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Simon Appleford, "Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
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Dr. Simon Appleford
Hello everyone.
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Podcast Host (Shu)
Welcome back to New Books Network. This is your host. Today I feel very happy to invite Dr. Appelford to join us to discuss his newest book, Join Liberalism. So for the first question today, I want to invite Dr. Appleford to introduce himself to us.
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Dr. Simon Appleford
Hi. Thank you Shu for inviting me to talk about my book. My name's Simon Appleford. I'm an associate professor of history at Creighton University where I also am director of the Creighton Digital Humanities Initiative.
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Podcast Host (Shu)
Thanks so much for your self introduction. For next question. I'm wondering why you take interest in this very, I think it's amazing topic of the political Caton and its history.
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Dr. Simon Appleford
Yeah, so I was originally introduced to Herblock specifically a long time ago when I was an undergraduate at the University of St. Andrews, I was doing a course on the history of Watergate and my professor, Steve Spackman was very interested in sort of the pictorial elements of that story and especially the way in which the Washington Post helped lead the public's understanding of that of the break in and the Subsequent cover up and scandal and obviously Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein garnered a lot of the headlines and a lot of the attention for it. But one of the things he emphasized was how Herblock was also specifically cited by the Pulitzer Committee in its award for the Washington Post's reporting. And that kind of just led down a rabbit hole of how insightful, how powerful these cartoons could be and were, especially in the depiction of people like Richard Nixon. And as I spent more time with it, I found more and more quotes from Nixon himself talking about how much he hated Herblock and how much the depiction of him in the cartoons bothered him. And it kind of just stuck with me. So when I was casting around for topics for my PhD thesis, I was looking for something that would be fun, that would be interesting, and political. Cartoons, as I say, had stayed with me, and it seemed like an untapped topic for a historian. You know, comic studies has grown substantially over the course of the last several decades. But in comic studies, they're much more interested in graphic novels and comic books, the sort of sequential narrative driven arcs of superheroes and autobiographical biographical comics, those sorts of things. Cartoons just have this really long history that seemed to be untapped, especially if you go back into. Back into it. You look at the work of someone like Thomas Nast, who's had such a huge impact on the visual literacy of the nation, sort of popularizing what we understand to be Santa Claus, introducing the donkey and the elephant as the national symbols for the Republican Democratic parties. Then During World War I, cartoonists were targeted under the Espionage act for working against the national interest and for undermining the war effort. And so the idea of just exploring how comics shape, reflect the public's understanding of events was something that really appealed to me. And Herblock was a natural choice because he was at the Washington Post for 50 years. He has such a strong liberal bias in his cartoons. He's strongly drawing, he's constantly drawing what we can understand to be a typical liberal interpretation of events during post war America. And this seemed like an opportunity to kind of understand how a cartoonist might be able to navigate the space between sort of public intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Hofstadter, who are shaping what liberalism means at an elite level. And how Herblock takes this and translates these ideas and makes it into a form that is palpable, that's understandable for a more general audience, much larger public audience than perhaps might have been reached by the writings of some of these other liberal intellectuals.
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Podcast Host (Shu)
Thanks so much for your Answer. So now let's attend to your book. So my first question about your book. For the first question, I'm wondering about how bloc's commitment to anti communism mirrored a division within a Democratic party and that come to defy liberalism throughout the post war period.
