Herblock, “Carry On, Lads” (1954) (illustration credit 17.1)
In the fall of 1953, in my last year of college, I was privileged to be able to participate in a new experiment, the Washington Semester, under the aegis of American University. The idea was that a small group of students from around the country would take up residence in the nation’s capital, where, to supplement their classroom studies, they would constitute a roving seminar, meeting with members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, the Librarian of Congress, and other members of the Washington establishment, to see how our government really worked.
As a premature civil libertarian, I looked forward to a heady experience. The cold war was anything but cold. The Supreme Court was on the brink of declaring school segregation unconstitutional. And with Richard (“Tricky Dick”) Nixon serving as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice-president, “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy riding high in the Senate in his hate-filled search for Communists and traitors under every mattress, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities moving from smear to smear, I expected to be in the red-hot center of American politics.
Our seminars were lively, but somehow it seemed what we were getting were live elaborations on textbook accounts of how the three branches “really worked,” rather than a sense of the urgent issues dividing the country. Then, almost by accident, everything changed. One day a classified ad appeared in The Washington Post for a tour guide for the paper, and since I could use the extra money, I applied for and got the job.
Along with the other tour guides, I was given a script. The tour was supposed to start on the top floor and proceed downward, where floor-by-floor the guide would explain what went on. I thought I had a better idea and got permission to try it. I would start the tour out on the street where the story took place, then try to follow it from the rewrite man to the copy desk to the production department, ending up in the basement where the presses rolled. Then I would take the bedraggled tourists back up to the editorial floor, where they could see the editors discussing or writing editorials commenting on the news, and then the pièce de résistance—Herblock, working on his next day’s cartoon.
No matter the time of day, deadlines that he always somehow met be damned, he had time to come out of his glassed-in office and talk. Unlike some of the other artists whose work is depicted here, no single Herblock cartoon ignited a national or international explosion, yet I would argue that his influence—although there is no consensus on how to measure the impact of pictures (whether versus words or not)—was beyond incalculable. His images were indelible and are with us to this day.
Herblock, “Untitled, 12/8/1953” (illustration credit 17.2)
The previous year, 1952, Herblock had incurred the wrath of Phil Graham, the Post’s publisher, who was supporting the Republican candidate for President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, against his Democratic opponent, Adlai E. Stevenson. In the final weeks of the campaign, Graham asked Herblock to stop submitting his anti-Ike cartoons. Herblock, who was nationally syndicated, agreed, but as a result, readers saw Herblock cartoons portraying Ike as insufficiently intolerant of McCarthy’s and Nixon’s red-baiting of Stevenson elsewhere, and angrily accused the Post of censoring their own cartoonist. Graham relented, and ever after, as Katharine Graham, who succeeded her husband as publisher, later recalled, Herblock “earned a unique position on the paper; one of complete independence of anybody and anything.”
Thus was Herblock syndicated and vindicated—a unique position not only at the Post but in the country, since editorial cartoonists are expected to follow the editorial line of the papers in which their work appears. Here, perhaps, we have implicit recognition of the fact that the impact of visual propositions is “different” from verbal ones.
Who will ever forget McCarthy with his tar brush, or “Here He Comes Now,” as the crowd of Republicans awaiting his arrival see the five-o’clock-shadowed Nixon emerge from the sewers with his suitcase? As renowned journalist and author Haynes Johnson noted in Herblock: The Life and Work of the Great Political Cartoonist on the occasion of his centenary, that cartoon “would stick with Nixon throughout his career.” Or think of Herblock’s hysterical citizen, rushing up the ladder carrying a pail of water with which he seems intent on dousing the flame in the Statue of Liberty’s torch at the height of the Red Scare.
It is fitting that Herblock, who invented the term “McCarthyism,” showed McCarthy, at the end of his career, fallen in the gutter, under the caption “Carry On, Lads,” as he passes on his McCarthyism tar brush to Nixon and fellow red hunter Senator William Jenner of Indiana.
On one of my last days at the Post, December 8, 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower eloquently (according to all accounts) spoke before the United Nations General Assembly proposing “Atoms for Peace,” whereby America would extend aid to countries using nuclear power for peaceful purposes. I can’t remember a word he said, but Herblock’s rendition of the bomb casting its shadow on the UN Building is still with us.