May 9 · This Day in America
In the Pennsylvania Gazette, beside the day's dry news, a woodcut appears: a snake chopped into eight pieces, each labeled for a colony. Below it, three words. JOIN, OR DIE. Benjamin Franklin is staring down a French war on the frontier and a harder truth at home — that thirteen quarreling colonies, each guarding its own door, are a snake in pieces. It is the first political cartoon ever published in an American newspaper, and it does what the best ones do: it makes an argument you cannot un-see. Newspapers up and down the coast reprint it. Two decades later the same severed snake rides into revolution on broadsides and flags. An idea born in a Philadelphia print shop on this day — that we are stronger whole than apart — turns out to be the whole American argument, drawn in five strokes.
Source: guides.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1914
A West Virginia woman named Anna Jarvis had grieved her mother into a movement, writing letters for seven years until a nation listened. On this day President Woodrow Wilson signs the proclamation: the second Sunday in May, fly the flag, for "our love and reverence for the mothers of our country." Jarvis would later spend her life fighting the florists and candy makers who turned her quiet tribute into a sale.
Source: www.loc.gov