The Thinker...and Some of His Thoughts, Jim Berryman's Uncle Sam on wartime strikes

The Thinker...and Some of his Thoughts... is a Jim Berryman cartoon for the Washington Evening Star dated 3 January 1944. Uncle Sam sits in the pose of Rodin's Thinker while a thought cloud asks whether strikes are costing soldiers' lives and whether the Commander-in-Chief should tell the people (NAID 5743131).

The pose and the thoughts

Uncle Sam sits in the pose of Rodin's sculpture, and the cartoonist signs off with an apology to the sculptor. Above him, a thought cloud holds three lines of thought, strung together with dots.

THE THINKER.........

.....AND SOME OF HIS THOUGHTS.....

If strikes are costing soldiers' lives, shouldn't the Commander-in-Chief tell the people?......

...Our government leaders have minimized the effect of strikes.... ...is it any wonder the strikers minimize it?....

...we hear a lot about Our Rights ... why isn't there more emphasis on Our Duties?

[signature: Jim Berryman] (WITH APOLOGIES TO RODIN)

A newspaper cartoon, not a government poster

Jim Berryman drew it for the Washington Evening Star, and the record dates it 3 January 1944. The National Archives holds it among the Berryman cartoons in the records of the U.S. Senate. The archive classes the issuer as media, the audience as the domestic public, and the themes as labor, war, and the home front.

This is a private paper criticizing the president, in wartime, for not saying enough.

Two arguments in one cloud

The archive tags transfer: the cartoon borrows the weight of soldiers' lives and of a famous sculpture to carry its point. That is fair. The first line is conditional, "if strikes are costing soldiers' lives," and the cartoon offers no figure to show that they were. The condition does the work of a fact.

Two different arguments share the cloud, and they deserve to be pulled apart. The first is a demand for disclosure. If the Commander-in-Chief knows something about the cost of strikes, the cartoon says, he should tell the people. That is a sound principle, and it cuts in every direction; a public that is asked to sacrifice is owed the facts.

The second is a complaint about rights talk. "Our Rights" against "Our Duties" is where a reader should slow down. The freedom to stop work and bargain is a freedom of free people, and a free country should not treat it as lapsing because a war is on. A citizen can argue that a particular strike was wrong. Treating rights as the problem is another matter.

The same artist and paper drew I Just Can't Stand Secrets that June, a cartoon about a different secret: a chest marked "Pearl Harbor Court Martial." The site's case study of labor organizing and anti-union campaigns follows unions and employers over a longer span.