I Just Can't Stand Secrets, Jim Berryman's G.O.P. as Pandora at the Pearl Harbor box

I Just Can't Stand Secrets is a Jim Berryman cartoon for the Washington Evening Star dated 9 June 1944. A bearded figure labelled Congress holds a key tagged "December 7, 1944" and warns a robed G.O.P. elephant away from a locked chest marked "Pearl Harbor Court Martial" (NAID 5743134).

The drawing

Three things share the panel. A bearded figure labelled Congress holds up a key with a tag on it. An elephant in a robe, labelled G.O.P., is near a locked chest. The chest is marked as the Pearl Harbor court martial. Congress speaks, and calls the elephant Pandora.

DECEMBER 7,
1944

KEEP AWAY
FROM THAT BOX,
PANDORA!

CONGRESS

PEARL HARBOR
COURT MARTIAL

G.O.P.

Jim Berryman

The title, "I Just Can't Stand Secrets," is the catalog's; it is not among the words the archive transcribes from the drawing.

Whose cartoon

Jim Berryman drew it for the Washington Evening Star, a private newspaper, and the record dates it 9 June 1944. The National Archives holds it among the Jim Berryman Political Cartoons in the records of the U.S. Senate. The archive classes the issuer as media, the audience as the domestic public, and the themes as elections and party politics and war. An earlier Berryman drawing on this site, Shucks Henry! of 1938, shows WPA money scattered across the South; this one turns on the Republicans.

On the side of the lock

The archive tags name-calling and calls the fit weak, since the cartoon works by allegory. The label is Pandora, and the charge is curiosity. The date on the key's tag, months ahead, reads as the time the box may be opened.

Read plainly, the cartoon takes the side of keeping a military proceeding about Pearl Harbor closed for now, and mocks the opposition party for wanting to look inside. It was an election year. The cartoon does not say what was in the box or why it was closed, and the record is silent on both.

A cartoonist is free to argue that a secret should stay a secret, and a free press printed him. The libertarian question still applies to the argument he made. In a republic, the party out of power that asks to see what the government knows about a disaster is doing its job. Secrecy can be justified in war, but the burden belongs to those who keep the lock, not to those who ask. The Roosevelt administration essay treats the 1944 election and another record the voters did not see that year. A Berryman cartoon from the same year on labor, The Thinker, asked the president to tell the public more.