The Uncle Sam poster arose from America’s lack of a living war figurehead

Evidence

Finally, there was the American version of the giant Kitchener poster that had been so important to the British effort. Lacking a living personification of the cause, however, the Pictorial Arts Division substituted the allegorical Uncle Sam pointing his finger and declaring “I want YOU for the U.S. Army,” for what would surely be the most indelible instance of the recruitment genre. In another poster reading “Destroy This Mad Brute,” Germany appears as a giant crazed gorilla; this King Kong avant la lettre, clutches in one arm a beautiful woman naked to the waist—the ravaged Belgium—and in the other hand, a club emblazoned with the word Kultur. The appeal is right to the male amygdala, the brain’s seat of violent emotions, shown in functional MRI to light up at such primal horrors. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 161

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘King Kong avant la lettre’ and the amygdala appeal resonates with the trees article’s mythic/apex symbolism and with attention-as-emotion-capture themes. — connects to: Uncle Sam’s image came from the poster artist’s own face, not an official model — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1206