>> Hello everyone. I'm Calina [phonetic], and I work in the Learning and Innovation Office at the Library of Congress. We're really happy to have you here at today's online office hours from the Library of Congress. Today we're going to be exploring and learning about 20th century political cartoons from an expert at the Library's Prints and Photographs Division. Just so you know, this event will be recorded, and any questions or participant contributions may be made publicly available as part of the Library's archives. We're really glad that you can join us live today or by recording. Welcome again. These office hours are short and informal. We're going to start with a 20-minute presentation, and then we'll open it up for questions from you and conversation with our presenters. And you'll have a chance to talk to each other and speak with our presenter via chat. So just to get us all started with the chat, if you could just tell us in the chat box your first name, where you're joining us from and the grade levels and subjects that you teach. That'll help us get a sense of who's here and help inform our conversation for later. So as I said, today's episode is focused on 20th century political cartoons, and we're joined by Sara Duke who's a curator in the Library's Prints and Photographs Division. If you have any questions or comments during Sara's presentation, please feel free to post them in the chat box. We will also be posting links there and answering questions that come up, or I'll pose them to Sarah during Q and A. So now I'm going to pass things over to Sarah. >> As Calina said, my name is Sara Duke, and I am a curator of popular and applied graphic art in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. And first of all, I want to thank you for coming today. I know a lot of different museum libraries are offering you content, and I am so happy that you selected the Library of Congress as an institution with whom to spend a moment with this afternoon. I'm going to be talking about Herblock cartoons from the Great Depression to the 2000 election. Who is Herblock and why does he matter? Herbert Lawrence Block was born in 1909, and he died in 2001. He came from a Chicago family. He worked as an editorial cartoonist starting with the Chicago Daily News in April of 1929, which if you do the math, is a mere six months before the Great Depression. And he worked there until 1933 when he went to the Newspaper Enterprise Association in Cleveland, Ohio. He joined the US Army in 1943 and spent about a year and three quarters drawing cartoons and working as an illustrator in the Army in Florida. And then in 1946, he moved to Washington D.C. and became the editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post where he created most of his well known cartoons. He died, he drew his last cartoon on August 26th, 2001. If you do the math, it's just a few short days before 9/11. He was too ill to return to his drafting table, and he died just days short of his 92nd birthday in October 2001. But he spent 72 years cartooning, which is why he matters. So, as I said before, he grew up in Chicago, and he was from a conservative Midwestern family. They believed that you should look out for the little guy, but government shouldn't really intervene. And so we have the philanthropist, and it is about helping the poor. But in this case, perhaps Block is saying that the rich could do more than just purchase the goods of the poor, that they have more resources to help the poor. But notice he's not saying the government should do it. He gets to that later. At this point, he's also drawing in a style that's very reminiscent of Midwestern cartoonists who used pen and ink. So think of Ding Darling in Des Moines or Carey Orr or John T. McCutcheon in the Chicago Tribune, the Tribune being the flagship paper of Chicago. And so Block emulates the people that he knows best, the cartoonists with whom he grew up. As I said before, in 1933 he moved to Cleveland where he took a position with the Newspaper Enterprise Association, and it's during that time that he takes on his own look. And in this cartoon with a nice little couplet he makes it clear that he doesn't like Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt to pad the Supreme Court in order to get his National Recovery Act legislation passed. But he also gives a nice introduction to the size of the Supreme Court and how it changed over the course of time. So Block didn't start out as a liberal cartoonist that those of us who him know him to come to be. He was a conservative. But two things politicized him. One was the Great Depression, and the other was World War II. And so in 1942, he was really, by 1942, he was advocating for change and for more liberal policies, for more intervention. So we have this 1940 cartoon that's really almost two years before Pearl Harbor. You know, what we at, 23 months before Pearl Harbor, where he's looking at Hitler and saying, there should be no appeasement for this guy. Poland had already been overrun, so there were European countries falling under German domination. But Block was very astute and called for more than just sitting back and being isolationists. And it was those cartoons as he became