differences between them. One claims “she appeared less wife than patron.” But Flagg seems to have been devastated by her death. This is what he had to say about her , and their relationship, in his autobiography: “Here was the beautiful woman who had turned down a number of rich suitors to marry a poor but promising artist who was madly in love with her…. Nellie was a St. Louis socialite and knew all the richest people in all the big cities; up to then a realm of society entirely beyond my knowledge.”
[5] The character was popular enough to appear in several Broadway revues, two live silent films, and an animated short in 1916.
[6] I only have my sources’ word for it that the women pictured were well-known actresses. I didn’t recognize any of them. See note one above.
[7] Available in HathiTrust if you want to take a peek.
[8] Whether they made arrangements with Flagg to use the Kitty Cobb brand is not clear.
History on Display–Anne Frank: The Exhibition
Photo credit: John Halpern, Courtesy of Anne Frank House
My Own True Love and I recently spent a morning at an extraordinary exhibit about Anne Frank, at the Museum of Science and Industry[1], or as I suppose we should call it now, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. Created by the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, the exhibit does not focus solely on the often told and heartbreaking story of Anne’s life and death. It uses the Frank family’s experience as a lens for telling the broader story of the rise of the Nazis, the Holocaust, and what happened after the war to those who survived the death camps.
The exhibit is a brilliant example of the use of modern museum technology. It begins with the family’s privileged life in Germany before Anne’s birth and through her early childhood—all of which felt very new to me.[2] It does an excellent job of narrating the Nazi rise to power with a combination of a well-done audio guide,[3] film, photography, and artifacts— and then zooms in to consider the impact on the Frank family. Once the Franks are in Amsterdam, the exhibit once again gives us the larger context for their life in Amsterdam, before and after the arrival of the Nazis, alongside the specific experience of the Frank family. Again, much of this felt new to me.
The heart of the exhibit is a full-scale recreation of the Secret Annex in Amsterdam where the Frank family and four of their friends hid from the Nazis for two years. The recreation brought to life just how tight the space was—something that the flow of visitors emphasized. I don’t know if it was a deliberate design choice, but we were packed tightly enough at each stop through the annex that it triggered a bit of claustrophobia for me. The narrated account described the limitations on their lives and evoked their discomfort, fear, and monotony.
The annex recreation also serves as the narrative hinge for the exhibit. Once outside the annex, the exhibit follows family’s arrest, their movement through the camps, the deaths of the Frank family women, Otto Frank’s experiences after liberation, and the path to publishing Anne’s diary.
For me the most powerful moment came at a single panel after the report of Anne’s death—I’m not going to describe it because I don’t want to spoil the impact for any of you who make it to the exhibit.
The exhibit will be at the Museum of Science and Industry through early 2027.
[1] Wondering what Anne Frank has to do with Science and Industry? The link is Jewish-American philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, who was, among other things, the moving force behind the creation of the museum. (I will point out that he did not ask that it be named the Rosenwald museum.) The more I learn about Rosenwald, the more impressed I am.
[2] It’s been many years since I read The Dairy of a Young Girl, so it is not entirely clear to me what was new and what I had simply forgotten. However, I’m quite sure that I did not know that Otto Frank did a one year internship at Macy’s in New York, for instance.
[3] As some of you may know, I have historically been anti-audio guides. In this case, the auto-guide is absolutely essentially to the experience.
From the Archives: Stranger in the Shogun’s City
Over the last few weeks the book Stranger in the Shogun’s City has come up several times in conversations with fellow history buffs and book nerds. Each time, my response has been “I love that book!” And after a while I decided it was time to tell those of you who didn’t read this review when I first posted it in 2020 that I loved this book. I hope you love it too.
One of the major challenges historians face when writing about the lives of non-elite women of the past is the absence of sources. Sources written by men that describe their lives are rare. Those written by the women themselves are rarer yet. Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, by historian Amy Stanley, demonstrates how rich history can be when such sources are available.
The project began when Stanley became fascinated with a family archive that included dozens of letters written in early nineteenth century Japan by a rebellious woman named Tsuneno and the letters (and legal documents) created by her family in response. Together, these letters created a rare picture of the life an unconventional, non-elite woman, written in her own words.
Born in 1804 in a rural village, Tsuneno was the daughter of a Buddhist priest. She tried to settle into the traditional (and relatively privileged) life that her family expected of her, but it didn’t take. After three divorces and faced with another arranged marriage, she ran away to Edo (now Tokyo), then one of the largest cities of the world. Her life in Edo was always hard and often scandalous by the standards of her family and society. She made horrible decisions. She moved from tenement to tenement, took menial jobs that didn’t pay enough to support her, and married, divorced, and re-married a violent man from her home region. Her life can be summed up in a single line from one of her letters: “I ended up in so much trouble.”
Stanley places Tsuneno firmly in her historical context, creating a multi-layered picture of life in Japan in the decades before it was forcibly “opened” to the West by Commodore Perry’s fleet in 1854. Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a vivid and often lyrical portrait not only of Tsuneno, but of Edo, the city she loved.