Countercultural Icon-work: Adversarial and Collaborative Uses of “Uncle Sam”

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Bent Sørensen, AalborgUniversity

One of the best known American icons is “Uncle Sam”. From the political cartoons of Thomas Nast in the 19th century, via the WWI recruiting poster designed by James Montgomery Flagg, the image of the bearded old man clad in red, white and blue and almost desperately insisting “I WANT YOU” has entered the national unconscious and established itself as a potent national symbol, not least via its dissemination throughout American popular culture.The figure has undergone several make-overs, and Nast’s version of Uncle Sam was not as colourful and flamboyant as the 20th century versions. In Nast’s day figures such as “Brother Jonathan” and “Yankee-Doodle Dandy” were equally as popular as Sam and they tended to be the colourful ones. However, Uncle Sam has proven the most durable of the national personifications, outlasting the abovementioned male ones, as well as Columbia, the female counterpart to Uncle Sam, who also was a great favourite of Nast’s. The origins of Uncle Sam are somewhat uncertain, but from the earliest recorded use of the nickname, and re-emphasized by Flagg’s use of him in the recruiting poster, the denotative value of his name and icon has been firmly associated with the initials of his country, the US, and with the Army – the latter not least because legend has it that the original Uncle Sam was an upstate New York meatpacker by the name of Samuel Wilson, who supplied the US Army with beef in the war of 1812.

This paper, however, primarily examines the function of “Uncle Sam” icons in the counter-culture of the 1960s. Using a basic distinction between adversarial and collaborative icon-work, I analyse both novelistic representations of “Uncle Sam” in texts about the fifties and sixties by Ishmael Reed and Robert Coover, and images and texts produced by Allen Ginsberg and the song-writing team of Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia and their group The Grateful Dead.I aim to show that novels such as Coover’s The Public Burning and Reed’s The Free Lance Pall-Bearersoffer manipulated images of Uncle Sam which primarily serve as adversarial satirical tools to critique American imperialism and constitutionally sanctioned racism, whereas the performative practice and lyrics of Ginsberg and Hunter/Garcia use the “Uncle Sam” image in more collaborative, but no less subversive ways – in fact offering to become alternative, ‘queer’ or tripped out “Uncle Sams” to a generation of young people as badly in need of being “WANTed” as any previous youth group in American history targeted by recruiters.

Icon-work, as shown in the analyses below, is an interactive process where anyone can become a textual agent or producer, manipulating existing iconic texts/images, or creating new additions to the bank of already existing iconic representations of a given cultural icon, as in the case of Uncle Sam. Images enter the open field of cultural iconicity where others may contribute freely to elaborating and reinterpreting their iconic status. Historically this has worked to extend the lives of these images and figures beyond the span one might otherwise have estimated for them in an age of cultural acceleration, which is particularly pertinent in the case of an old-fashioned nationalist icon such as Uncle Sam..

I propose that all iconic representation combines two modes of representation: the images presented areboth stylised and sacralised. This duality originates in the connotations of the word ‘icon’ from two spheres of use of the term: The commercial icon or pictogram which works through simplified representation (i.e. is stylised), and the religious icon which works through embellished representation and through symbolic detail (i.e. is sacralised). In the case of Uncle Sam the duality is traceable in the blend of an easily recognisable, stylised colour coding (red, white, blue) and metonymic representation (stars and – usually – stripes, standing for the flag, in turn standing for the country) on the one hand, and on the other the function of extraneous details in the images that embellish it and sacralise it, for instance Uncle’s grey hair and beard that connotes age and wisdom, and the firmness and directness of his gaze that connotes will and courage. The firm pointing hand in the image also lends itself to comparison with the gesture of benefactionusually performed by saints in religious iconography.

From the religious connotations of iconicity we as public inherit the position of worshipper. The need for icons is an expression of our longing for something beyond our own subject-hood, a desire to idolise. This need is no longer fulfilled in traditional religious ways, but has become transferred onto other manifestations of the extraordinary, such as heroes, stars, idols. In the case of Uncle Sam in his original function as a recruiter this aspect is extremely foregrounded: We must instantly join Sam’s cult, the Army. From the industrial, service and information oriented connotations of iconicity we inherit the position of consumer. In the case of Uncle Sam-icons the consumer position only enters in belatedly in more recent commodification uses of the icon as part of posters, stickers,record covers, and other images that can be bought and consumed.

A person who achieves icon status,or who, as in the case of Garcia and Ginsberg, borrows iconicity from a pre-existing image, has to be recognisable to a large number of members of a specific group, whether that is a subculture (defined through age, race, class, belief etc.), a nation, or the global community: Iconicity presupposes immediate recognition and familiarity. In apparent contradiction of the safety connoted by familiarity, the iconic person simultaneously has to be extraordinary, whether through his or her achievements, or through image. Some element of the person’s appearance, life, story or activities has to transcend the familiarity of everyday life as lived by most of us: Iconicity presupposes transgression of normality. Ultimately, icon status is only achieved when the person imaged represents a combination of familiarity (which echoes in the word ‘fame’) and transgression of norms (often figured as ‘cool’).

