Cartoons Without Humor

Herblock’s cartoons have been a fixture on the Post’s editorial page for more than 50 years, despite fairly obvious shortcomings. Herblock (he’s used the compound name since the 1920s) cannot draw caricatures. His liberal politics are mind-numbingly cliched. Perhaps most objectionable, he is never, ever funny. His lone strength is the smear.

Regular readers of the Post may wonder: Has he always been this bad? A stroll through the new Library of Congress exhibit “Herblock’s History” provides the answer. If the 121 cartoons he has donated to the library (does it ever turn anyone down?) can be taken as a fair selection, then, yes, he has always been this bad.

Of course, the history of editorial cartoons is full of rim shots and dirty pool. The father of the art, Thomas Nast, was busting chops as far back as the Civil War. But Nast didn’t arrive on the scene as a cartoonist. He started as an illustrator, filling much the same role for newspapers that photographers do today. Instead of zig-zagging through a war zone with cameras around the neck, illustrators like Nast had to pitch an easel on the edge of the battlefield and dodge cannonballs between ink strokes.

Nast’s job was to draw what he saw. But it was when he moved from representation to allegory that he gained notoriety — and, ultimately, wealth and formidable influence. He became the first editorialist of his kind, inventing elements of the language of cartooning, and setting hypocrisy and lies in high relief. Nast the editorial cartoonist created the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey, and even the modern image of Santa Claus. He helped elect Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency. He worried Horace Greeley — perhaps to death. And in the early 1870s, Nast helped depose Boss Tweed with nothing more than the power of the pen (and the impressive circulation of Harper’s Weekly).

Herblock is a direct descendant of Nast — Nast the illustrator, that is. Because for Herblock, editorial cartooning is little more than photography by other means. There he is, still stuck on the edge of the battlefield, illustrating away, concentrating earnestly with his tongue hanging out and a pen in his mouth, metaphors whizzing past his ears, just missing their target.

The illustrations are breathtakingly simple and unwitty. But like a colossal bore who repeats his stories, thinking your failure to respond means you didn’t understand the first time, Herblock is not content to leave bad enough alone. Hence his trademark habit of labeling every item in the panel with GREAT BIG CAPITAL LETTERS. Thanks to this device, he sometimes achieves the distinction of insulting the reader’s intelligence four or five times in just one cartoon.

Consider a typical Herblock cartoon from March 3, 1985. A happy-faced man is running down a street toward a manhole. Herblock’s metaphor — which is in no way suggested by the drawing — plays out like so: The sun is labeled ECONOMIC INDICATORS and the manhole is labeled TRADE DEFICIT. But the panel is — as usual — so generic, practically any other labels would do. Wanna play Herblock? Insert labels yourself! Try these: WORLD PEACE for the sun and MIDDLE EAST CRISES for the manhole; EXPENSIVE GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS and FEDERAL DEFICITS; THE DEVIL and THE DEEP BLUE SEA.

Sometimes Herblock is even lazier. On October 19, 2000, the Washington Post ran a panel in which he portrayed George W. Bush (labeled BUSH) as Peter Pan, standing on the ledge of a building and set to fly under the power of a bag of FAIRY DUST CAMPAIGN PROMISES.

On January 25, 1987, Herblock drew Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger as the personification of the proposed Star Wars missile defense, standing on the ledge of a building and set to fly under the power of books labeled MARY POPPINS, DUMBO, SUPERMAN . . . and PETER PAN.

The corner of the building in both panels is the same. The windows are cut off by the edges of the panel in the same places. The same amount of skyline is visible in the lower left corner. And the night sky of both panels is illuminated by identical sliver-crescent moons. They are virtually the same cartoon, nearly 14 years apart.

If his method is execrable, his politics are worse. Herblock has made a career as an enthusiastic water boy for the powers that be on the left. The deal is fairly canny: He singlemindedly cheers on the team, and in return, they pretend he is amusing.

If blind fealty were a virtue, Herblock would have been measured for his saint’s robes back when Clinton was still learning to play post office. Rarely in his 70-plus years of work has he come upon either a leftist position or pol with which he disagreed.

There is no middle ground with Herblock, and none of the playfulness found in the work of superior cartoonists. Disagree with Herblock, and you disagree with Heaven. Everyone is either friend or foe. Nixon is always crawling out of a sewer; Reagan is always a nitwit. And when inspiration fails, there is always the National Rifle Association to quicken his pulse and send him racing to the drawing table for a little defamation. He equates gun rights advocates with dealers of street drugs; he depicts hunters as careless fools; and in one especially repellent panel he draws a schoolyard of dead and dying children under the view of two smiling lobbyists for the NRA.

Herblock’s cartoons often aren’t editorializing, they’re just especially nasty name-calling.

Consider also Herblock the hypocrite. He is a law-and-order man — unless the law-breakers are his friends. While he blasted Presidents Reagan and Bush repeatedly over the Iran-Contra affair, and Gingrich for his book deal, Herblock pulled on the kid gloves for Bill Clinton. For practically every other cartoonist in America, liberal or conservative, Clinton has been a dream president. Not for Herblock. His smug apologies for the Clintons make a James Carville rant sound like Tocqueville. In his 1998 memoir Herblock: A Cartoonist’s Life, Herblock dismisses the Clinton fund-raising coffees as merely “crummy.” And he defends Clinton’s renting of the Lincoln bedroom to donors by — get this — playing down the historical value of the room itself:

It is a room Lincoln never slept in but which now contains his bed, along with a framed picture of him and other “Lincolnia.” Continuous mention of this room not only implied that Lincoln had occupied it but practically gave the impression that he was still using it and was being forced to sleep in the hallway.

