Let Me Through! Two 1963 bills jammed in the Senate doors

Jim Berryman's Washington Star cartoon of 29 September 1963 draws two angry figures in long white hooded robes, sashed "Tax Cut" and "Civil Rights," shoving through the swinging doors of the U.S. Senate.

The drawing

A sign over a pair of saloon-style doors reads "U.S. Senate." Two figures in long white garments with hoods are wedged in the opening at once, faces angry, each pushing to be first. One wears a sash reading "Tax Cut." The other's sash says "Civil Rights." There is no other text but the artist's line.

U.S. SENATE

TAX CUT

CIVIL RIGHTS

JIM BERRYMAN WASHINGTON STAR

Reading it

The joke is about the calendar. Two large measures were waiting on one chamber, and only one could go through the door first. FRAME tags the cartoon card stacking and adds that the tag is a weak fit; the sheet frames two bills as rivals for a single opening and leaves out everything else about them.

The costume is the uncomfortable part. A long white hooded robe in an American cartoon of 1963 is hard to see without thinking of the Klan, and the archive's description does not say whether Berryman meant that. This page does not guess his intent. A reader can still notice that the civil rights bill is drawn in the same outfit as the tax bill, as one more interest pushing for position, rather than as a question of equal rights. That flattening is the cartoon's argument, whether or not it was the artist's aim.

The Senate did not owe either bill passage. It did owe the second one a debate on its merits. The wider campaign is the subject of Citizens' Councils, state money, and the civil rights campaign. Berryman's earlier Birmingham cartoon, A Flower Tries to Grow in Birmingham, takes a different line on the same year.

Record and rights

Washington Evening Star, cartoonist Jim Berryman. Held in the Jim Berryman Political Cartoons series, Records of the U.S. Senate, National Archives: series NAID 5730852, item NAID 5743298, retrieved 3 October 2026. FRAME records the rights as public domain (U.S. government work).