increasingly advocating intervention and advocating help to the poor that fell him a fellow of the Newspaper Enterprise Association Service, which was owned by Scripps Howard. And Scripps Howard is a fairly conservative organization, maybe not in today's political spectrum. But they ordered him to New York, and he knew he was going to be fired. But in the time it took him to get to Cleveland to New York by train, word had come out that he had won a Pulitzer Prize. And Scripps Howard couldn't very well fire the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist. He got to keep his job. He decided to walk away in March of 1943 and join the Army. We're going to jump ahead, and this is going to seem kind of quixotic. I'm giving you an overview of some touchpoints in Block's career. Is it really intended to be a direct kind of US history in 20 minutes? So looking out for the little guy. But here he's advocating for the government to do it. And so that's a mental shift, right, between solid Midwestern conservative saying we all should help look out for the little guy to a more liberal stand saying the government should help look out for the little guy. And so this is about the Marshall plan about the money that the United States Government sent to Europe after World War II because Europe took decades to recover from war. And so shall we say grace, and it's the wealthy American family sharing its food with the millions of starving people. So jumping ahead to nuclear weapons. Mr. Atom is probably one of the more famous characters that Block repeated time and time again from the 1940s well into the Reagan administration. I don't remember him appearing much after that. So, Mr. Atom is a nuclear missile, a warhead, and he's always very dark. I mean it kind of seems humorous on the face of it, and then when you take a look at the deeper meaning, you see the dark undertones. So here he's, Block is evoking Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the moment in time when Robinson Crusoe realizes he's not alone on the island, when he sees Friday's footprint in the sand. But in this case, it's Mr. Atom, and he sees a footprint, and he is surprised that humanity exists at all. And so a very, very dark message. And you can find other Mr. Atom cartoons in the collection, and they all are pretty bleak. So, now we're moving ahead to McCarthyism, which was actually a term that Mr. Block coined and kind of sliding it here with the House un-American Activities Committee as well as red scare activities on the part of state and local governments. And I picked teachers because I thought maybe this would hit a nerve with you, that there was a moment in time in history when US teachers were really scrutinized for how they taught school and from where they drew their lessons. And so you read books, eh? There are a lot of cartoons about the red scare in the Block collection. And we cover many of them in our exhibitions, but they're more available in the collection. So Joseph McCarthy was a senator, and from the time that he said that he knew of 205 names in the State Department who were communists to the Army Senate Hearings in 1954, Mr. Block drew a lot of cartoons trying to expose him for the brutal red scare methods that he was, you know, he destroyed careers during the four years of his campaign. So here, he held a doctored photo and a fake letter I have here in my hand. So, just because Block despised McCarthy and his tactics didn't mean that he was soft on communism. He had, whether he was dealing with it as a government system or an ideology or a method of economy, he really just didn't see it as a viable entity. But he was well aware of the role that the Communist Party played in the world. And from the 1940s to the 1980s, it had a strong role the world. So here we have Nikita Khrushchev from the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong from China, each with a portion of the hammer and sickle, which of course is the logo of the Communist Party. At this time, Khrushchev really wanted peaceful coexistence, at least that's what he said with the West. I mean he was doing nuclear testing. We were doing nuclear testing. It was a, you know, Zedong was on a razor edge at the time. But he was trying not to be directly confrontational with the West. And I think that's because he knew he didn't actually have the military strength to go head to head with the West, whereas we did not know that. Mao Zedong was a great influencer in Southeast Asia and in Africa, and China still plays a role in those areas today. And he wanted, he had a much more hardcore line. He didn't believe in making peace. He believed in being aggressive. Of course, both of these countries endured pretty horrific famines at this point in time or shortly after this point in time in the 1960s. Civil rights. Mr. Block was a great proponent of civil rights and equal rights in the United States. And I picked this particular cartoon because actually I have a volunteer who has been doing summary descriptions of some of our cartoons which have not yet been digitized so that people can quote/unquote see them online and figure out if the cartoon is really something they're interested in ordering a TIF of. And I learned