Unrelieved scorn for enemies, but special pleading like this for friends — hey, it’s a living.

The likeliest explanation for Herblock’s durability is that he was always the premier Nixon Hater at the paper whose reputation was secured by Watergate. Indeed, Herblock might be just another forgotten hack if Nixon hadn’t rescued him in the 1970s by letting it be known that Herblock wounded him.

“Herblock the cartoonist got to me,” Nixon famously said. “But now when I walk into this office I am cool and calm.” The Washington Post ran this quote across a page of Herblock’s Nixon panels on August 9, 1974, in newspapers that hit the front porch just hours after his resignation. And there in the middle of the page was Good Citizen Herblock, grinning from ear to ear — as if Watergate had been years of good clean fun.

Like so many leftists, Herblock was driven less by outrage over Nixon’s dirty tricks than by unspent rage against Nixon for his success in exposing liberalism’s tolerance for communism in the 1940s and 1950s. Even as Senator Joe McCarthy used his kangaroo committee hearings to damage his own political enemies with the charge of communism, so Herblock used the radioactive charge of McCarthyism to damage his enemies.

Herblock claims credit, Gore-like, for inventing the term “McCarthyism” (and, later, the epithet “Contract on America”). Whether he invented the term or not, there is no doubt that he epitomized the type for whom the fight against “McCarthyism” would outlive the senator himself and be transformed into a lifelong anti-anti-Communist passion.

It has never seemed to bother him that this passion led him to judgments that were woefully wrong. Throughout the 1980s, he portrayed the Pentagon spending that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union as a ludicrous waste. He labeled the Soviet military threat PENTAGON PROPAGANDA; he frequently drew Caspar Weinberger necklaced with a commode seat that stood for wasteful spending. Most notably, in a panel from December 8, 1982, that would be laudable for its prescience were it not offered as ridicule, Herblock puts these words in the mouth of President Reagan: “If we keep on with the arms race, after a while the Russian economy will collapse.” Indeed.

In an especially shameful cartoon published just five days after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Herblock took his place at the head of the “moral equivalency” crowd, portraying Kennedy and Khrushchev struggling together to keep a nuclear monster in a box — as if the two occupied the same side of that struggle. His anthropomorphic atom bomb, a recurring trope throughout the Cold War, is a quaint period piece now, a reminder that when it came to the most important political struggle of the age, Herblock never got it right.

Partisanship is the lifeblood of political cartooning, but Herblock’s has always been of the unpleasantest sort. He’d rather use a knee to the groin than a tickle in the ribs. In a panel from October 4, 1988, he ludicrously outfitted then-presidential candidate George Bush with a lapel button reading EXTREME RIGHT-WING POLITICS. This was gentle compared with the panel four years later mocking Bush’s signature phrase for American voluntarism. Above a tableau in which dozens of Americans are firing on each other with machine guns, Herblock pens: “A thousand points of light.”

But for real tastelessness, it’s hard to beat Herblock on the subject of race relations. He takes the unsubtle view that his political opponents are all basically Klansmen. A couple of examples: On January 13, 1982, he portrayed President Reagan directing a black couple to a sign reading OFF LIMITS TO COLOREDS. A week later, he portrayed the Reagan administration as a bum hanging onto a bottle of OLD JIM CROW.

It’s an odd obsession that recurs in his work. For all his sermonizing that Republicans are out to lynch black people in every sense of that word, Herblock’s drawings themselves always call to mind particularly unpleasant racial stereotypes. He no doubt thinks he’s getting inside the brain of those nasty Republicans, but what he finds there seems more revealing of his mindset than his enemies’: black characters with enormous lips, Step ‘n’ Fetchit caricatures, and welfare queens.

In a July 2, 1980, cartoon, for instance, he weighs in in favor of federal funding for abortions. And whom does he draw as the representative supplicant of such largesse? An African-American woman — no husband to be seen — and four small children. If a conservative did this, he would be looking for another line of work faster than the Reverend Jesse Jackson could come up with a new word to rhyme with “bigot.”

Perhaps it is not fair to judge Herblock this way. The Herblock cartoon has been an institution for so long, perhaps one should just bow down and admire the longevity of the thing, and not look for truth, or wit, or even a solitary passing insight in it. Lately, though, he rarely even makes sense.

When he sticks to partisan business, the knee still jerks in all the right directions. Just last week, he heard that Ralph Nader was less than alarmist about the state of abortion rights under the Republicans, and he dashed off a picture of a dark back alley (though he forgot the requisite coathanger). When he marches without his ideological orders, though, the cartoons can be increasingly hard to parse. Two weeks ago, in the midst of Israeli-Palestinian violence in the Middle East, he dashed off a panel of rock-tossers in Bedouin scarves standing around a hinged slab on legs. A fellow in a suit sits at one end holding newsprint-sized sheets marked BARAK PEACE PROPOSALS. The caption? FOLDING PEACE TABLE.

Huh? This is the cartoonist’s equivalent of Andy Kaufman’s Foreign Man: The jokes don’t make any sense, and the desperate explanations only make them more obscure.

Writing in the introduction to Herblock: A Cartoonist’s Life, Washington Post owner Katharine Graham confessed to “generally finding myself laughing uproariously” at Herblock’s cartoons. Well, I guess he knew whom he had to please. The rest of us are laughing at the fact that such a hack managed to get by for so long with so little talent.

Michael Long is a director of the White House Writers Group, a strategy and public relations firm in Washington, D.C.