Figure 1: New York Journal, May 16, 1897, p. 2.
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Political cartoons constituted a popular form of visual currency during the Spanish-American War of 1898, illuminating the ideological contests over war and imperial policies. Front and center on the news pages, editorial cartoons functioned to simplify foreign policy perspectives in a concise and compelling way for mass audiences.[1] A prevalent theme in nationwide political cartoons of the period was access to food, eating, and their bodily impacts. A brief analysis of exemplary cartoons on this theme will demonstrate how food and consumption were literally and metaphorically at the center of U.S. campaigns for war and imperialism in the Caribbean and Pacific in 1898 and beyond.[2] These cartoons illustrate the ideological disconnect in media perspectives between the humanitarian aims that propelled the nation into war with Spain and the postwar complications that arose when President William McKinley opted upon victory to acquire, rather than emancipate, Spain’s remaining colonies. Uncle Sam’s physical act of colonial ingestion and his potential engorgement became a medium through which cartoonists could articulate imperialist desires and anxieties surrounding the administration of the nation’s first overseas possessions.
Between the renewal of Cuban nationalist resistance against Spanish colonizers in 1895 and the U.S. decision to intervene in April 1898, American newspapers provided extensive coverage of Cuba’s struggle to obtain independence. Driving this press campaign were a handful of papers, most notably Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, which had the financial means to send foreign correspondents to Cuba. Their reporting of the Cuban crisis circulated broadly through subscription services, providing ample material for use by cartoonists across the country. While the causes of the crisis were complex and rooted in decisions made by both Spanish and Cuban leaders, American cartoonists almost exclusively reduced the conflict to one of Spanish brutality and Cuban victimization.
Figure 2: Minneapolis Journal, May 9, 1898, p. 6.
Specifically, one of the dominant pictorial motifs in the pre-war media campaigns called out Spanish negligence and cruelty for their failure to provide adequate food to feed Cuban civilians. U.S. media attributed reports of mass starvation to Spain’s official policy of reconcentration, which removed thousands of Cuban civilians from the countryside into concentration camps to destroy the supply lines of the insurrection. Insufficient food and medical supplies, coupled with the rampant spread of disease in the camps, had devastating consequences. Political cartoonists were at the forefront of the public outcry and typically portrayed Cubans as emaciated bodies on the brink of death. Cartoonist Homer Davenport of the New York Journal, for example, advocated for “How We Should Help Cuba” by picturing Uncle Sam handing foodstuffs to a Cuban civilian in tattered clothing amidst the carnage of dead or dying human and animal remains (figure 1). Uncle Sam says, “Here, my son, get freedom and food for yourself.” Cartoonist Charles “Bart” Bartholomew of the Minneapolis Journal similarly pictured Uncle Sam armed and loaded to go to war with a loaf of bread upon his rifle: “For Starving Cuba.” Bart captioned it, “The Kind of a Campaign Uncle Sam is Expected to Make and Make it Quick, Too” (figure 2). Imagemakers like Davenport and Bart urged the United States to step in for humanitarian purposes: to bring sustenance and ease suffering. Their editorial cartoons made no mention of any intent to acquire territories through such action; rather, their repeated plea was for a Cuba Libre or free Cuba.
Although pre-war media campaigns promoted U.S. intervention to help Cuba achieve independence, President William McKinley was not bound to such calls. Once Congress granted him the war powers to intervene, he took the war in the direction of his own political vision. Immediately after the war began, he ordered Admiral George Dewey to attack the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, expanding the purview of the war beyond Cuba to what would ultimately encompass the entirety of Spain’s imperial holdings, including Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Claiming military necessity, McKinley also secured the annexation of Hawaiʻi in the summer of 1898, a move that didn’t have congressional support prior to the war. In effect, McKinley shifted the goals of the war from liberating Cuba to conquest, and in the treaty negotiations following Spain’s surrender, he ordered the peace commissioners to demand that Spain cede all of its remaining colonies to the United States in exchange for $20 million.
Figure 3: Los Angeles Sunday Times, May 8, 1898, p. 1.
