School Begins

Uncle Sam has become a schoolmaster. He leans over his desk mid-lecture, addressing four new pupils slouched and scowling in the front bench, each labeled for a territory the United States had just taken in the wake of the war with Spain: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines. Behind them sit older, tidier students standing in for the established states. A Black child cleans the window, a Native American pupil holds a book at the back, and a Chinese boy waits outside the door. The blackboard sermon borrows the language of consent of the governed, then quietly cancels it. Dalrymple drew for Puck at the height of the national argument over empire, and he let the classroom stage the contradiction instead of settling it.