Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America

By Simon Appleford

Drawing Liberalism is the first book-length critical examination of the political and social impact of the political cartoonist Herbert Block—popularly known as Herblock. Working for the Washington Post, Herblock played a central role in shaping, propagandizing, and defending the ideals of postwar liberalism, a normative set of values and assumptions that dominated American politics and culture after World War II.

Best remembered for his unrelenting opposition to and skewering cartoons of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, Herblock introduced the term "McCarthyism" into the American political lexicon. With its unstinting and unapologetic support for the liberal agenda, across a career spanning over fifty years at the Post, Herblock’s work affords a unique lens through which to interpret and understand the shifts and contours of twentieth-century American political culture, from the postwar period through the civil rights era into the Nixon presidency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780813948898

Book preview

Cover Page for Drawing Liberalism

Drawing Liberalism

Drawing Liberalism

Herblock’s Political Cartoons in Postwar America

Simon Appleford

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2023 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Appleford, Simon, author.

Title: Drawing liberalism : Herblock’s political cartoons in postwar America / Simon Appleford.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Presss, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022034830 (print) | LCCN 2022034831 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813948881 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813948898 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Block, Herbert, 1909–2001—Criticism and interpretation. | Editorial cartoonists—United States—Biography. | Cold War in comics | Liberalism—United States—History—20th century. | United States—Politics and government—1945–1989—Caricatures and cartoons.

Classification: LCC NC1429.B625 A66 2022 (print) | LCC NC1429.B625 (ebook) | DDC 741.5/6973—dc23/eng/20220915

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034830

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034831

All Herblock cartoons © The Herb Block Foundation

Cover art: Herblock in the 1960s. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; C-DIG-ppmsca-22212)

For Liam and Skye

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 | An Uninhibited Voice of Liberalism: Becoming Herblock

2 | The Fear-and-Smear Racketeers: Protecting Democracy

3 | The Major Moral Issue of Our Time: Standing for Civil Rights

4 | Nothing More Than Inflammatory Propaganda: Denouncing the New Right

5 | I’m Afraid to Look: Defending Liberalism from the Left

6 | That Son-of-a-Bitch Herblock: Taking on Nixon

Epilogue: A Watchman in the Night

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1 | Typical layout of the Washington Post’s editorial page

2 | Get Ready for the Cleanup, October 6, 1928

3 | The Pleasure Is All Ours, July 16, 1929

4 | Dealing with Both Hands, March 14, 1933

5 | Wait Till the Dies Committee Hears about This! December 3, 1938

6 | ’Tis a Sad Story, Men! May 6, 1929

7 | Listen! Listen to the People Cheering! December 31, 1947

8 | You Read Books, Eh? April 24, 1949

9 | Fire! June 17, 1949

10 | You Mean I’m Supposed to Stand on That? March 29, 1950

11 | You’ll Take the High Road, and I’ll Take the Low Road; I’ll Be in the White House afore You, January 23, 1952

12 | Relax—He Hasn’t Got to You Yet, March 7, 1954

13 | I Have Here in My Hand—, May 7, 1954

14 | The Gov. Faubus ‘Peace’ Plan, September 5, 1957

15 | I Got No Control over Myself, January 29, 1946

16 | It’s Okay—Ol’ Gene Will Be Back in Soon, July 29, 1946

17 | Not Guilty, May 23, 1947

18 | Somebody from Outside Must Have Influenced Them, February 28, 1956

19 | Nah, You Ain’t Got Enough Edjiccashun to Vote, December 10, 1958

20 | We Don’t Want No Troublemakers from the United States, May 23, 1961

21 | Sportsmen! Kids! Maniacs! November 27, 1963

22 | They’re ALL Communists Except Thee and Me—, April 5, 1961

23 | If You Don’t Like This Situation, You Can Cast Your Twentieth of a Vote against It, October 13, 1961

24 | I Don’t Want My Tax Money Spent on Your Kind, July 25, 1961

25 | If You Had Any Initiative, You’d Go Out and Inherit a Department Store, December 6, 1961

26 | Birchhead, February 20, 1963

27 | "We Want a Choice—a Choice—Not an Echo—an Echo—," July 15, 1964

28 | Gave Proof through the Night . . . , April 2, 1968

29 | "Faster! . . . Here It Takes All the Running You Can Do, to Keep in the Same Place," May 30, 1963

