Today is Uncle Sam Day, and Sam wants YOU to drink more coffee. Uncle Sam Day, every September 13, commemorates the dude on the poster we’ve all seen a million times. Uncle Sam is an iconic symbol of America personified in the form of Sam Wilson, a New York meatpacker from the late 1700s and early 1800s. A number of variations (male, female, young, old, etc.) have symbolized different facets of the United States — the government, the country as a whole, the working man — though most people can point to the classic US Army recruiting poster as the Uncle Sam they think of first.