OF A MERRY CHRISTMAS PAST

If ever there was a year when Americans could look on their works with pride, it was 1902. From the sparsely settled, fledgling nation of a century before, America had become one of the great industrial powers of the globe. Her cities bristled with skyscrapers. Her inventors had given the world the telephone and the electric light. People were chugging around in horseless carriages powered by fuel sucked out of the ground in Texas. The American fleet could hold its own against the navies of Europe, not to mention the forces of the banana republics we were snaffling up. Within the next two years, American steam shovels would be chewing away at the isthmus of Panama.

So, when W. A. Rogers sat down that year to draw these three Christmas sketches for Harper’s Weekly, he chose an ebullient patriotic theme, showing Uncle Sam well pleased by his growth during the past hundred years. We here reproduce Harper’s Christmas greeting of 1902, wishing you the best of the season, and in the hope that Americans will sometime again be as proud of what they have wrought.