this while I was doing data entry that until 1962, in the state in which there were literacy tests, if you didn't have a sixth grade education, you couldn't vote. Really, this was controlling like who had access to the ballot box. So this particular incident that is depicted here Tuskegee, Alabama had the highest proportion of African American PhDs in 1958. And yet, only a handful could pass the literacy test and become eligible to vote. And the commission examined this and found that the literacy tests that were being imposed on very intelligent people were daunting, like you know, say the Bill of Rights from, you know, from memory. You had to stand there and, you know, read it, not read it, enunciate it. There were things like that that went on that kept African Americans away from the ballot box. And so you see the professor on the right with his Tuskegee briefcase and his books, and Block pairs him with stereotypical rednecks who are preventing him from achieving his fundamental right to vote. So segregation, a similar issue. This cartoon appeared eight years to the day after Brown v. Board was passed and in a time when there were still separate but unequal education facilities for African American children. And so he has a little girl looking up at a bureaucrat saying I'm eight. I was born on the day of the Supreme Court decision. And if you look at the top of the image upside down, you'll see a 1964. And two years later, he reran this cartoon because the issued had not gone away. And I have seen cartoons during the Nixon administration where he's still hammering on the need to have equal education opportunities. So, Mr. Block was a gun control advocate for most of his career. And this is his reaction or one of the cartoons that he drew in reaction to the Kennedy assassination. It's just full of vitriol and anger that, and it plays off a real advertisement that appeared in newspapers and magazines of the time selling a weapon capable of murdering people through direct mail. And so somebody had told me that they thought that was how Lee Harvey Oswald obtained his weapon. I've never seen evidence that he got it through the mail order. But at the time, it was legal to have weapons shipped through the mail anywhere. And it was, it angered him, it outraged him that there was no control over who might possess a weapon. He continued to do gun control, I would say on the average of five to seven a year for the rest of his career. During the Vietnam War, Block took a more, he looked at policy, and he looked at the players. There was very little cartoons about the troops, and I think that's because his own Army experience during World War II, and he was much older than the average soldier during World War II anyway. But he wasn't on the frontlines. And so he doesn't have that kind of experience on which to draw, so he draws about what he does know which is about policy. And so we have Lyndon Baines Johnson showing, we've shown that we're willing to go more than halfway, and this was over negotiating with the North Vietnamese in 1967. Watergate, if you read the Washington Post between 1972, and I think the break in was just on June 17th, so just four days before this cartoon was drawn, and the time Nixon resigned on August 8th, 1974, you opened the paper to at least 174 cartoons about Watergate. Not to mention all the other cartoons about corruption in the Nixon administration that was occurring during that time. So how could Block do this? I mean Woodward and Bernstein couldn't write an article until they found Deep Throat. So, how could Mr. Block four days after the Watergate break in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, how could he get away with this? And it's because we have a First Amendment right to express our opinion. And cartoonists take advantage of that right. It turns out he was correct. Nixon was involved, the unindicted coconspirator as we later called him. But he drew a lot of cartoons about this. He was no fan of Nixon dating back until the 1940s. He gave him a clean shave when he became president of the United States, but that didn't last long either. And so there are a lot of great Watergate cartoons, and this is just one of my favorites. So on the issue of Nixon, so this is about five months before he resigned from office, and Block depicts a flag up a flagpole over the White House, whatever you can do for as long as you can get away with it. And the cartoon is called Position of Moral Leadership. So on Jimmy Carter, Block found him a fairly ineffectual leader. And so we have him here two and half years into his presidency with a visitor's guide to Washington, so as if he were a tourist himself, standing and pounding on the desk, at his own desk in the Oval Office demanding to know who's in charge here. During the 1970s and 1980s was the start of a lot of terrorist activity internationally. And so in reaction to what he saw as Muslim fanaticism and terrorism, Block wanted to remind his readers that there was a continuum of terrorism, and it wasn't limited to one religion. So he's got death trying on his particular quote/unquote hat, but on the table there's the Irish Republican Army, there's the German Baader Meinhof gang. There's the Japanese