Not long before America’s entrance into World War I, James Montgomery Flagg, one of the nation’s most successful illustrators, worked on a cover photo for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly newspaper. Flagg hastily drew the image of Uncle Sam, which he borrowed from a British recruitment poster. It would be adopted by the U.S. government as a recruiting tool and would go on to endure as an iconic symbol of American patriotism.
Christopher Capozzola, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen, said Uncle Sam became the most familiar visual metaphor for America.
“He turned the vast machinery of war mobilization into a family relationship. He gave political power a personal face and he helped Americans make sense of the presence of government in everyday life,” Capozzola said during the University of Oklahoma’s Teach-In on March 7.
The U.S. Army was smaller than Bulgaria’s when America entered World War I in April 1917 and the federal government did not have a system in place to mobilize for war.
“In the absence of a strong federal government, Americans at first mobilized society by first mobilizing one another,” Capozzola said. “In clubs, schools, churches and workplaces, Americans turned to one another to determine the obligations of citizenship and then used those institutions to enforce those obligations of citizenship.”
Capozzola said this volunteerism showed both the best and worst of the country. On one hand, it brought Americans together in service and sacrifice. It also enticed violence and coercion.
Federal authority and federal power expanded during World War I, including the size of the budget, the number of employees and the size of the Army. But a draft was a difficult proposition at the time because the government did not have the means to identify draft-age men. Almost nobody had a driver’s license, the Social Security number hadn’t been invented yet and passports were rare.
After passage of the Selective Service Act of 1917, voluntary associations helped play an important role in driving registration for the draft. Pastors would read the names of young men who had signed up. Newspapers would print the names of young men who were scheduled to training at a military camp. Community members, neighbors and family would inform the government is a draft age man had not registered.
A volunteer group called the American Protective League investigated draft dodgers, who at the time were called “slackers.” The biggest slacker raid came in September 1918 in New York City, when nearly 500,000 men were interrogated on the street and up to 60,000 were held in custody.
“Norman had it's own version of it. Right on Main Street it had something called the slacker pen,” Capozzola said. “The slacker pen was set up on whatever part of Main Street it is that had all the banks next to it and the American Protective League would stop people on the street and ask them how much they had bought in liberty bonds and how much they were giving to the war effort. If the American Protective League thought that wasn't enough they would put them into the slacker pen until they actually bought more liberty bonds.”
KGOU would like to thank the Office of Public Affairs at the University of Oklahoma and audio engineer Richard Feinberg for recording this presentation.
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