It Shouldn't Happen to a Dog!: Jim Berryman's Uncle Sam at the radio, November 1957

Jim Berryman's Washington Star cartoon of 5 November 1957 puts Uncle Sam at a radio set in headphones, sweating, while two sounds reach his ears: "Beep-Beep" and "Bow-Wow." Those two words are the only text on the drawing.

What the cartoon shows

Uncle Sam at a radio receiver, headphones on, wide-eyed and sweating. A shield with stars is behind him. Two noises reach his ears, and they are all the lettering there is besides the signature.

BEEP-BEEP

BOW-WOW

What it leaves out

Nothing on the drawing says satellite, Soviet, or space. The archive's own description says as much, and treats the space-race reading as an inference from the date and the two sounds. A reader in November 1957 would not have needed the label. The cartoon trusts its audience to hear the beep and the bark and know where they were coming from, which is a kind of compliment to the paper's readers.

How to read it

FRAME tags it fear appeal: the country, personified, is shown rattled by signals from overhead. The picture is also funny, and the catalog title makes the joke at Uncle Sam's expense as much as anyone's. A cartoon that shows its own country flustered is not cheering for anyone. It tells readers the country had been caught off guard, which a newspaper is free to say and an official poster rarely does.

Berryman's paper ran a run of these that autumn. On 6 October an observatory lettered U.S. SCIENCE swings its telescope toward streaking objects under a sign saying the men are watching. On 10 November Santa reads that the Army promises a satellite by Christmas. On 28 November Uncle Sam sits down to carve a bird labelled COMPLACENCY. Read in order, they move from surprise to a demand that the country stop being complacent, and every one of them comes from a private paper. The government's own atomic-age messaging is collected in the civil defense and atomic age hub; the full Berryman run is on the Berryman cartoons hub.