30 | A Time of Testing, April 9, 1968

31 | Race, May 28, 1968

32 | Our Position Hasn’t Changed at All, June 17, 1965

33 | There’s Money Enough to Support Both of You—Now, Doesn’t That Make You Feel Better? August 1, 1967

34 | He Really Shrinks on You, Doesn’t He? November 12, 1968

35 | We Got to Burn the Evil Spirits out of Her, May 16, 1948

36 | Naughty Naughty, October 29, 1952

37 | Here He Comes Now, October 29, 1954

38 | Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who’s the Fairest One of All? January 2, 1960

39 | This Shop Gives to Every New President of the United States a Free Shave, November 7, 1968

40 | Who Would Think of Doing Such a Thing? June 20, 1972

41 | Mugging, October 23, 1973

42 | I Am . . . Not . . . a Crook, May 24, 1974

43 | Through the Looking Glass, June 3, 1984

Acknowledgments

A project of this scope, which has been a daily part of my life for so long, inevitably incurs more debts than I can ever truly repay.

This book would not have been possible without the help and support of Vernon Burton, who from the moment I first emailed him as a prospective graduate student has taken me under his wing and become both a mentor and a friend. His support over the years has made me a better historian and, more importantly, a better person. I have also benefited from the generosity of several talented scholars who have read portions of this book in various stages of its development. Dianne Harris, Ray Fouché, Clarence Lang, Jim Barrett, Elizabeth Elliot-Meisel, Heather Fryer, and Adam Sundberg have all offered careful and insightful readings, and I owe them considerable thanks not just for pointing out myriad ways in which my arguments could be improved but also for their encouragement throughout this process. Jennifer Guiliano has been a sounding board, reader, editor, colleague, and conspirator during this whole journey. An incredibly talented historian and practitioner of the digital humanities, she is an even better friend.

I am grateful to the Herb Block Foundation for their permission to reprint over forty of Block’s cartoons in this book. I must also express my thanks to the librarians and staff at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, who were patient and supportive as I invaded their space with my digital camera and tripod. Librarians and archivists at the Truman, Nixon, and Clinton Presidential Libraries and at the Princeton and Yale University Archives have all been equally generous during the research of this project. Jeff Nichols generously sent me archival material related to Block’s time working in Chicago that he encountered while working on other projects.

Support from Creighton University, and especially Bridget Keegan, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, provided me with the time and resources necessary to turn this into a finished book. A George F. Haddix Pre-Tenure Sabbatical gave me the opportunity to dedicate a semester to the final drafting of the manuscript. A Summer Faculty Research Fellowship from Creighton’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship supported the research that became the fourth chapter of this volume, while a Magis! Investigatio Research Award provided additional support as the manuscript moved through production. My colleagues at Creighton, especially those in the History Department, have been unstinting in their support and encouragement of my scholarship. I have also benefited from the insights of my many talented students over the last several years. Hailey Austin, Wade Peyou, Cole Crawford, Eric Howard, Kathleen Bever, Alisha Baginski, Kate Albrecht, and Katherine Consola have all assisted in various aspects of the project.

At the University of Virginia Press, Nadine Zimmerli has championed this project from the moment it landed on her desk. Her guidance and suggestions helped hone the book’s argument and turned it into a much more focused work. Wren Morgan Myers ushered my manuscript through the production process while Margaret Hogan’s careful copyediting has captured numerous errors that had escaped previous rounds of review and greatly improved the clarity and readability of my work. I am also grateful to the two anonymous readers whose comments and feedback helped make this a significantly better book.

My friends and family have all supported me throughout this process in more ways than I could have expected or hoped. The Obrecht clan, Catherine Callard, Susan Requa, Beatrice Smith, Troy and Robin Smith, Stephen Spackman, Jason Thatcher, Vetria Byrd, Megan Shockley, Christopher Woodall, Leslie Cornell, Audrey Shoemaker, Nick Jaworski, Stephanie Seawell, Sally Heinzel, Heidi Dodson, Jason Jordan, and Clara Wong have all in their own unique and individual ways provided me with much needed support at various stages of this project, and I am grateful for their continuing friendships.

Thank you to my grandparents, who through their unconditional love influenced not just this book but who I am as a person, in ways impossible to express in just a few words. My parents, Ann and Michael, have been my biggest supporters throughout my life and have always done everything in their power to give me every opportunity to succeed. I don’t tell them often enough how much their love means to me. Thank you for always believing in me.