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Dr. Simon Appleford
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, so post war liberalism, you know, and I kind of borrowed from scholars who have conceptualized post war liberalism largely as a period of broad consensus. Right. There are several key tenets that the majority of Americans abided by. Most notably the American capitalism is the greatest economic system that has existed. The idea that the federal government has a responsibility to insert itself into Americans lives to make Americans lives better. And most importantly that communism is a threat that has to be counted both abroad and at home. And obviously there are major problems with that conception of post war liberalism. Really it's describing the attitudes of middle class white men, women, people of color, immigrants, gay, lesbian. Americans are very explicitly excluded from that. And I talk about that as well in the book. But this question about liberals commitment to fighting communism is a complicated one. It's a complicated one within the Democratic Party in the late 1940s and the 1950s, partly because of course, part of the New Deal, part of the New Deal consensus that had brought Franklin Roosevelt to power and that the Democratic Party was still very much invested in, was built on a coalition that included the American Communist Party. And left leaning members of the Democratic party were navigating this very complicated space where they were not necessarily sympathetic or members to the Communist party, but certainly more on the left side of the political spectrum. And there are debates and discussions within the party certainly around the 1948 presidential election when Harry Truman has to.
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Marshall Poe
Meet.
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Dr. Simon Appleford
The challenge, meet the challenge of previous vice president whose name is escaping me right now, but led a third party challenge to it that was really focused on this question of how far left, how progressive should the Democratic Party be. At the same time they're also navigating these questions of anti communism. The late 1940s into the 1950s is the peak of the House investigation, investigations into communism. And Joseph McCarthy is obviously on the verge of becoming a prominent figure on the American scene leading these purges of the American government, targeting anyone with suspected ties to the Communist party. And yeah, and what I argue, what I try to track in sort of this, the second chapter of the book is the ways in which Herblock's cartoons kind of navigate this space. So he comes out very strongly in support of the mainstream Democratic Party. His cartoons support. His cartoons support Truman strongly. He draws cartoons that, sorry, he draws cartoons critiquing the candidacy of Henry Wallace, who leads the third party candidate, suggesting that it's something that will favor, that will strongly favor the Republican candidate, the Republican Party during the, during the election. And uses his platform as a cartoonist to emphasize what is important about Truman's campaign as opposed to Henry Wallace and sort of more left leaning elements of that campaign. And that then follows through into sort of the more broad questions about the role of communism, role of the communist witch hunts. And again Bloch very much falls into sort of the middle of the road mainstream Democratic perspective where he is generally supportive of the goal of outing communists. He's supportive of the idea that communist influences are a danger to the nation. And he's certainly very suspicious and opposed to the Soviet Union. At the same time, he is opposed to the tactics and the methods of these investigating bodies. Most obviously Joseph McCarthy. And he spends a good chunk of the first part of the 1950s drawing these cartoons that steadily depict Joe McCarthy more as a thug. He draws him with stooped shoulders, he give him heavy hair on his hands, heavy five o' clock shadow looking like a beard. Progressively making Joe McCarthy look more and more bestial as his, as his investigations persist and as they get from the perspective of Herblock and other liberals and certainly members of the media as McCarthy's investigations become more and more extreme, become more and more out of control as he reaches out, as he overreaches in the investigations. And I should of course not be remiss to say that Herblock helped coin the phrase McCarthyism to describe that era. I talk about this at some length in the chapter. I actually discovered that there was an editorial writer working for the Christian Science Monitor who used the phrase a day earlier and I think originally coined the phrase. But what I suggest is that Herblock's cartoon that followed the next day which depicts several Republican congressmen pulling the GOP elephant towards a teetering tower of tar and smear politics that's labeled. McCarthyism was something that really summed up what McCarthyism was doing to the Republican Party at this time and provided a sort of visual element, a visual idea that lodged in Americans minds that was reinforced by other writers who likewise picked up on Herblock's cartoons and helped shape the popular memory of the period in a way that just words I don't think would have been able to do. The sort of. The visual of this cartoon really played a significant role in cementing McCarthyism. The phrase and what McCarthyism stood for in the American public's imagination Kay Jeweler's.
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Podcast Host (Shu)
Thank you so much for your answer. So, for the next question about chapter three of the book, I'm wondering about your argument that blocks katoms reveal the limited network placed on efforts for radical justice. Sorry, for racial justice by a wider political establishment interested only in incremental change.
