Herblock's Genius
Kennedy, Kenneth R.
Herblock's Genius The Herblock Book, by Herbert Block. Beacon Press. 244 pp. $2.75. Reviewed by Kenneth R. Kennedy THIS is frankly a report by a Herblock admirer, and any discounts one wants to...
...The book provides an incisive commentary on the troubled course of events in the last seven years...
...Most of Herblock's cartoons have the sharp weapon of humor...
...But some of them are pretty stark, too, like the one based on the removal of American war dead from Europe showing a ghostly soldier saying to a small displaced waif, "They didn't ask me who should get the trip...
...Everyone who reads and looks at The Herblock Book ought to enjoy it and should get some pretty clear insights in the bargain...
...He has some light-hearted comments on his own profession—his cartoons are done on office time and not by "inspiration"—and the manner in which some of his victims take the lampooning...
...Herblock started his career on the Chicago Daily News, and from 1933 until he entered the Army in 1943 he was editorial cartoonist for NEA, the newspaper feature service, but the lid didn't pop off his genius until these last few years...
...The bystanders, he notes, are often more indignant than the victims...
...But if anyone has a prior claim, "he's welcome to the word and to the junior Senator from Wisconsin along with it...
...he writes with an easy informality...
...The cartoons in this book are practically all of Washington Post vintage, from the end of 1945 right up into the last Presidential campaign...
...It's an example of American individualism at its best...
...Reviewed by Kenneth R. Kennedy THIS is frankly a report by a Herblock admirer, and any discounts one wants to make on that account are as deductible as the depletion allowance on an oil company income tax...
...Some of his drawings and text are devoted to the guilt-by-association craze for rooting out subversives...
...Cartoons and text together reveal Herblock as a man devoted to American ideals of fair play, freedom of speech and action, and diversity of opinion...
...Franco and the "Asia Game...
...His text is no less pointed...
...for an illustration as to how far the craze has gone, he records a conversation with a publisher: "But, Herb—you don't know these people are innocent...
...Many aspects of the American scene come under the Herblock scrutiny—foreign policy and crowded schools, the ethics of mink coats and off-shore oil, communism (against which his cartoons are used as an antidote abroad) and the A-Bomb, the DAR and the utility lobby...
...As readers of The Progressive know, Herblock has the faculty of pointing his brush directly at focal points of infection in the body politic...
...The term McCarthyism apparently originated in a Herblock cartoon of the GOP elephant being pushed toward a tower of tar buckets, protesting, -"You mean I'm supposed to stand on that...
Vol. 17 • January 1953 • No. 1
