NONFICTION
How Herblock ruled Washington with a pen
Herblock By Haynes Johnson and Harry L. Katz Norton 304 pages, plus CD; $35
Herbert Lawrence Block is the reason Tom Toles no longer draws editorial cartoons just outside my office, although when I peer over the top of my computer I can still see his old drawing table and the signature drawing lamp he depicts in the lower corner of his cartoons.
Block — or “Herblock,” the combined-name moniker by which he was known for decades both by his fans and by those who feared him—accomplished that by dying. We hold that against him. The Washington Post hired Toles away from this newspaper after that passing. We were delighted to find an up-and-coming talent in Adam Zyglis to replace him, but it’s always tough to lose a colleague and a friend.
No disrespect to Toles, who continues to build his own strong national reputation and appears often on our pages as a syndicated cartoonist, but I imagine many Post readers felt the same way. This book, subtitled “The Life and Work of the Great Political Cartoonist,” is proof of that.
Herblock was the uncompromisingly liberal editorial cartoonist who ruled Washington by crayon for decades. He started in Chicago just before the Great Depression, chronicling that and World War II before landing at the Post. He depicted, lampooned, impaled and cajoled America from that perch until his last cartoon was published on Aug. 26, 2001 — just two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed the country in ways he could have helped us all understand. He died of pneumonia less than a month after those attacks, at the age of 91.
The heart of this book is the cartoons — more than 200 of them interspersed with the text, all 18,000-plus on the accompanying CD. But there also are interesting commentaries on his life and his targets, by Pulitzerwinning journalist and longtime Post colleague Haynes Johnson, and by Herb Block Foundation Collection Curator Harry Katz. And by Block himself, thanks to excerpts from his own writings on such subjects as editorial independence and, well, the art of cartooning.
As, for example, this: “It may not sound very exciting or ‘cartoony,’ but to me the basic idea is the same as it ought to be with a written opinion — to try to say the right thing. Putting the thought into a picture comes second. Caricature also figures in the cartoons. But the total cartoon is more important than just fun with faces and figures.”
Indeed it is. The essential mission of an editorial cartoonist is to rip the veil off an essential truth with just a few swipes of the pen. That’s not easy.
There are only a few editorial cartoonists still practicing that trade at American newspapers, fewer than 80 the last time I looked — and I’ve been afraid to look, lately. In my role as editorial page editor, I look at a lot of editorial cartoons — Sunday section editor Carol Feind and I narrow them down to the 17 we run each week, drawing from (no pun intended) the seven syndicated cartoonists we have contract rights to use as well as from our own in-house pen, Zyglis. Some weeks are pure joy; other weeks stand as testimony to the difficulty of the art form, with more misses than hits.
In teaching writing, I tell students that to write short is much harder than to write long, and takes a lot more time. For the cartoonist, the form is even more constrictive — and the task even harder, and more demanding. It takes a special kind of talent. Herblock definitely had it.
This book is interesting for its insights into the art form — of which, I must add, humor is an aspect but only an aspect, even though I still field the occasional call from a reader incensed that a particular editorial cartoon just isn’t funny. (It’s not a comic strip or panel, it’s an editorial cartoon, and what it’s supposed to be is insightful first, humorous second.)
But it’s most interesting for the cartoons. Many are grouped by subject, but I was more intrigued by the chronological groupings that allow readers to skim Herblock’s evolution of style — from, in very general terms, his early days of loose and scratchy lines in what was called the “Midwestern School of Editorial Cartooning” to the heavier strokes and deep artistic shadings of his later years (longtime readers of this newspaper would easily recognize that style as also practiced years ago by Pulitzer-winning News editorial cartoonist Bruce Shanks).
The authors make the easy case that there was real artistry at work in Herblock’s drawings. There is, of course, because the real artist is most successful when he or she gets at the truth without letting the “art” get in the way.
They also note Herblock’s key and early struggles and victories in his quest for true editorial independence—there were times when either his publishers or the Washington Post’s editorials didn’t share his opinions, but he developed both the stature and the talent to chart his own course. We accord much the same freedom of opinion to our own cartoonists, but Herblock in his day had to fight for it.
That he did, and won, opened for him chances to pick his causes as well as his daily targets. It helped him to champion underdogs, to develop cartooning as “a means for poking fun, for puncturing pomposity,” and to clearly focus what he called the “purpose beyond the chuckle.”
And it helped Washington, and the rest of us, to understand the world we live in and shape. Herblock was an effective editorial cartoonist. Not bad for a few strokes of the pen. Not bad at all.
Mike Vogel is the editorial page editor of The Buffalo News
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