Print shows Uncle Sam asleep in a chair with a large eagle perched on a stand next to him; he is dreaming of conquests and annexations, asserting his “Monroe Doctrine” rights, becoming master of the seas, putting John Bull in his place, and building “formidable and invulnerable coast defenses”; on the floor by the chair are jingoistic and yellow journalism newspapers.
Caption:
Uncle Sam’s Dream of Conquest and Carnage — Caused by Reading the Jingo Newspapers
Puck, November 13, 1895
Note that I downscaled the image to half source resolution to conform to lemmy.today pict-rs resolution restrictions; it’s still pretty decent resolution.
Some context: this was 130 years ago, back when the US had an okay — but certainly not top-tier — navy, and a relatively-weak army. We’ve got some hindsight to see how things played out.
On annexations of islands:
The Cook Islands today are a country in free association with New Zealand.
Fiji is an independent country.
Hawaii was annexed in 1898 and became a US state in 1959.
I’m not sure why Hawaii and the Sandwich Islands are listed separately. Might be terminology in 1895 differed from present-day terminology.
Cuba is an independent country.
Haiti is an independent country.
I think “Friendly” refers to Tonga, which is an independent country today.
On “Licking John Bull out of his boots” — at the time, the British Empire and the US considered each other fairly likely candidates for fighting in a war, made war plans for each other, and the conflict never actually happened. After the US wound up fighting alongside rather than against the British in World War I and World War II, the two wound up allied.
On “sweeping his enemies from the seas”, yes; the US is the biggest naval power (and allied with most of the other substantial naval powers). We’ll see where the growing China rivalry goes over time, though; in 2024, China has more warships than the US, though the aggregate tonnage of US warships is significantly larger than China’s.
On “establishing formidable and invulnerable coastal defenses”: well, not really in the sense that Puck would have thought of it, with naval forts and guns, but due to aircraft and warships, it could ward off a naval invasion easily, so kind of functionally similar.
On the Monroe Doctrine: I’m not sure that it’s quite as meaningful today; it really dealt with an era where there was a potential “scramble for the Americas”, where the US didn’t want opposing major powers entering the Americas. Kerry called it obsolete, Trump’s referenced it. I suppose if a major power started annexing new chunks of the Americas, the US would probably take issue with it today, but unless China decides to do so, I don’t think that anyone’s likely aiming to do so, so…shrugs
EDIT: Oh, and one other note: the “torpedo” in the image will refer to something akin to what we today would call a “naval mine”. Terminology shifted.