2024/09/16 by Susanne Schregel, Charles F. Howlett, Christian Philip Peterson · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy
paper · doi:10.1093/ahr/rhae387
In early August 1914, while awaiting a ship bound for Great Britain to cover the opening hostilities in World War I, political cartoonist John T. McCutcheon decided to sketch out a set of five cartoons. One of those truly stood out, and he called it, simply, “The Colors.” On August 7, 1914, the Chicago Tribune printed the sketch, which was composed of four panels, on its front page. As readers followed the captions from top to bottom, they found brief descriptions of the situations that the respective pictures focused on: “Gold and Green are the Fields in Peace,” “Red are the Fields in War,” “Black are the Fields when the cannons cease,” “And White for evermore.”1 The cartoon’s imagery drew on traditional panels of the seasons. Yet McCutcheon adapted them to give an account of war and peace expressed as the transition of a rural landscape. Embedded in the first panel we see a harvest of peaceful abundance with a farmer tilling the soil and bundling his wheat. Then the field is littered with dead soldiers, smoke billowing upward. Looking down to the next panel, we witness mourners grieving at the loss of so many after the battle is over. And, finally, we come to the last panel, which is highlighted by white gravestones marking the places where the victims of war are buried.