Red Faction Army. There's the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Red Brigade. So he wants to show that there's a continuum of terrorism in the world. It's not limited to one religion or one country. So at the end of Ronald Reagan's administration, Mr. Block drew an empty safe and a broom and a couple of dollars and a record debt of two trillion and said you don't hear much about liberalism lately. We're not leaving anything to be liberal with. So he was not a fan of the Reagan administration. He was not a fan of the treatment of the poor during the Reagan administration the way food was allocated. There are a lot of cartoons that he drew critical of Ronald Reagan. And the point I want to make is it doesn't matter, Mr. Block himself was unaffiliated with any party, and it didn't matter to him what party a president was affiliated with if he saw wrongdoing. If he saw the failing to look out for the little guy. If he saw them doing something that he felt was morally corrupt or legally corrupt, he called them out on it. So George H. W. Bush who had been Reagan's vice-president had run in 1980 on a platform that called Regan's economic policy voodoo economics. And here we have him when he's president having succeeded Reagan in the sorcerer's apprentice, the voodoo economics blew up, and it's Block showing that Bush hasn't really changed the policies that were initiated by Reagan, but now they're blown up in his face. And that's a lovely little cauldron exploding. Gun control, as I said, block repeatedly went did cartoons about gun control. And this one is a reaction of the failure of the Brady Bill to pass the first time. So, Brady was Reagan's press secretary when George Hinkley fired at the president's vehicle. Brady stepped in path and took a bullet to the head. And the Brady Bill was supposed to strengthen gun control, but at that point, Congress didn't pass it, and here Block draws a pistol and people bringing loved ones as sacrifices to the weapons industry. A pretty hard hitting cartoon on the lack of gun control in the United States. So with Bill Clinton, here's a cartoon, I know it looks like Hillary, but it's not. It's Madeleine Albright. She's got the State Department seal, and she was the secretary of state under Clinton. So we often talk about the Chinese losing face, and here Block has erased all but Clinton's mouth from his, and maybe a cleft under his lip, in negotiating with the Chinese. And Block has shown that the Chinese are unwilling to negotiate on the reduction of nuclear weapons. That they are murdering their own people, and he wants Clinton and Albright to look the other way. And Block is really angry about this, Clinton's failure of courage in standing up to the Chinese. And in fact, shortly after this cartoon was published, China received most favored nation status from the United States. The environment was something that Block truly cared about. Actually, the very first cartoon he ever drew in 1929 was about clearcutting. We don't have that cartoon at the Library of Congress, or I might have included it today. But here he is in 1995 during the Clinton administration, and you can see a family on the far side of this factory building garbage. They really want to swim in the water. The little girl is holding an innertube. And you have congressmen and businessmen and lobbyists tearing up the Clean Water Act, and the caption is we can even improve on turning things over to the states. We can let the industries regulate themselves. Mr. Block, even one of the last cartoons he drew in 2001 was on the environment. He really cared passionately about taking care of the forests and the water and the air. So this is the last cartoon I'm going to show you today, and it's from the 2000 election, and it's Getaway Car. And you can see somebody with a ballot box dashing into a vehicle that represents the US Supreme Court decision to disregard the hanging chads in Florida and give the victory to George W. Bush in 2000. And the one thing I want to say about this cartoon is there's a lot of white out, there's a lot of tape, it doesn't necessarily show up here. Mr. Block has really reworked this cartoon, and he is at this point ten months away before the end of his life. The ideas have not failed him. The execution is getting more difficult for him. And so that's kind of a run through of some of the highlights of Mr. Block's career. We have 14,450 original cartoon drawings from 1929 to 2001 at the Library of Congress. We have digitized a little bit more than half. I think we've digitized about 8,000. They are copyright protected, but there's a means to see more cartoons easily, and that's through our exhibitions. So, the first exhibition we did, Mr. Block was still alive in 2000. It's called Herblock's History, and it was only the second retrospective exhibition in his career. The first one being at the Corcoran Gallery in 1950. Mr. Block played a large role in the selection of the cartoons, and he reviewed all the captions himself. I myself rewrote a few captions because he didn't like the way I had interpreted his cartoons. So he was a darling person, but he was very, he really liked having things his way. And this was his history, so it was his