After the imperial prospects of the war became clear, editors and imagemakers disagreed over the merits of overseas colonization. No longer focused on gaunt Cuban bodies, imagemakers turned to the figure of Uncle Sam as the visual incarnation of the American national body on which to inscribe their political positions. Pro-imperialist cartoons celebrated acquisition by expanding Uncle Sam’s waistline as he embarked on a new dietary regime of colonial feasting. On the cover of the Los Angeles Sunday Times, for example, cartoonist Will Chapin depicted
Uncle Sam chewing a big bite of fruit labeled the “Philippine Islands” before national representatives from Germany, Great Britain, and Russia, among others (figure 3). The caption reads: “Uncle Sam to the powers (who are watching him with great interest:) – ‘There ain’t going to be no core.’” Titled “The Whole Thing,” the frame focuses on Uncle Sam chewing up the Philippines, assimilating the archipelago in its entirety into the American body. These displays of consumption symbolize acts of territorial conquest, constituting a social relationship between entities in which the “eater” represents power, wealth, and whiteness and the “eaten” are deemed politically incompetent and racially inferior. This trope rests on a history of racialization of black and indigenous bodies in American visual culture: the colonies and their peoples now exist to service the needs and desires of the hungry U.S. empire.[3] Through this act of colonial ingestion, Uncle Sam, in short, is performing and naturalizing empire.
Figure 4: New York Herald, Nov. 25, 1898, p. 3.
Reimagining the colonies as foodstuffs, Charles Nelan in the New York Herald pictured Uncle Sam awaiting his Thanksgiving dinner, just following the treaty negotiations. President McKinley is about to serve him a menu of “Consomme Cuba, Roast Philippine, Salad Porto Rico, and Desert [sic]Ladrone”; Uncle Sam says, “BRING ON THE WHOLE GOL DARN BILL O’FARE!” (figure 4). In a stunning shift after only a brief time, cartoonists abandoned the visual narrative of a Cuba Libre, and in its place, transformed the Spanish colonies into nutriment to fuel the ascension of American global influence for the United States (via Uncle Sam) to consume wholeheartedly, completely, and with full gastronomic pleasure.
For pro-imperialist cartoonists, Uncle Sam’s new colonizing diet was having a glorious bulking-up effect, bolstering U.S. power and stature. In 1899, cartoonist Victor Gillam of the popular periodical Judge represented Uncle Sam’s growth and maturity through a timeline (figure 5). In 1783, he is a mere baby of 13 states; in 1803, with the acquisition of Louisiana and additional states, he grows into a young lad. By mid-century, after acquiring Florida and Texas and having survived civil war, Uncle Sam has fully matured into a grown man—tall and lean. But by 1898–99, his girth has enlarged to accommodate the Spanish colonial acquisitions and Hawaiʻi. At this point, Gillam noted, “and now all the nations are anxious to be on friendly terms with Uncle Sam,” as hands reach out to greet him from Russia, Germany, Italy, Australia, England, France, and China. Gillam captioned it, “A Lesson for Anti-Expansionists: Showing how Uncle Sam has been an expansionist first, last, and all the time.” Toting a ship by his side, Uncle Sam has transformed from his formerly tall and lanky frame to a globular heftiness, signaling his achievement of political and naval ascendancy and putting the other world powers on notice. Gillam framed the rise of American empire not as an aberration but as the next step in the nation’s historical trajectory of expansion.
Figure 5: Judge, 36 (Feb. 4, 1899), 72–73.
But the extent of Uncle Sam’s weight gain might give viewers (past or present) some pause: Had Uncle Sam consumed too much, too quickly? To anti-colonialist critics, Uncle Sam’s rapid weight gain posed a serious threat to the nation’s civic health, jeopardizing American democracy. As a result, cartoonists tapped into the double meaning of America’s constitution: it represented the nation’s political foundations as well as its corporeal composition, making it a highly adaptable and versatile symbol of empire. An editorialist of the anti-colonialist New York World, for instance, questioned how the U.S. government would balance the demands of colonialism with its democratic principles: “And these new people will be Americans, citizens of the United States at once, perhaps. Are they not entitled to the rights guaranteed to us by our Constitution? Do they not come in under our Declaration of Independence, with its sweeping assertions of universal equality and of no government without the consent of the governed? … Are we or are we not enlarging our commerce to any great extent? … Bigger— yes. Greater—yes. But—better?”[4] World cartoonist C. G. Bush exemplified this “is bigger really better?” question by depicting imperialism’s effects on the form of Uncle Sam (figure 6). Bush portrayed him as excessively bloated by profits in exports, trade, and gold and satirized expectations of “prosperity” by asking, “Speaking of expansion, how’s this?” Uncle Sam’s exorbitant bodily distension encapsulates the World’s anxieties about Uncle Sam’s meteoric rise as a global economic superpower. To Life magazine, the consequence could be implosion from within, at some undefined future point (figure 7). Surely Victor Gillam’s cartoon spread in Judge (as discussed above) was a direct response to Life’s apocalyptic anti-colonialist prophecy.
