The Last Ditch

Charles Dana Gibson pits two allegorical figures against each other on a blasted no-man's-land. A classically draped woman—her headband reading DEMOCRACY—grapples with a Prussian-helmeted soldier whose sash is labeled MILITARISM, forcing him backward toward an open pit where a skeleton reaches up to receive him. Grave crosses crowd the horizon behind burning ruins. Gibson's soldier wears the spiked-helmet silhouette that had become shorthand for German aggression in American editorial art. Published as the United States moved toward entry into the First World War, the drawing frames American liberal idealism as the force that will literally bury Prussian militarism—a confident, uncomplicated argument rendered in Gibson's signature muscular pen line.