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.