Meme Culture's Early History: Critiquing/Constructing Authority during the US Civil War

After the current administration proposed tariffs, a new satirical nickname was applied to Donald Trump: TACO. The acronym stands for Trump Always Chickens Out, a way for the president’s critics to attack his trade policy and undermine his self-proclaimed mastery of the “art of the deal.” Among the flood of memes generated by the nickname was one that caught my eye as a historian of nineteenth-century visual culture. Titled “Taco Belle,” the meme played on the term bell/e by deploying the visual codes of white Southern femininity from the antebellum U.S. Created through digital manipulation, a recognizable likeness of the president now appeared dressed in an ornate bonnet and hoop-skirted dress while wielding a diminutive lace parasol. As this paper will explore, the gender, racial, and regional codes invoked to satirize Trump in this meme – not to mention its collage format – are not new. At the end of the U.S. Civil War, Northern artists attempted to undermine Jefferson Davis using strikingly similar tools and tropes. Multiple collages condemned Davis by presenting him dressed as a woman. (Captured wearing his wife’s cloak, images of a cross-dressing Davis went viral.) Notably, artists used intermedial approaches in the 1860s not only to discredit Confederate enemies, but also to construct Union heroes. Such images were deeply imbued with their own racial, gender, and class markers. Drawing from a forthcoming book, I argue that modern collage technologies have long offered the means to disrupt normative visions of leadership during periods of national anxiety.