Figure 6: New York World, Dec. 19, 1898, p. 4.
Political cartoons function as a historical gauge of the media landscape: to be legible, they have to resonate with the ideas, beliefs, and values of their audiences. To that end, such postwar reimaginings of Uncle Sam’s bodily image and size are doubly revealing: they give insight into the aspirations and anxieties fueling imperial debates while also illuminating the period’s conflicted perceptions of the fitness, desirability, and health of fat bodies. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social and cultural ideas about fatness were in flux. Thanks to urbanization and industrialization, American workers were becoming more sedentary and were increasingly drawn to the convenience and low cost of processed foods. As middle-class bodies became heftier, fatness gradually lost its cultural associations with wealth and power. At the opposite extreme, urban poverty created fears of starvation and malnutrition for the working classes, stigmatizing extreme thinness. Gaining traction over the nineteenth century was the notion of moderation in diet and weight for purposes of health and longevity, largely endorsed by the newly professionalized medical and scientific communities. Cultural contests over body size with respect to ideals of beauty, status, and health furnished cartoonists with a visual concept that had both the elasticity and cultural potency to encapsulate arguments for and against imperial acquisition.[5]
Figure 7: Life, 33 (Jan. 26, 1899), 72–73.
The pictorial use of consumption as a visual metaphor for imperialism was not unique to this conflict. Still, it seems particularly striking in this context given that only months earlier, pre-war media campaigns had justified U.S. military intervention on claims of Spanish colonial mismanagement vis-à-vis mass starvation of the Cuban population. It shows how quickly appetites can change once a decisive Spanish defeat gave Americans a taste for world power.
Bonnie M. Miller is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Boston, specializing in the history of U.S. visual culture and food studies. She is author of From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish American War of 1898 (2011). An elaboration of the research summarized here will be published as a book chapter titled “Colonial Engorgement in the Pictorial Arts: ‘Fat’ Uncle Sam in the Imperialist Debates, 1898–1902,” in Fat and the Body in the Long Nineteenth Century, forthcoming in 2024 (University of Toronto Press).
[1] For students and beginning researchers interested in learning more about methodologies of using political cartoons as historical documents, see Bonnie M. Miller, “A Primer for Using Historical Images in Research,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, 27 (April 2017), 73–94.
[2] For additional pictorial examples, see Bonnie M. Miller, “Colonial Engorgement in the Pictorial Arts: ‘Fat’ Uncle Sam in the Imperialist Debates, 1898–1902,” in Fat and the Body in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Amy Shaw and Lynn Kennedy (forthcoming 2024); and Bonnie M. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (2011), 175–77. For a comparison of the work of two cartoonists who had opposing views on U.S. imperialism, see Bonnie M. Miller, “The Image-makers’ Arsenal in an Age of War and Empire, 1898–99: A Cartoon Essay, Featuring the Work of Charles Bartholomew (of the Minneapolis Journal) and Albert Wilbur Steele (of the Denver Post),” Journal of American Studies, 45 (2011), 53–75.
[3] For astute work on this trope, see Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (2012); and Erica Owens and Bronwyn Beistle, “Eating the Black Body: Interracial Desire, Food Metaphor, and White Fear,” in Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body, ed. Phillip Vannini and Dennis D. Waskul (2006), 201–12.
[4] “Bigger—But Better?” New York World, Nov. 29, 1898, p. 6.
[5] Shaw and Kennedy, eds., Fat and the Body in the Long Nineteenth Century (forthcoming 2024).