Finally, this project would never have been completed without the love and support of Rebecca Appleford. From encouraging me to write to forcing me to take a break, she has done more to make sure that this book is finished than anyone else. Her patience, generosity, and passion inspire me. You are my North Star, and I love you!

This book is dedicated to our children, Liam and Skye. They bring constant joy to our lives and are never afraid to remind us of what is truly important.

Drawing Liberalism

Introduction

In the space of a single week in March 1951, the Washington Post’s editorial cartoonist Herbert Block, better known by his nom de plume, Herblock, received plaudits from two of America’s most prominent liberals. I have long admired your work, declared the noted Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., both from an artistic point of view and as a cogent expression of political and social liberalism.¹ Later that same month, Chester Bowles, the former governor of Connecticut, also congratulated Block on the consistent and high-quality nature of his work. I honestly do not know anyone in the publication field or radio field, Bowles wrote, who is presenting a liberal viewpoint more effectively and consistently than you.² That Block was lauded as a key proponent of liberal ideology by such public figures is not surprising. By 1951, he had been drawing political cartoons professionally for over twenty years. He was in his fifth year as the Washington Post’s resident editorial cartoonist where he had established himself as both one of the nation’s most prominent political cartoonists and a leading voice for liberalism in the post–World War II era. Over a professional career that lasted seventy-two years and encompassed the presidencies of thirteen men, from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush, Block drew liberalism for a much broader national audience than was reached by the writings of other liberal writers and intellectuals, helping shape how the American public understood and reacted to the events of the day.

This monograph is the first book-length, critical study of Block’s work to date. It shows how Block drew cartoons to further the goals and priorities of liberalism in the three decades following the conclusion of World War II. By complementing close readings of these cartoons with the responses they generated from readers across the country, it argues that Block’s cartoons interpreted, influenced, and reinforced postwar liberal opinion. Block was not an uncritical supporter of every tenet of postwar liberalism, but he was one of the most visible and productive members of this intellectual movement. In drawing liberalism he played a critical role in shaping public discourse and opinion across a wide range of political and social issues. Whether Americans agreed with or rejected postwar liberalism, there is no doubt that its policies changed the nation’s society and politics. To understand postwar America one must also understand why liberalism took the form it did and why Americans either supported or rejected it as a political ideology. In the context of his daily editorial cartoons, which were regularly seen by Americans across the country, analyzing how and why Block chose to support, attack, and even ignore certain topics and events offers a distinctive lens through which to understand how liberalism and the events of the third quarter of the twentieth century were distilled, understood, and interpreted by the American public. His cartoons, far from simply reflecting liberal ideology, reveal the nature and limits of twentieth-century American liberalism.

Postwar liberalism articulated a belief in a benevolent but activist and expansive federal government that could shape society by keeping in check the worst excesses of capitalism. It could protect the civil rights and liberties of individuals and social groups while providing citizens with social welfare programs to afford them protections at all stages of their lives. Block’s cartoons made him as important as more recognizable contemporary intellectuals and politicians such as literary critic Lionel Trilling, historian Richard Hofstadter, and lawyer and politician Adlai Stevenson in defining liberalism. Block also engaged in regular correspondence and considered himself friends with many of liberalism’s intellectual leaders. As shown by the letters he received from Schlesinger and Bowles in March 1951, they thought of him as one of their number and an important proponent of, and advocate for, liberal ideology.

Overshadowing this mutual admiration and belief in postwar liberalism was the Cold War and anticommunism. Rhetoric of both national prestige and national security supported the massive programs of government spending that postwar liberals advocated under the auspices of the Cold War (1947–1991). The looming threat of the Soviet Union encouraged Americans to follow a series of conservative values that placed clear limits on what attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs were acceptable to hold within American society. These normative assumptions included commitments to the principles of hard work and personal responsibility, the preservation of traditional gender roles, and an unwavering belief that the American system of government was superior to all others. Even liberals—eager to purge their consciences of their prewar ties and sympathies to Marxism—acquiesced to anticommunist sentiment at home.³ So prevalent were these attitudes in postwar American society that in 1949, Arthur Schlesinger could describe how the vital center, by which he meant liberal ideology, was critical in the defense of the ideals of American democracy from extremists on both the left and right of the political spectrum.⁴ The following year, Lionel Trilling declared without any hint of embarrassment or irony that in the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. . . . There are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.⁵

