Herbert Lawrence Block, commonly known as Herblock (October13, 1909October7, 2001), was an American editorial cartoonist and author best known for his commentaries on national domestic and foreign policy.
During the course of a career stretching into nine decades, he won three Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning (1942, 1954, and 1979), shared a fourth Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for Public Service on Watergate, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1994), the National Cartoonist Society Editorial Cartoon Award in 1957 and 1960, the Reuben Award in 1956, the Gold Key Award (the National Cartoonists Society Hall of Fame) in 1979, and numerous other honors.
Career
Block was the youngest of three boys born in Chicago to a Catholic mother, Theresa Lupe Block, and a father of Jewish descent, David Julian Block, a chemist and electrical engineer. His brother Rich became president of an industrial laundry and his brother Bill was a newspaper reporter for the Chicago Tribune and later for the Chicago Sun.
He began taking classes at the Art Institute of Chicago when he was eleven, and adopted the "Herblock" signature in high school.
After graduating in 1927, he attended Lake Forest College for almost two years.
Late in his second year there he was hiredafter submitting some cartoons he had done in high school and college for the Evanston News-Indexto replace the Chicago Daily News departing editorial cartoonist. He never returned to school.
Block moved to Cleveland in 1933 to become the staff cartoonist for Newspaper Enterprise Association, which distributed his cartoons nationally.
He won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1942, then spent two years in the Army doing cartoons and press releases. Upon discharge Block became chief editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post, where he worked until his death 55 years later.
Block's cartoons were syndicated to newspapers around the world by Creators Syndicate from 1987 until his death in 2001.
He never married, and, in the Post'''s employee index, his address was listed as simply "The Washington Post".
Cartoons
His first cartoon for the Chicago Daily News (April24, 1929) advocated conservation of America's forests. Herblock said that his family was conservative and that his father voted for Herbert Hoover in 1928. But with the onset of the Great Depression, he became a supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. He pointed out the dangers of Soviet aggression, the growing Nazi menace, and opposed American isolationists.
While he criticized Stalin and other Communist figures, he also believed that the United States was overreacting to the danger of communism.
In the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy was a recurring target of Herblock's cartoons, one of which introduced the term McCarthyism. He won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1954.The Washington Post officially endorsed Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election. Because Herblock supported Adlai Stevenson, the Post pulled his cartoons, but restored them after a week. He always insisted on total editorial independence, regardless of whether or not his cartoons agreed with the Post's stance on political issues. He focused most of his attacks on those public figures in power, often on Republican figures, but Democrats who displeased him were not immune from criticism. As an example—despite being an ardent admirer of Franklin Roosevelt—he found it necessary to attack the president's 1937 court-packing scheme.
During the 1950s, Herblock criticized Eisenhower mainly for insufficient action on civil rights and for not curbing the abuses of Senator McCarthy. In the following decade, he attacked the US war effort in Vietnam, causing President Johnson to drop his plans of awarding the cartoonist with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. The cartoonist would eventually be awarded this honor by Bill Clinton in 1994.
Some of Herblock's finest cartoons were those attacking the Nixon Administration during the Watergate Scandal, winning him his third Pulitzer Prize in 1979. Nixon canceled his subscription to the Post after Herblock drew him crawling out of an open sewer in 1954. He had once used the same motif for Senator McCarthy.
He also ended up on the president's infamous enemies list. In the 1980s and 1990s, he satirized and criticized Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton in addition to taking on the issues of the day: Gun control; abortion; the influence of fundamentalist Christian groups on public policy; and the Dot Com bubble. The tobacco industry was a favorite target of Herblock, who had smoked at one time. He gave it up and had criticized cigarette companies even before that.