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Dr. Simon Appleford
Yeah, absolutely. So first thing I want to say is that Bloch, from very early on in his career, I think, was a strong proponent, a strong advocate for civil rights. He was someone that recognized, despite some problematic portrayals of black Americans and in early cartoons, I think that he very, very clearly recognized early on in his career that civil rights was an injustice, that the violence of white supremacy was something that should be stood, should be stood against and should be ended. And there are early examples in his work of him commenting upon lynchings and other examples of political, of racial violence where he is clearly critiquing, he's clearly condemning the actions of those white Southerners. When he becomes cartoonist for the Washington Post, he's in a position where he's drawing about, I think, two general themes, general topics. He will draw about major events that happen around the country. But a lot of his influence, a lot of his inspiration is sort of the congressional work that is going on on his doorstep that he can go out and he can watch happening. And so a lot of his civil rights cartoons are drawn from this perspective that it's the actions primarily of congressional leaders, presidents and other members of the liberal establishment that are responsible for ensuring that change happens, that ensuring that the injustices of the Jim Crow south, the injustices of segregation should be ended. And for the most part, certainly in his pre1960 cartoons, cartoons from late 1940s and the 1950s, when he's drawing about civil rights, he's drawing largely those congressional leaders, often Southern Democrats, who are opposing meaningful civil rights legislation through threats of the filibuster and what have you. Or he is drawing white Southerners.
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Dr. Simon Appleford
So, for example, during the Little Rock desegregation crisis in 1956, this marks probably the first time that Herblock drew a series of sustained cartoons on the topic of a single civil rights incident and throughout it. So the focus of his cartoons are Orval Phoebus, the. The governor of Arkansas at the time, members of the National Guard, and white Southerners who are opposed to and are protesting against the desegregation of Little Rock. So notably absent from the cartoons of sort of any black people and especially any black children. Those people are largely absent from much of Bloch's civil rights cartoons. It's only into 1962 that he begins to draw black activists in his cartoons. And when he does, he is often drawing them. He's depicting them as sort of stoic bystanders almost reacting, facing up to violence or the racism or the prejudices of white Southerners. So he's got a cartoon from 1953. Sorry, 1963. Somebody from outside must have influenced them. He depicts two really angry looking white Southernists standing by a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, looking back at them as a young family of a young black family walks towards. Walks towards a church. And, you know, the family is dressed in their Sunday best, but we noticeably can't see their faces. We only know that they're black from the context of it being a cartoon about Montgomery, Alabama. And that sort of depiction of them, of. Of black activists, of black protesters, follows through for much of his cartoons well into the 1960s, where they're always depicted, and rightly so. And this is partly how I think the civil rights movement presented itself as well then wanted to present themselves as respectable members of American society. They wanted white Northerners to see them as being just like they are ordinary Americans standing up to injustice. And this is how Bloch depicts them. Notably absent from this is people like Martin Luther King. So the impact of all this is that black protesters, members of the civil rights movement, are never seen Having are never seen, never depicted, having any agency, never having any control over, certainly over their lives. But even over the actions, the course of the civil rights movement, the types of legislation that had been proposed, it goes back to the idea that it's presidents and it's congressmen and senators that are responsible for civil rights reform. And yes, it's an injustice. It's something that has to be overcome, it's something that has to be ended. But the sort of cumulative impact of this, of this depiction seems to say that it's on the terms of the white liberal establishment. It's what liberal leaders say will, will. Will result in, in the Civil Rights act of 1964, the Voting Rights act of 1965, and then notably, you know, later on when sort of the black power movement, a more militant, a more perhaps aggressive, a more. A different vision for what the black freedom struggle should look like. Bloch immediately rejects that. He views it as a danger. He views it as something that is damaging to the civil rights cause, not least because he depicts it as being damaging to the ways in which white liberals respond to the questions of racial injustice.