exhibition. And he was there to celebrate it. In 2009, we did another retrospective, and this obviously was a posthumous one. So we got to include things like Getaway Car, the last cartoon I showed, while it hadn't been drawn yet when we did the first retrospective, it had by the time we did the second one. These give you great overviews of his, both of these give great overviews of his career. Now, the difference between the 2000 and 2009 cartoon, sorry, exhibitions, are we actually possessed the Herblock collection by the time we did the 2009. We were just received as a gift of those cartoons that appeared in the 2000 exhibition in 2000. So, one of the, through the instrument of gift, we do a display of Mr. Block's cartoons in a more lengthy way every three years. And this gives us a wonderful opportunity to highlight his career. So the first one that was done in 2003 was Herblock's Gift, and this celebrated the arrival of the collection at the Library of Congress. And it was a bit of an overview exhibition itself. It was much smaller than the two retrospectives, but it did do career highlights. In 2006, we did Enduring Outrage, and this was a themed exhibition, but it also gave us an opportunity to pair it with some of the rough sketches that he did. And he did about five rough sketches a day, and we have 50,000 rough sketches. And while his staff took very good care of the published editorial cartoons including finding the date they appeared in the Washington Post or if they were mailed first and then appeared in the Post. They didn't control the rough sketches. So the rough sketches are not organized at all, but we were able to through great diligence a colleague Martha Kennedy and I were able to pair some of the rough sketches with the published drawings. In 2012, we decided to take a slightly different tact and we paired Mr. Block's cartoons on the environment with environmental photography on the same issues. So we looked at air pollution. We looked at the use of powerful chemicals in agriculture. We looked at land pollution. We looked at water pollution and other things. So you can, and global warming. So this is a good way to draw people and also to teach them photographs can also express an opinion. That it's not just recording a moment. It can also have a purpose and a need. Pointing Their Pens was a 2015 exhibition in which I paired Herblock's cartoons with those of his more conservative contemporaries. It was pointed out in the 2009 retrospective that the Library of Congress had done a lot of exhibitions about liberal cartoonists, and the person who complained was not wrong. And so I saw this as an opportunity to highlight some of our wealth of conservative cartoons in our collection and very controlled themes. So it's, you know, on five themes because it's a small space that we have to use. And most recently, my colleagues Martha Kennedy and Katherine Blood paired Mr. Block's work with both protests like demonstration posters and fine art. And so if you have students who are reluctant to look at fine art or consider fine art, here's a way to draw them in into looking and thinking about the purposes of fine art and protest gestures in conjunction with cartoons. So and then the final thing that we do is the Library of Congress always has ten of Mr. Block's cartoons online at any given time. And we look back 50 years because we figure even if a teacher or a parent were alive 50 years ago, they still might have learned something about history 50 years ago and be able to talk to a younger child or a student about what happened 50 years ago. Certainly grandparents can do that easily. And so we look back 50 years, and we're now up to 1970. All the exhibitions are available online. Right now, and so I've been in charge of this gallery since it opened in 2011. I picked five cartoons on a theme of that year so one particular theme that I thought Mr. Block was really strong and had a good message and that I could have five cartoons that spoke to that message, right now that's on Vietnam, and I picked five cartoons that are generally about what happened in that event. Sometimes it surprises people that the issues haven't gone away or that wow, that really just happened 50 years ago. And I just want to show you what one of the cartoons looks like when you enlarge it on the website. So that if you're having trouble, because we control the images and you can only see the small GIF images from the Library of Congress in general, from the Prints and Photographs online catalog, one way to get access to see if there's a image that you would particularly like to use in the classroom is to go into the exhibitions, because you can see it enlarged. And this particular one is actually a really horrific one. Is it true about you're keeping political prisoners caged up? And it's, I'm going to butcher his name, Hugh, looking at Uncle Sam. And these are tiger cages, an they are just horrific places where people were imprisoned, political prisoners were kept during the Vietnam War. So we have a learn more page. We're actually going to be working on elaborating this. I picked one because it had the most links and the most up to date links. And in fact, we corrected one link last night, so