In 1952, however, Republican Dwight Eisenhower swept to victory against Adlai Stevenson—the darling of the liberal establishment, who was the losing Democratic presidential candidate in both 1952 and 1956—by winning over 55 percent of the popular vote and beating Stevenson 442 to 89 in the electoral college.⁶ Combined with the culture of fear that Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade engendered across America, it appeared to many observers as though the liberals’ moment was over. Yet historians have come to recognize that many of the achievements of the Eisenhower administration—including massive federal funding on public works projects, support for civil rights, and welfare program reform—were also liberal priorities. As such, the core beliefs of each political party overlapped significantly.⁷

This overlap has led scholars such as journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson to describe the postwar era in the United States as an age of consensus. Hodgson argued that whether you look at the writings of intellectuals or at the positions taken by practicing politicians or at the data on public opinion, it is impossible not to be struck by the degree to which the majority of Americans in those years accepted the same system of assumptions.⁸ This so-called liberal consensus—at least for white, heterosexual, and middle-class men—manifested itself politically in a strong bipartisan commitment built around six central and connected tenets: (1) capitalism, especially as found in the American free-enterprise context, was the best economic system in the world; (2) American democracy was the best political system in the world; (3) class distinctions were in the process of being eliminated, and American society was naturally growing more equal; (4) any existing social problems could be solved by the benevolent application of social science and appropriate resources; (5) communists, both at home and abroad, represented the major threat to the advances that the liberal consensus promised; and (6) it was the duty and responsibility of America to contain and eliminate this Soviet threat so that the rest of the world could benefit from America’s social, economic, and political advances.⁹ Richard Hofstadter was thinking of America’s past when he famously wrote in his 1948 book The American Political Tradition that the fierceness of the political struggles has often been misleading; for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise. But this statement of political consensus applied just as well to the postwar nation.¹⁰

Postwar conformity was very much a white, male, and middle-class ideological construct. Behind its facade lay significant differences in how Americans understood and experienced their position in society.¹¹ On the political left, alleged communists and communist sympathizers were subjected to aggressive investigations and congressional hearings to answer for their alleged subversive activities, bringing to national prominence the likes of McCarthy and then-Senator Richard Nixon and threatening the nation’s constitutional commitment to the principles of free speech, freedom of assembly, and a free press. Starting in the 1940s and growing increasingly vocal in the 1950s and 1960s, those Americans that were excluded from the full benefits of postwar society—most notably African Americans but also women, Mexican Americans, Indigenous peoples, and lesbians and gay men—pushed back against the restrictions imposed on them by the normative pressures of postwar liberalism to try and ensure access to the legal and constitutional rights other Americans already enjoyed. In tandem, America’s youth rose up in violent protest as they struggled to assert their voices against a political establishment that did not represent their interests.

The political and social dominance of liberalism was opposed just as strongly from the political right. For a growing number of conservatives, the events and developments that characterized and altered America from the late 1950s onward seemed to threaten the values that they believed ensured the prosperity and security of both themselves and the nation. These insecurities included fears by white conservatives over the effects of the end of segregation and an increasingly militant African American freedom struggle. Similarly, the Christian Right became fearful that secularization was creeping through American education and popular culture. Many American men came to believe that feminism, gay rights, and changes in the economy were undermining the traditional patriarchal family. And, perhaps most significant was the simple fear among many Americans that society and culture were changing in ways and at a speed they could not comprehend. These tensions, coming from both the left and the right, crystallized during the 1960s into national movements that sought to overturn the existing political establishment, leading to the final collapse of postwar liberalism during the presidency of Richard Nixon and the ascendancy of a new conservative politics that became closely associated with Ronald Reagan.¹²

From the moment he joined the staff of the Washington Post in January 1946, Block used his cartoons to draw postwar liberalism and counter conservative viewpoints by familiarizing his readers with the central tenets of liberal ideology—the importance of a federal government committed to social reform and protecting the civil rights and liberties of individuals and social groups while also combating the threat of communism. In doing so, he positioned himself as one of liberalism’s most forthright advocates. Block was described as simply the greatest cartoonist of his era and a genius by those who shared his political leanings, while his critics labeled him a master of sick invective and an enthusiastic water boy for the powers that be on the left.¹³ Examples of his cartoons can be found in politicians’ personal collections across the country—ranging from Democratic president Harry Truman to segregationist Strom Thurmond. Block himself received countless requests from people and organizations—of all political persuasions and whether they were presented in a positive or negative light—for copies of the cartoons in which they were depicted.