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Podcast Host (Shu)
So much for your answer. So now let's turn to the chapter four. For this chapter, I'm wondering about how grocer Cantones served as a process in the early stage of national debate over so called cultural war that has characterized much of American political discourse for the past 50 years.
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Dr. Simon Appleford
Yeah, so obviously the 1960s is an era where the conservative movement is being reborn. Conservatism has fallen out of favor in American political circles ever since 1990, 1932 and Herbert Hoover's disastrous response to the Great Depression and his indifference to the plight of suffering Americans and support for sort of big business over ordinary Americans, leading to again, sort of major liberal intellectuals like Lionel Trilling, Arthur Schlesinger, to dismiss conservatism as kind of a discredited and a spent force in American politics. Trilling famously says that there's no more conservativism. At the same time, of course, Right wing Americans haven't gone away. People who believe in, in more conservative values who, who, who believe that perhaps the great social changes of the 1950s and the 1960s is changing something fundamental about what it means to be American. Changing, you know, changing attitudes towards race certainly, but also to gender, Supreme Court rulings, limiting prayer in schools, you know, this sort of the, the efforts of the Johnson administration to transform American society through his Great Society programs are all things that come under attack and come under the influence of, are critiqued and challenged by a variety of different conservative intellectuals, conservative movements ranging from sort of young Republicans. Right the way through to the John Birch Society and sort of more extreme types of Republican activism that's occurring at the time. And these are things that Bloch depicts at various points, at various points throughout the 1950s and the 1960s. He's very concerned about the emergence of the John Birch Society. Generally will depict them as being sort of kooks, as being people that can be dismissed because their ideas are just so outlandish that they're people who have no real legitimacy because they believe in crazy things like Dwight Eisenhower was a secret communist that. The American government has been infiltrated by, by Communists. He sees it as a throwback to the bad days of McCarthyism and regularly depicts them in ways that are very dismissive of those ideas. And then with Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign, Herblock draws a series of cartoons that are designed to sort of connect Goldwater to both. To the sort of more extreme view of right wing politics, connecting Goldwater to the ideas of the John Birch Society and its founder, Robert Welch. And then also showing how from Bloch's perspective and from the perspective of liberals, Goldwater doesn't really care about anyone who is not like him, a rich white man. And what I do with it, what I do in the book is I go into Herblock's correspondence files. He was a hoarder. I think he kept almost every piece of paper that passed across his desk across his 50 years at the Washington Post. And he was the target of quite a lot of hate letters. They tell you today never read the comments on and news post on the web. And the same could certainly be true of reading the correspondence files of a political cartoonist from the 1960s, where you have some really quite respectable Americans, they're writing on letterhead, they're signing their names and they're lawyers, they're political activists, they're doctors, they're engineers. Writing to Herblock and you know, really angry at the way in which he's depicting what it means to be a conservative. In the mid-1960s. Taking umbrage at the sort of the depiction of Barry Goldwater as uncaring, as someone who, you know, who has it easy because of his personal wealth and therefore doesn't care about. About poor Americans living in poverty, really taking Herblock as a figure who they can vent their frustrations over the way in which liberalism writ large has treated conservative values over the previous 10 to 15 years or even longer. And in Herblock, he revisits some of the traits that he had used for McCarthy in depicting right wing and increasingly the Republican Party under Barry Goldwater, and as it becomes more influenced by the views of the New right, is outdated. He takes the elephants that Thomas Nast has previously used to depict the Republican Party, takes the elephant and he transforms it into a woolly mammoth. Showing in these cartoons that from his perspective, from the perspective of mainstream liberalism in the 1960s, what was now the Republican Party, how the Republican Party had fallen under the influence of Goldwater and more right wing elements of society, really was a relic of the past. A sort of prehistoric, outdated way of thinking about American politics that had no place. And I think I kind of end the chapter by Talking about the 1964 GOP Republican National Convention and Barry Goldwater's nomination for the presidency. And sort of Herblock greeted that by depicting a delegate angrily, with his fist angrily raised, quoting from Phyllis Schlafly, saying that he wants choice. A choice, not an echo. An echo. And kind of behind him as the echo is a John Calhoun esque figure from 1864 representing inequality, anti federalism and violence, which is how Bloch understood the Republican Party in 1964. This is what he thought it now represented. So he's capturing this moment, this idea that if the Republican Party is really a throwback to the 1860s, to the Civil War era, if the Republican Party is represented by sort of these prehistoric, antiquated ideas, there's no negotiating with. There's no negotiating with that. You know, there's no way that you can find common cause, politically or otherwise, with people who understood that. And the lesson I think that he would have taken from the letters that he got, that he received from supporters of all of this would have been that they had no interest in common cause in finding a common language with liberals either. And so this sort of political division, unwillingness to compromise, the idea that the other side of the political spectrum is out of step with what it means to be a mainstream American in this moment, is very much a presence in Herblock's cartoons throughout the 1960s as he is depicting the Republican, what he saw is, I think, the fall of the Republican Party to these extremist un American views.