every one of the links on this particular page should work for you. But it gives you some access to some books, some other websites, a webcast about Block, as well as the Herblock Foundation. And if you are teachers in the local DMV area, if you have students living in poverty who are exceptionally bright and college ready, the Herblock Foundation sponsors 20 students from the DMV to spend up to five years in community college. And they really want to make sure students finish. And so it's worth up to $8,000 a year. The foundation works with college granting agencies and financial aid with the students. But it also includes childcare if needed, books, transportation. Mr. Block really believes strongly that education was a pathway out of poverty, even though he walked away from his own college education when he was 19 to become an editorial cartoonist. So do check out our learn more page. It gives you more resources. I talked about the Prints and Photographs online catalog. Of the 16 million objects in our collection, we've digitized about 1.4 million, which sounds like a lot until you realize it's less than 8% of our collection. When things are in the public domain, we give you full access to the TIF files. When things are not, you can look through the GIF files. And so Mr. Block died in 2001. His work will be under copyright until 2071. But you can get access to the small images as well as caption information for things that have gone on exhibition. We do put the caption in the catalog record. Otherwise, we have a short summary that just describes what you see, not necessarily what the cartoon is about. It can be frustrating for teachers I know because we don't give the aboutness of the cartoons, just the visuals. But for those cartoons that have gone on exhibition, there's a caption, so you get a bit of the aboutness. And then as I said before, it's still under copyright. His work is still under copyright. But I had a conversation with the Herblock Foundation just this week via email, and I asked them what their policy is regarding teachers. And they said that they usually freely grant full access to TIF files to teachers free of charge as long as they submit an inquiry. They really want to keep track of which cartoons are being used in the classroom. That's the only reason why they want you to write to them. They want to know what you're using so they can, I think it kind of, it frames their own idea of how they need to do more outreach as topics change. And so don't be shy. If you want to use a Herblock cartoon in a lesson or an exam, write to the foundation. Chances are, they will give you free access to it. And that concludes my presentation today. If you have any questions, post them in the chat box, and I will do my best to answer them as I see them fly up, or Calina can pose them to me. Yes, he really did coin the term McCarthyism. It's a cartoon owned by the Washington Post. They retained a few of his original drawings when he died. I think they were ones that had been given to the Meyer and Graham families, the people that owned the paper before Jeff Bezos bought it. So yes, he coined the term McCarthyism. And that's not unusual for cartoons. Cartoonists, either they hear something and they put it in print first, or that may have been what happened. People were talking about McCarthyism and that in the newsroom, and he was just the first person to put it into print. But either way, he is the person who is credited with coining it. And LeAnne, he started his career at the Chicago Daily News. He walked away from college when he was 19 to take a position at the Chicago Daily News, and he stayed there until 1933 when he went to the Newspaper Enterprise Service. And that was, that wasn't, while it was in Cleveland, it wasn't associated with any one newspaper. It was a distribution service, so his cartoons appeared all over the United States. And in 1943, he joined the Army. And then in 1946 he joined the staff, in January of 1946 he joined the staff of the Washington Post. And he remained there until he drew his last cartoon on August 26th, 1978. I'm sorry, Dana, I missed that as it went by. >> Dana asked if he covered local events or only national and international events. >> So he was actually a really strong advocate for D.C. statement, like almost the time he arrived in Washington D.C. And he drew a cartoon every time D.C. residents got a little more voting rights. He definitely celebrated it with a cartoon. But like, oh yeah, he drew cartoons about Marion Barry, not favorable. So yeah, no he did do local politics because he was a Washington Post, well it's a national newspaper in many respects, it's also still a local paper. And he couldn't ignore local issues. So yes, the D.C. government whenever they did anything questionable, but he was a strong advocate for the residents as well. So, but you know, his cartoons were also going out in syndication. So a lot of cartoonists who worked for a flagship paper or for a newspaper, because there's so few cartoonists who work for a paper, do do local issues. But the majority of the cartoons are going to be on national and international issues because the syndication, papers that pick up the cartoons in syndication are