April 17, 1997General
The snake figure was to have a long history as an American political cartoon, according to Karen S. Cook, a researcher at the University of Kansas.
Cook presented the history of Franklin's symbol in a paper titled "The Snake That Would Not Die" at the 1997 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers on April 4. A longer version appears in Cook's "Images and Icons of the New World," a book published in London by the British Library in 1996.
In the newspaper article that accompanied the snake cartoon, Franklin called upon the colonies, a narrow band of settlements along the Atlantic coast, to unite against the French and Indian threat from the interior. Cook said the shape of the snake has a meaning not recognized before.
"Although historians have lauded Franklin's snake as a cartoon 'first,'" Cook said, "they have failed to identify it as a symbolic map. The curves of the snake suggest the coastline's shape, and the labels on its eight segments are in geographical order, from 'N.E.' - New England - at its head to 'S.C.' - South Carolina - at its tail."
Cook first became interested in the snake while a curator of early maps at the British Library, England's equivalent of the Library of Congress.
"It wasn't until I went to England that I became interested in U.S. cartography," she said. "I was working with 18th-century maps from the collection of King George III, who was king at the time of the Revolutionary War."
Cook developed her first paper on Franklin's snake for the 1993 International History of Cartography Conference in Chicago.
Cook's research showed that Franklin often used graphic images to accompany his writings.
"He probably designed the snake cartoon himself," she said, "combining existing symbolism from literary and pictorial sources."
Political cartoons published in Europe in the 18th century often depicted mutilation, decapitation and blood. British satirical prints often showed Britannia as a partially dismembered female figure, an image Franklin later used on his visiting cards.
"He must also have seen patriotic symbolic maps personifying countries as mythical figures or heraldic creatures," she said, "such as Britannia and the Belgian lion."
Artists in North America used animals native to the continent, such as the alligator and rattlesnake, to symbolize the New World, Cook said. Franklin owned a copy of Mark Catesby's "Natural History of Carolina," published 1731 to 1748, which described how a glass snake would separate into several pieces when struck.
"Franklin probably did not expect his snake cartoon to live on, but it caught the popular imagination," Cook said. "Illustrations were not common in colonial newspapers, and the snake cartoon was quickly copied in other papers from Massachusetts to South Carolina."
According to Cook, Franklin was trying to reach the widest possible audience. "In that day and age, there was not a lot of new news," she said. "And copyright laws were nonexistent."
Newspapers across the colonies copied the cartoon and the accompanying article in 1754. The segmented snake later appeared in different forms on newspaper mastheads during the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 and during the Revolutionary War period, 1774 and 1775.
The cartoon snake changed over time as it was revived to fit additional crises. Paul Revere's masthead design for the Massachusetts Spy newspaper in 1774 showed the snake combating the British dragon.
The snake cartoon was revived for the last time in 1863 during the American Civil War, Cook said. By then, the Confederate version, which showed the snake in segments, had lost its map aspect, while the Union counterpart appeared on a map as a soldier-devouring anaconda, but no longer divided into segments.
Story by Harlan Roedel and Dann Hayes, (785) 864-8855