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Dr. Simon Appleford
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Dr. Simon Appleford
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Podcast Host (Shu)
Thanks so much for your answer. So for the next question, I'm wondering about Block's response to emergence of a so called New Left as a major force in the politics in the 1960s.
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Dr. Simon Appleford
Yeah, so again, I think that Herblock saw himself, he saw himself not necessarily as a member of the Democratic Party. He very consciously avoided labeling himself that way. He got quite angry in correspondence and even in his autobiography he talks about this. He did not want to be seen as a Democrat, he wanted to be seen as nonpartisan, but he very much embraced the label of liberal. And again, it's this sort of very specific vision of what it means to be a liberal that's born out of sort of the post war era that's shaped by the ideas, especially the ideas I think of Arthur Schlesinger, who was a friend and a correspondent of her blocks for well over 50 years. But again, the idea that the federal government has a responsibility to make the lives of Americans better, they should intervene, that communism is a force that should be opposed, that American capitalism is a net good for the broader world order, that American democratic values should be exported, you know, all of these things. And Block saw, you know, he was inspired by Kennedy, he was inspired by the Kennedy administration. He was more suspicious, but I think grudgingly came to admit that the Johnson administration had done good through the Great Society, through. Through the passage of the Civil Rights act and the Voting Rights Act. But what he didn't have time for was sort of Challenges to the middle of the road, consensus liberalism of the period, whether it was coming from the right or the left. And we saw this with Henry Wallace and the progressive movement of 1948, Henry Walsh's campaign for the presidency. And we see this in a variety of different challenges that post war liberalism faced, largely from the perspective of what I write about from 1965, the middle of 1965 through to 1968 and the election of Richard Nixon. First of all, black power, the riots and civil disorders, borders that erupt in cities like Watts in Los Angeles and are followed in cities across the urban north over various summers. The idea that these more aggressive militant black activists are threatening the gains of the civil rights movement. They're threatening what, what civil rights leaders and what legislators in Congress have achieved. And I think he recognizes that as the violence, as the cities regularly turn to these riots in the summers of 65, 66, 67, that it is undermining the authority of the administration to enact more far reaching change through the Great Society. Likewise, the war in Vietnam. Vietnam is something that he, during the Kennedy administration, he is somewhat passively supporting the American presidents in Vietnam, but certainly by the time of the Johnson administration and certainly by 65 and 66, block has become very much opposed to the Vietnam War, which he sees as he depicts it as something that leads the Johnson administration to be disingenuous to the American public. Famously, he draws a picture of Lyndon Johnson standing on an escalator telling an aide that their position in Vietnam hasn't changed at all. They're still standing on the same step, but the escalator is going up. So the war in Vietnam is escalating is kind of Herblock's point. And as the war drags on, more and more money spent, it becomes more and more of a distraction. It means that the sort of the great liberal programs of the Great Society are being neglected. And another