The activities of the consumer of icons – in both senses of the word consumption – form what I term icon-work. It is convenient to subdivide this icon-work into two broad categories determined by the intention of the consumer, fan or icon-worker: adversarial and collaborative icon-work. By adversarial icon-work I understand the type of intervention which is aimed at destabilising or subverting the icon’s function and meaning in the icon-worker’s contemporary cultural reality. Icons, especially over-commercialised and over-familiarised ones, tempt people into actively resisting them, e.g. by defacing them, satirizingthem or otherwise tampering with them: The formerly passive worshippers then become iconoclasts. Collaborative icon-work, on the other hand, may take the form of homage, imitation, worship and activities to preserve the memory of the icon, etc. This form of activity is often the work of the ardent fan or follower of the icon’s original work. Most icon-work comprises a mixture of adversarial and collaborative efforts. All of these activities, whether adversarial or collaborative, ultimately serve only to perpetuate the iconic person or image’s status and longevity.

Largely due to the increased commodification and availability of icons, the need for worship has not diminished throughout the last 50 years, despite the apparent secularisation of the post WW II-era. On the contrary there are now more icons than ever, and despite the general tendency towards cultural acceleration, many icons formed,or reshaped and reinvented in the 1950s and 60s are still potent and present in the commercial and cultural sphere. Iconicity serves as a form of immortality (at least within a cultural or subcultural memory), yet, historically speaking, icons are always specifically situated and mean different things in different eras. Icons have a history, and not all icons are permanent, as witnessed by certain icons slipping out of a culture’s memory after some decades.

The psychology of the decades of the 50s and 60s couldbe postulated to contain peaks of paranoia, psychosis and to some extent schizophrenia, and this has an immediate impact on the forms of icon-work associated with those decades. Paranoia has certainly been a favourite causal explanation for phenomena as formative of the American psyche as the Red Scare and McCarthyism of the 50s and the rebellion against it that can be labelled the Beat generation and its sequel: the rainbow of oppositional thinking and living known as the 1960s counterculture. In fact it is possible to claim that the counterculture performs a bricolage of the cultural phenomenon of paranoia, taking the paranoia of anti-communism and the desire on the part of the state to purge itself of foreign infiltration (thematized in numerous s-f and other alien invasion narratives in the 1950s) and by turning it on its head, creating a new narrative where paranoia, and ultimately schizophrenia (madness in general, in fact) are seen as healthy responses to society’s rejection of change and non-conformist behaviour, i.e. sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Prime examples of such narratives from the 1950s would of course be Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (“the only people for me are the mad ones”), whereas an early 1960s example (revitalised by its movie adaptation in 1975) would be Ken Kesey’s OneFlew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The latter narrative further can be seen to ride the wave of Laing inspired anti-psychiatric discourse in the period, combined with sociological critiques (Marcuse, building on Riesman and others) that began to see society as an alienating force, in effect creating mental disorders in order to shore up its own normalcy narratives and exclude undesirable oppositional elements with this diagnostic tool.

Icon-work that involves bricolage performedon the tropes of paranoia and schizophrenia is endemic in the manipulations of the Uncle Sam figure in the 50s and 60s, and later retrospective treatments of those decades in the 1970s. Robert Coover’s 1977 political satire The Public Burning, set in the Eisenhower era, which gives a critical, political reading of the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953, is a good case in point. President Eisenhower is depicted in this novel as the latest incarnation of Uncle Sam. Told by the Vice-President, Tricky Dick Nixon himself, the novel speculates that the force of Uncle Sam is such that he seeks out suitable vessels to inhabit when the time is ripe for a new infusion of patriotism into the American psyche. What better figure than the basically vacuous Eisenhower whose reading is limited to a few western novels and who sleeps through all the films he views with the exception of High Noon, where he still nods off during the kissing scenes? Ruled by the needs of Uncle Sam to be worshiped with burned offerings, Eisenhower as the current vessel inhabited by Sam is forced to sacrifice the Jewish Rosenbergs on the national, public altar. The process of incarnating Uncle Sam in a new, earthly vessel is described as follows in the novel:

There is much curiosity, even among insiders [the ‘priests’ ministering to Uncle Sam] as to how and when Uncle Sam chooses his disguises. […] Does Uncle Sam groom his Incarnations from birth for example, or does he play it more impulsively, adjusting to the surprises that come along? […] Finally when a Candidate does arise (or is conceived) does the actual Incarnation hit him like a ton of bricks, a sudden brutal invasion of the Presence, or has it been growing in him all along? […] Well, only Uncle Sam knows why this or that receptacle is chosen to receive the Host, but one thing is clear: Uncle Sam moved toward Dwight Eisenhower with more conviction and gusto than toward any other Incarnation since the Father of the Country himself. […] Uncle Sam seemed to want Eisenhower like a child wants happiness. (160-162)