Block was one of several prominent cartoonists working in the postwar years. Among his most notable contemporaries were the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Bill Mauldin, the Miami Daily News’s Anne Mergen, the Los Angeles Times’s Paul Conrad, and the Denver Post’s Pat Oliphant. Block’s status as cartoonist for Washington’s only morning newspaper afforded him a privileged position that allowed his cartoons to appear in the newspaper most likely to be read by the nation’s powerbrokers and to influence their responses to the day’s events. As a result, his cartoons were inevitably the subject of public comment, admiration, and condemnation. Harry Truman, for example, famously responded to a question about whether the House Un-American Activities Committee’s actions posed a threat to educational freedoms by encouraging reporters to look at that morning’s Herblock cartoon as it pretty well answered that question.¹⁴ Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 comment to British Labour Party leader Harold Wilson that, although Block was our best, he would come over and eat your cookies, but then . . . go back and draw a cartoon giving you hell the next day, is typical of the dichotomy his cartoons provoked among the targets of his satire.¹⁵

Rhetoricians Michael A. DeSousa and Martin J. Medhurst have theorized that cartoonists generally draw on one of four themes or major inventional resources: political commonplaces, literary/cultural allusions, personal character traits, and transient situational themes when building their scenes. Taking each of these in turn, political commonplaces are those scenarios and topics in which a reader might naturally expect to see the subjects of political cartoons act, which allows the cartoonist to draw a cartoon without having to provide their readers with additional context. In other words, when one sees a character standing outside the White House, the cartoonist is likely commenting on presidential politics. When that same character is instead standing next to a stock ticker or atop planet Earth, the theme is more likely to be economics or something of global import. By the same token, placing a recognizable politician in a swamp or on the beach also primes the viewer as to the cartoon’s intent. Setting a cartoon in a doctor’s office, a grocery store, or a married couple’s living room are all everyday settings that instill the cartoon with specific expectations and assumptions.

Cartoonists also frequently make use of literary and cultural allusions, drawing on anything from Greek myths to the latest Hollywood blockbuster to draw a connection between the subject of their cartoon and some more broadly understood context. Depending on the specific context and how a group of characters are portrayed, depicting them as Marvel’s Avengers can instill them with heroic qualities, but it can also mock them, suggesting characteristics that the subjects may imagine they possess but the cartoonist feels they in fact lack. This intertextuality can deepen the layers of meaning within a cartoon but can also be a barrier to understanding if the viewer is unfamiliar with the analogy being made.

Personal character traits are those defining physical, emotional, and personal characteristics that caricaturists tend to highlight and exaggerate. In the hands of a skilled political cartoonist, though, these characteristics are used not simply to mock the subject of their pen but instead to reveal some inherent truth about that subject’s personality. In rare occasions, those exaggerations can come to define who that political figure truly is for millions of readers.

Finally, timely and transient situations are the result of specific events or short-term controversies that often provide cartoons with their immediacy and timeliness on the day they are published. Timeliness, though, can make them indecipherable when separated by a period of months or years from the events that inspired them. As such, political cartoons are inherently ephemeral in nature. To fully understand their meaning and the cartoonist’s original intent, a reader must not only recognize all the portrayed characters but also the historical and political context of the day and any cultural or literary allusions that are being employed.¹⁶

Block saw his work as an integral part of the Washington Post’s editorial content. While delivering the second annual Joseph Pulitzer Memorial Lecture at the Columbia School of Journalism in February 1957, for example, Block discussed the power and responsibility of a free press to use its freedom to protect the freedom of everyone. He began by describing the symbiotic relationship that existed between his own work as a cartoonist and the editorial page of a newspaper. The cartoon and the editorial, he declared, are much the same thing—the means for speaking up and expressing opinions. Yet, it is the editorial cartoon that is the more natural medium for vigorous comment because it is a type of work which is not calculated to induce in the practitioner an undue reverence for public officials.¹⁷ In contrast to written editorials, which provide readers with the newspaper’s official stance on a newsworthy event, political cartoons therefore offer a more personal and visceral reaction that shows why readers should care about a specific issue. To do so, they make use of a variety of visual, thematic, cultural, and rhetorical devices that allow the artist to embed within them a multiplicity of meanings. They contain both visual and textual messages on political and social events that are presented to their audiences through cultural symbols which have been interpreted and filtered by the cartoonist. Cartoons are assumed to be funny. But just as often they provoke anger, sadness, or joy, while their social impact derives from their simultaneous appeal to the eye, intellect, conscience, and emotion. They frequently rely on a visual shorthand, including caricatures, stereotypes, recurring symbols, and the juxtaposition of text and image, to give the cartoonist the latitude to draw what editorial writers arguably cannot write.¹⁸