famous cartoon that he drew in 1967 is Lyndon Johnson sort of arm in arm with this extravagantly dressed woman who's labeled the Vietnam War and she's got all this jewelry which is in the shape of, of guns and missiles and bullets off of her. And Lyndon Johnson is addressing this waif of a housewife who's literally in rags and representing us urban needs. And he's telling them there's money enough to support both of them with the clear implication that all of the money is going to the war, to the neglect of what's important for American society. And again, it's the idea that these priorities are undermining the politics of liberalism, the idea that the government should be responsible for helping ordinary Americans. Because of the distraction of the war, they're unable to achieve this. But the main focus is really on his reaction to the emergence of the self described New Left of groups like sds, Students for Democratic Society, led by Tom Hayden and a sort of younger group of Americans who grew up during the affluence of the 1950s. But questioning what American affluence, what American security has given them as a younger generation coming of age. The priorities of the New Left is questioning a lot of the assumptions that underscore American liberalism. They're questioning the security that's promised to them. They grew up in schools where they were taught to hide under desks, under their desks in case of a nuclear bomb attack. They've grown up watching people their age fighting for civil rights, fighting against injustice across the South. They're living in a world that is perhaps a little less secure. The economy is a little less strong. Their job prospects are not as assured as they were for their parents generation. And they're facing calls to go fight a war in Vietnam. And Block depicts all of their activities as being largely. As being illegitimate. So Students for Democratic Society becomes, in Blok's cartoons, students for destroying society. They're shown as slackers, they're shown with long hair hippies playing up on all the stereotypes of American youth from the 1960s. And all this comes to your head in Chicago 1968 and the Democratic National Convention and the subsequent presidential election when the supporters of Eugene McCarthy who fails to win the nomination, The violence in the streets of Chicago. Block lays firmly at the feet of students questioning, depicting politicians and the police as sort of innocent victims of their violence. And he never really forgives the supporters of Gene McCarthy or Gene McCarthy himself for not fully supporting the campaign of Hubert Humphrey in 1968, blaming them for Humphrey's lost to Richard Nixon. Again, the chapter sort of ends with a depiction of a really small gene McCarthy, which is, he's depicted as dwarfish almost to delegitimize McCarthy. I mean, he's holding a bloody knife in one hand in the other. So on the other hand he's holding a sign that says if only Humphrey had said just the right thing at just the right moment, then maybe, maybe I would have supported him. And Humphrey himself wrote to Herblock after he drew that cartoon and said that he got it just right, that this is what cost him the election. And I think what ties it all together is as I say, this commitment to a vision of what American liberalism should be, what the promise of American liberalism was in the 1960s for people like Herblock and for Arthur Schlesinger and others. And challenges to that liberalism, whether it comes from the right or the left, need to be addressed and need to be delegitimized.
- [47:42]
Podcast Host (Shu)
Thank you so much for your answer. So now let's turn to the last question. Today I'm wondering about how blocks can tone play a critical role in transforming a young con horseman from California into an archetype of corrosion?
