Artists in Uniform Written By Mary McCarthy

• In Artists in Uniform, Mary McCarthy narrates her confrontation with a man who she encounters on a train voyage across the United States. McCarthy's essay was published in 1953, less than a decade after the end of World War II. In this essay, McCarthy utilizes a scholarly vernacular, as well as her usual confident tone to establish her intellectual superiority to the man she meets. This allows her to establish her credibility, utilizing the rhetorical device called ethos. McCarthy also taps into her audience's emotions by having her story revolve around the general message that biases blinds a person from seeing others as they truly are, but they are also very hard to break free of. She communicates her purpose masterfully by highlighting the colonel's stupidity, when he says hateful things about Jews, yet immediately takes a liking to McCarthy after hearing her very Irish sounding last name. Although she is much more logical than he, she is unable to  shake him of his ignorance towards the Jewish people. McCarthy is a fourth Jewish, but does not let the colonel know this until the very end of their time together because she does not want him to dismiss her thinking as motivated by her own lineage, "Don't start that anti-semtetic talk before making sure there are no Jews present," (McCarthy, pg.205). She makes him look very foolish by employing dramatic irony throughout the piece, because the audience knows she is Jewish, yet the colonel does not. After he makes many offensive and anti-Semitic remarks, McCarthy decides that instead of declining his invitation to lunch as she once intended to, she will go out with him in the pursuit of teaching him the error in his ways. Unfortunately, she in unable to, and she begins to question if her unprejudiced view was acquired in her life, just as much as a the colonel acquired his anti-semitic outlook. As she parts with the man, he asks for her married name. She reveals that it is Broadwater, and immediately the colonel's grimace is traded for a look of understanding, as the name sounds very Jewish. She considers this a victory for the colonel, as he can walk away from the encounter assuming that McCarthy only tried to persuade him to be more tolerant because she was defending her own religious community, but the audience knows that this is not the case. Artists in Uniform is filled with subtle nuances such as this, that add deeply to the thematic message that McCarthy is trying to communicate. Her target audience is post-adolescence, and some level of academia is required in order to understand the significant word  choices she makes. 

Hatred is taught: This is a poster that was shown to the public to advertise a Nazi propaganda movie called, The Eternal Jew. It depicted the Jewish people as parasitic and unclean, using them as a scapegoat for the German failure. Joseph Goebbels was in charge of Nazi propaganda the time, The Eternal Jew, was released. 

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