In the wake of World War II, the unofficial cartoonist laureate
of the war,
Bill Mauldin, turned the focus of his comic art to life within America's
borders. In a 1946 panel, he portrayed two men talking in the shadow of
the United States Capitol building. The listener was clearly a slick senator;
the speaker looked to be a well-groomed tramp. His question no doubt
left the senator fumbling for an answer: “Do you mean your American
Way or my American Way, Senator?”Mauldin did not provide us with the senator's response, but it
hardly
matters. The tramp's question all but answers itself. The supposed
post-war
consensus, the shared American Way, had not been achieved by
unanimous consent, the tramp was suggesting, but by leaving out those
who did not fit into it. The popular imagination of America might have
attained a single, clean vision of the nation, but only by cropping out
anything that could blur the picture. The imagined American Way would
not admit it, but there were others trying to climb into the frame.
‘‘Our American Way of Living’: Lucy Richardson Milligan and American Radio on the eve of World War II’