Political cartoons are many things. But one of the things political cartoons are not is an accurate representation of the truth. Instead, they reveal a truth, a representation that the cartoonist wants to make apparent to their readers. Cartoons may or may not depict events and show politicians and public figures engaged in activities that actually occurred. But the best cartoons go beyond a single moment to reveal the true significance and hidden motivations of their subjects.¹⁹ As the political scientist Charles Press wrote in 1981, Cartoons present a picture as the essence of truth, a message as to what ought to be done on behalf of the deserving, and a mood created through artistic technique and allegorical imagery of how the viewer ought to feel over what is happening.²⁰ The intersection of all these factors offers a unique lens through which historians can understand a society’s interests, prejudices, and values, allowing an insight into how the behavior of international, national, and local figures was interpreted by their contemporary audience.

Politicians who have been the subject of a particularly scathing cartoon were painfully aware of the impact cartoons might have on their political ambitions. Perhaps most famously, the nineteenth-century cartoonist Thomas Nast undertook a sustained attack on the corruption he saw in New York City’s Tammany Hall boss William Tweed, which in its passion and effectiveness . . . stands alone in the history of American graphic art.²¹ As a result of these cartoons, Nast was reputedly offered a $500,000 bribe to stop his attacks and leave the country, leading Fiona Deans Halloran, a recent biographer of Nast, to describe him as a man whose work could change minds, topple leaders, and influence leaders. Halloran argues that his cartoons were more than mere editorials that supplied evidence in support of his personal opinion. Instead, Nast used visual imagery to grab the public’s attention and provoke a response.²² Tweed’s demand upon viewing an especially powerful Nast cartoon was that his lieutenants stop them damned pictures because I don’t care so much what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see pictures. This remains a ubiquitous anecdote used by scholars to highlight the impact of, and politicians’ reactions to, political cartoons.²³ Boss Tweed was not the only political figure to directly link his public image or political fortune to the work of Nast. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln described Nast’s drawings as the North’s best recruiting sergeant, while Ulysses S. Grant credited his victory in the 1868 presidential election on the sword of Sheridan and the pencil of Thomas Nast.²⁴ Indeed, Nast’s influence on American culture extends far beyond his unabashed support for the Republican Party or his attacks on Tweed’s corruption, as he is credited with introducing both the donkey and elephant as symbols for the Democratic and Republican Parties and even for creating the modern image of Santa Claus, visual devices Block himself regularly used.²⁵

Because of their ability to express complicated ideas in an easily understandable visual form, political cartoons have often found themselves treading a fine line at the limits of acceptable free speech, and cartoonists have frequently become the targets of governmental action when it seems they crossed that line. In 1917, for example, the Woodrow Wilson administration unsuccessfully used the Espionage Act to prosecute the cartoonists Henry Glintenkamp and Art Young for two cartoons critical of America’s role in World War I that were printed in the periodical the Masses. Although the charges were ultimately dropped after two trials that both ended in hung juries, prosecutors alleged that the cartoonists, together with several of the Masses’s editorial writers, were guilty of conspiring to cause mutiny and refusal of duty in the military and attempting to obstruct recruiting and enlistment—treasonable offenses.²⁶ Dictators and the instruments of their power, inevitably obsessed with their public image, have been particularly forthright in their attempts to control how they were depicted in political cartoons. During the Second World War, several Polish cartoonists were executed for drawing anti-Nazi cartoons, while Joseph Goebbels applied considerable pressure on the British foreign secretary in an unsuccessful attempt to stop publication of David Low’s highly critical cartoons of the Nazi regime in late 1937.²⁷ Block himself received a firsthand lesson in how his cartoons were received by a less than friendly regime when, in 1969, he was refused a visa to visit Soviet Russia, reputedly on the personal instructions of Leonid Brezhnev, who did not like how he was depicted in Block’s cartoons.²⁸

In shaping and influencing public opinion, Block created cartoons for what Benedict Anderson has described as an imagined political community—a public that shared a common set of assumptions and desires which were connected to each other not through personal interactions but through their readership of his cartoons.