America, The Great Icon Making Nation, Is it?

In his book, The Hamburger, Josh Ozersky writes, “America is the great icon making nation because it requires (emphasis added) icons more than any other nation. Created whole cloth, peopled by immigrants from China and Peru, and with lithe more than a federal bureaucracy, a half-formed and contested ideology, and a common language to unite them, Americans turned to iconography again and again: first George Washington, and then the Founding Fathers, and then, consecutively, the Flag, the White House, Abe Lincoln in his hat, Robert E. Lee in his uniform, Uncle Same, the Statue of Liberty, the planting of the flag at Iwo Jima . . . the list goes on and on. And to that can be added the exemplars of the American virtue, those Great Men those lives embedded the American Way — cultural heroes like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Charles Lindberg, and the rest. It is no accident that popular iconography, in the form of advertising, came into is modern form here. In a country as big and vague as America, recognized symbolized were, and are, at a premium.”

What do you think? Does this make sense to you?

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Alternative Abraham Lincoln

For this assignment I have chosen a symbol which is not a symbol of Abraham Lincoln himself but rather Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam originally known as Samuel Wilson had grew up in the town of Troy in New York. He worked in the army and helped supply troops with rations.  As early as 1830, there were inquiries into the origin of the term “Uncle Sam,” which first appeared in print in 1813. The connection between the popular cartoon figure and Samuel Wilson of Troy. The appearance of the original Samuel Wilson and the picture as we know it today is very different.As a symbol of an ever-changing nation, Uncle Sam had gone through many incarnations. The Civil War saw a major transition in the development of Uncle Sam as his image was associated with that of Abraham Lincoln. It was during this period that Sam aged and acquired a beard. This is interesting as it shows the impact that Abraham Lincoln had not only on the people but on the symbols of that time. It had only been recently that I began to notice the similarities between both Uncle Sam and Lincoln. Is demonstrates just how influential Lincoln was where that symbol is still used today in posters and campaigns.

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