Above: Cartoonist Joe Stern with his creation
The year 2023 is the 100th anniversary of arguably the most famous image in mutuals, “The Little Man Under the Umbrella”. The “Little Man Under the Umbrella” was created for CUNA (the Credit Union National Association) in the US and trademarked around the world as a symbol of the credit union movement. The men responsible for the logo were Joe Stern, a cartoonist with the Boston Herald Newspaper and Roy Bergengren, the man who paid Joe $5 for the original drawing in 1923.
Roy Bergengren was one of the most influential people in the American credit union movement. Bergengren was a co-founder of CUNA in 1934 and helped institute the US Federal Credit Union Act in the same year. The Act instituted the national US credit union movement and was the beginning of the USA’s parallel federal and state systems that are still operating successfully today (read more about Roy in our profile of him here).
In 1923, Bergengren looked to Joe Stern, a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist to “capture the essence of the credit unions” in a cartoon or logo. “The Little Man Under the Umbrella” is what Stern came up with and Bergengren paid him $5 for it.
Stern’s logo would go on to have worldwide recognition and was used by CUNA as their official trademark until the 1960s and it is still being used today. Mark Worthington, CEO of Australian Mutual Bank and a Director of the Australian Mutuals Foundation, was gifted this umbrella featuring the ‘Little Man’ logo at a recent Association of Asian Confederation of Credit Unions (ACCU) Conference.
Below is Mark donating said umbrella to the Chair of Australian Mutuals History, Greg Stevens, for eternal preservation in our archives.