not going to purchase local cartoons. It just doesn't make sense to them. What's happening now is we have very few cartoonists who get paid to work for a newspaper. If you subscribe to a print paper or a digital paper, well if you subscribe to a digital paper, chances are your paper picks up a spectrum of cartoonists on both sides of the aisle. The Washington Post certainly does. It has both liberal and conservative cartoonists in its online version. Although Tom Toles is the Washington Post cartoonist today, and he is fairly liberal. For example, like Scott Stantis who is a conservative, moderate conservative cartoonist who worked for the Chicago Tribute which was a flagship paper, he actually lives in Montgomery, Alabama now. He went, or Birmingham, Alabama, sorry, not Montgomery, Birmingham, Alabama. He went back to Birmingham when the Post said you know, we don't really want to give you benefits anymore. Why don't you work for us freelance? He's like fine, I'll work for you freelance, but I'm not living in Chicago anymore. And he walked away. And so he probably only does national and international cartoons for the Chicago Post. That's not right, I see him doing local things too and state level. But he's doing it from a distance. So it's not the same as having, Mr. Block lived in Georgetown. So he was not too far from the Post. >> Thanks, Sara. I'm just really struck by how wide ranging and how prolific he was, so I definitely want to explore the collection. I also wanted to give a plug to one of the resources that our team in the Learning and Innovation Office works with which is our primary source, an analysis tool, and specifically, we have ones that are targeted to different formats. So we have one that's specifically targeted for analyzing political cartoons. So I'm going to pop a link to that in the chat. Well, you'll have a link to the page with all of the guides, but you'll be able to find the one for political cartoons. And I appreciated your comment about, you know, Mr. Block, you know, really thinking highly with the interpretation and sort of correcting those that didn't interpret his work right. But I was also really interested in the rough sketches, and I wondered if you had a sense of what his creative process was like or what the drafting process was like with his cartoons. >> Yeah, so he did five cartoons a day, and they were not on the same thing. They were on a variety of themes. And really, they're like eight by ten pieces of newsprint, really rough sketches. But you can see in them, for the ones that ended up in publication, that they're a really good first draft. And according to people who worked in the newsroom, he would go out and go have a mo, really kind of like quietly. And he wanted people's opinions on the cartoons. And they quickly figured out that the one on top was one he really wanted to draw. But he wanted to hear what people had to say about them, and he took their what they had to say into consideration. And so if you laughed at them, he didn't ask you again. Because you obviously weren't thinking about what you saw. But for example, Frank Sobota [phonetic] who wrote on economics for the Post tells a story about how during the Reagan years, Block was doing a cartoon about Regan and the evangelical churches and their influence on the White House, and Frank said, ah, that would look really great to just put a steeple on top of the White House. And Mr. Block went back, and he put a steeple on top of the White House. And so he was a humble guy, according to everybody who knew him, in the office. And he really wanted to know what people thought because he wanted to make sure he reached his readers. And he wanted to treat his readers with the same respect that he treated his news people, bright people who were taking his daily paper you're literate. And so he didn't want to undermine their knowledge. But he wanted to make sure they understood what they were looking at. So that's the rough sketches. And they're in no particular order. We have boxes and boxes, and Martha Kennedy and I went through when we did Enduring Outrage, and we just put in pencil on the outside of the box like some of the themes and some of the presidencies that were covered in them so that we could get back to them. But you know, they're, I mean I think at the end of the day if we do anything with the rough sketches, we'll just scan them as is and maybe let people tag them or something. I don't know what we'll do. >> Thank you, Sara. I hope you're able to see in the chats. There have been some good questions and comments and some fun facts that Mike Brode [phonetic] is putting into the chat box. >> Mike Brode is an old friend. And actually, we have his stamped designs. They're not part of the cartoon, they're not in the cartoon filing series. They're still unprocessed, but we do have his stamped designs for that First Amendment stamp that he did. >> But I think that's a good segue, the comment about Sara's been indoctrinating it in me for years. I'm just curious about your professional journey to the Library of Congress and if you could also say a little bit more about the Popular and Graphic Arts collection and what that includes. >> Okay. So I like to misquote Bugs