CSotD: When We Were Great
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July 4, 1954, came just less than a month after Senator Welch spoke the famous lines at the Army/McCarthy hearings, "Have you no sense of decency?"
All the talk about "Making America Great Again" makes it seem like a good time to take a look back at those Olden Days of Greatness on Independence Day, and this front page from the Oakland Tribune sets the stage: While Lou Grant's Uncle Sam extols the history and virtues of our nation, behind his back the French are being driven out of what will very soon be Vietnam, the US is insisting on barring "Red China" from the United Nations and Guatemala is cleaning up after a revolution toppled its government.
There is a signature on this cartoon but it's hardly legible. In any case, we were held up — at least by ourselves — as the shining light and hope for the world. (Update: Brooklyn Eagle cartoonist Eugene Craig)
John Milton Morris doubled down on the notion: Not only were we a beacon of freedom, but one that stood out in a world in which people were losing their freedom regularly.
And Cargill, too, chose the theme of America as a source of comfort and inspiration for subjugated people everywhere, which, in the wake of Soviet post-war expansion and the recent bloody standoff in Korea, was not only understandable but inevitable.
And, as Carey Orr pointed out, we were prepared to stand tall and keep the Communists from encroaching on our hemisphere, in Guatemala or anywhere else.
Let's be fair, both to the cartoonists and to the people reading those cartoons: It would be quite a few years before the facts about, for instance, that revolution in Guatemala surfaced and we found out how much adventuring John Foster Dulles and the CIA were doing in the affairs of other nations.
And, in our own backyard, we were still about a year from when the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP refused to give up her seat on a bus, touching off a boycott and a whole re-examination of that word "we." (Oh, did you think she was just a "tired seamstress"?)
We were a nation on the verge of being wised up.
Or of refusing to wise up, and it was quite a while before we figured out who was fighting the science on this one, also commented upon by Cargill.
Meanwhile, Reg Manning was probably not the first cartoonist to pen this gag for July 4, but he was surely, surely not the last.
For a more in-depth look at America's self-image in 1954, perhaps you can click, embiggen and read this full page from the Brooklyn Eagle, a feature sent out by an ad agency to client newspapers, many of whom published it on July 4.
As for me, I'm gonna turn to the funny pages, it being a Sunday and all:
And now, this word from our sponsor:
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