- [47:58]
Dr. Simon Appleford
Yeah, absolutely. So again, I first discovered Herblock through Richard Nixon's cartoons, through his depiction of Richard Nixon in his cartoons, and specifically through Watergate. And what I discovered as I did more and more research into the sort of relationship, was that Herblock and Nixon, they go back an awful long way. So Herblock joins the Washington Post in January of 1946. Nixon is first elected to Congress that November. So they both arrive in Washington D.C. in sort of the space of 12 or 13 months of each other. And it's a couple of years until her book first depicts Nixon. But. It's through a cartoon critiquing Nixon's anti communist activities. He depicts Nixon and two other members of the House Committee on Un American Activities as sort of Puritans getting ready to burn the Statue of Liberty at the stake. The caption, we got to burn the evil spirits out of her sums up, I think, what Bloch thought of these anti communist efforts. They were a betrayal of American values, a betrayal of American liberty. And what better way to depict Take that than to show the members of this committee engaged in a literal witch hunt against a symbol of American liberty and America's openness to the types of immigrants that were also being targeted by the House Committee at the time and through Nixon's early career. As Nixon is rising in prominence, Bloch increasingly includes Nixon in cartoons when he's named the Vice president candidate by Eisenhower. Infamously, Nixon almost loses that spot because of allegations of corruption. The famous Checkers speech where he says that the gift was a dog for his young daughter, which ends up saving his political career. Then Herblock picks up on and just generally suggests that Nixon is this sort of unsavory, duplicitous character who is not necessarily corrupt, but is treading that fine line between what is legitimate and illegitimate activities. I think where the relationship really comes to a head, as in 19 or not comes to a head, but where the relationship between them is sort of solidified, though, is in 1954, when Nixon as Vice President is tasked by Eisenhower to go on a tour around the country to improve the chances of Republican candidates for Congress and for the Senate in their off year election. And what Nixon does during that is he kind of, you know, he spends a lot of his time smearing those Democratic candidates as being communist sympathizers, as being unpatriotic in some way. And Herblock picks up on this and depicts Nixon climbing out of the sewer, sewer as a marching bands and a welcoming committee kind of rushes up to him saying, here he is now. And this sort of sewer dwelling image of Nixon was one that he never really was able to shake. And Harblot kind of picked up on this at various times. He then started of depicting Nixon as having two faces. He'd have two versions of Nixon walking hand in hand down a street. He would depict Nixon choosing between various masks that he was going to. That he was choosing between what to wear on that particular day. And this sort of visual imagery, this idea that there was a ever shifting, ever a changing character to Nixon's Persona as a politician was something that commentators began to pick up on. And they would talk about Nixon's mask or Nixon's face for that day. Later in the 1960s, they talk about in New Nixon, which was something that Herblock had started drawing about earlier in his career. So this idea that the vision of who Richard Nixon was, people like Ralph Nade would talk about how when they think of Richard Nixon, it's the Herblockian Nixon, which is almost Shakespearean in how it gets into your imagination and sticks with you, is the one that sticks with him. And again, it's very similar. It draws upon sort of this imagery that he had with Joseph McCarthy, with white Southerners, with right wings, members of the John Birch Society, where Nixon's often slouching, he's got a heavy five o' clock shadow, he'll have heavy hair on his arms and hands, a ski jump nose is private. And as Nixon ages, sort of deeper and heavier jowls on his cheeks. And this sort of image sticks with you. And it's something that Nixon himself was very much aware of, where he would talk about having to erase the Herblockian, erase the Herblock image. And in 1972, as he's gearing up for his reelection campaign, he does a series of media interviews, a pool report, and he talks about how, you know, he talks about all sorts of different things in there, about how he's calmer, about how he's more presidential. His a talk about how he's grown in the presidency. But one of the comments that Nixon himself makes is that her block no longer gets to me, which, you know, is a clear sign that the first thing he does almost every day is probably go and see what. How Nick, how. How Nixon is depicted in that day's Herblock cartoon. The cartoons just had this ability to get under Nixon's skin and to reveal something that he didn't like about himself, but that Americans came to associate with Nixon. And I think that is that power of, of the image. It's the visual, you know, the sort of words might stick with us, you know, but the power of the political cartoon to, you know, not just depict an actual event, but to depict something that is invisible but was there. And through the lens of Herblock, who had a massive audience and following throughout his career through syndication and what have you, I think just made, it makes his cartoons this really interesting lens to explore and understand specifically post war America.
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Podcast Host (Shu)
Thanks so much for your answer for all my questions, all the questions I prepare for our talk today. So at the end, I want you to talk to our audience. If you take any interest in American political carton or political history. This is Dr. Appelfold's new book, Drawing Liberalism. So thanks so much for listening to our podcast today. Have a good day.