Uncle Sam is thus clearly pictured by Coover as a deity who requires a human body to inhabit. This Christian imagery is underlined through the capitalization of key words such as Incarnation, Host, Presence and Candidate. The process of Uncle Sam’s rebirth is explicitly parallel to the coming of Christ in human form via the vessel of the Virgin Mary. This harsh satire, which also echoes the Holocaust with its ruling image of a public burning of Jews, I would classify as adversarial icon-work designed to critique American imperialism and fantasies of racial purity through the depiction of Uncle Sam as a ruthless deity looking for another hapless innocent avatar to embody. The will to power and Empire is seen as the American condition par excellence and produces intense paranoia in poor Nixon. The depictions of Eisenhower in his role as puppet and uneducated yokel are hilarious, and incidentally could be utilised, without changing a comma, in a contemporary political satire of the current President…

Ishmael Reed’s 1967 debut novel, The Free Lance Pall-Bearers, offers an even more scathing (and eschatological), adversarial Uncle Sam image, yet one that is here curiously morphed into “HARRY SAM” or just plain SAM. As usual in Reed’s hoodoo’ed version of America places and people are strangely intertwined and twisted. Harry Sam is both the name of America as such and the name of its current ruler, a despot who has spent the last thirty years in the toilet “with a weird ravaging illness” on his own private island, “Sam’s Island”. There is also a HarrySamMotel, which forms the starting point of Sam’s rise to the top of his kingdom, and a HarrySamCollege, which the novel’s black narrator, Doopeyduk is about to flunk out of at the novel’s start. Harry Sam rules the land by fear and intimidation and particularly by a strategy of divide and conquer which keeps the black population of Harry Sam in permanent subjugation. Sam is a mongrel type himself, his father “a self-made Pole and former used-car salesman”, his mother “a low-down filthy hobo, infected with hoof-and-mouth disease” (1). Reed’s novel thus portrays a Sam that has risen from the scum of the earth to rule and corrupt America to the maximum extent of his ability. The target of this satire may well be none other than Tricky-Dick Nixon himself, whom we encountered as narrator in Coover’s book. The racial and class politics of Reed’s work are obvious: the American populace will gladly condone a corrupt, exploitative,paranoid psychotic as their ruler as long as he keeps the blackies in their proper place, disenfranchised and property-less. The only thing this Uncle/Harry Sam wants of his populace is unconditional service, and there is little reward to be gained from serving under him.

Figures more overtly associated with the counterculture of the 1960s than these two postmodern novelists have also subverted the iconography of Uncle Sam. I am thinking here particularly of the homosexual bard of the Beat Generation and later spokesman for the counterculture from a pacifist, Hinduist, ecological platform, Allen Ginsberg. Already in one of his earliest mature poems, “America”, written on or about January 17, 1956, Ginsberg addressed his native country: “America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing”. The poem is a passionate plea for the US to end aggression, war, the nuclear arms race, the Red Scare, McCarthyism, over-consumption, materialism, and stupid jingoist propaganda spearheaded by Time Magazine. At the poem’s turning point Ginsberg pauses in his plea and indictment of America to reflect: “It occurs to me that I am America. / I am talking to myself again.” Thus enlightened, the way is open for Ginsberg’s persona to participate more fruitfully in an American project of re-valuation of national identity. Playfully he offers to trade in his poetry like a used car: “America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe”, and generally to “get right down to the job.” The participatory version of America involves Ginsberg recruiting himself in the national service, although explicitly not in a way that follows Uncle Sam’s usual dictum: “It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. / America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” The queering of America that Ginsberg begins in this poem (actually a continuation of Whitman’s queering of America in the 19th century), is a process he continues more explicitly in an Uncle Sam incarnation in the 1960s.

In rallies against the established parties, most notoriously at the Democratic convention in 1968 Ginsberg donned Uncle Sam’s hat (as he had already been crowned King of May in Prague in 1965, I suppose the thought of high office came easily to him. In “America” he even played around with the idea: “My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic”) and led the crowds in chants of Om to pacify them and their adversaries, the police who were employing water canons and teargas against the demonstrators. This invocation of the American democratic tradition via a channelling of the Uncle Sam icon presents a new twist in the use of the conservative icon. Where Uncle is old, authoritative and stern of gaze, Allen is young, anti-authoritarian (his beard and hair flowing long and wild) and a jester figure, his gleaming eyes peeping (near-sightedly) out from behind his horn-rimmed glasses. Ginsberg as Uncle Sam thus deconstructs the iconic enunciation of the established icon, subverting state sanctioned violence and force (Army) into non-violence and resistance to taking orders, and masculine firmness into queer softness. Ginsberg’s Sam nevertheless is as missionary in his attempt to recruit pledges for his case as Flagg’s Uncle was.