Bunny, and several of you have heard me say this. I did make a left turn in Albuquerque. I was, I did my PhD I early modern Irish history from 1609 to 1649. I was looking at colonialism and ethnic identity and racism in Ireland. And I ran out of funding. And the man who is now my husband saw a sign for the Junior Fellows Program. And so I actually called up Mary Wolfskill who has been the great head of the Reading Room in the Manuscript Division. And I did actually get to thank her before she passed away for all of her help. And I talked to her about the process, because at that point I had only worked with documents, although I loved going to museums for pleasure. I had never, and I had taken one art history class. I didn't have a strong art history background. And so I talked to her, and I filed my application, and this was in 1991 when there was no email. You got a cold call. And I got a cold call from the head of the Prints and Photographs Division, and he said he was interviewing me. And I was like oh, I thought I was going to go to the Manuscripts Division. And he said young lady, I'll give you 24 hours to think about it. So I ran back to my division and I talked to the grad director. I was like what should I do? He was like, oh he told me that I was one of two people in their consideration. And I ran back to the grad director, and he's like you're one of two people, go for it. Just accept the interview. And the agreement was he was going to call me back 24 hours later. And so I took the interview, and he was like what do you know about the Civil War? And I was like which one, hoping that it wasn't the American Civil War, about which I knew next to nothing. But it was, and so I said well, if it was between the North and South, and it was as much an issue of slavery as it was the economics of slavery and the economics of international trade with Europe. And that's why Europe funded it or funded the South. And I just like went with it for as much as I could from my European background, my European history background. But apparently, I was the best of the two candidates because I got the job. And I quickly, quickly learned about the American Civil War because my first job was to catalog the Civil War drawings of Alfred and William Waud, who are now part of my collection here at the Library. And so I went to copyright for nine months. I came back as a curatorial assistant working with the Swan collection of cartoons. And eventually, a job was, I think I worked as a temporary employee for a decade, working on a variety of cartoon-related things, so I quickly became an expert on cartoons. And not only what they show but what they're about. And then a job was posted for me, and I became a full curator, and so now I will be celebrated my 29th year at the Library of Congress in September, so I'm no teenager. So one of the other things that are in popular and applied graphic art, it's a really cool collection, and I pinch myself every day that I get paid to play with it. Although except for now I'm just theoretically getting paid to play. I am still working and thinking very hard about the collection and doing activities like this, which I think are very important, to draw people in to looking at the art. Even if they can only do it digitally. So I'm in charge of historical prints, so think of Currier and Ives. I'm in charge of what we call documentary drawings as opposed to fine art drawings. So the Civil War drawings of Alfred and William Waud and other drawings that document a particular point in time. Courtroom drawings. The Library of Congress has the largest collection of courtroom drawings in the United States. And I did an exhibition called Drawing Justice that was based on those 12,000 drawings that we possess. And then [inaudible], so baseball cards, other kinds of trading cards and so my collection is pretty broad, and it runs the gamut of time. I think my earliest piece in the collection on which I'm in charge is from 1655, and the latest is probably from 2019, or the most recent. >> That's great. That's so interesting. I put it in the chat. It's so cool that you started as an intern. I think I knew that, but I had forgotten. And, you know, the Junior Fellows Program, we have two junior fellows in our division this summer. So you're a great inspiration in many ways. I am just looking through the chat just to make sure I didn't miss any questions. Thanks everyone who has been participating in the ask a question. Also our [inaudible] said that Herblock was one of her favorite collections, so that's really exciting. Well, if there aren't any other questions, I just want to say thank you so much again, Sara, for being with us today. It was great to hear from you and learn from you, and you've given us all a lot of food for thought, a lot of good resources to follow up with. And thanks everyone for joining us. Next week we'll be joined by Gabrielle Barnes. She is an editor in the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled. So she'll be talking to us about their program, and I really encourage you to come back here next Tuesday, same time, and yeah, we'll be looking forward to that with you. So thank you again, Sara, and thanks everyone for joining us today.