Jim Berryman's 1953 blood-donor cartoon and the home front in Korea's last summer

Jim Berryman's Washington Evening Star cartoon of 2 June 1953. J.Q. Public, cigar in mouth and coat over his arm, rolls down his sleeve outside a Blood Donor Center beside a notice of a critical shortage of whole blood for wounded U.N. fighting men, and says the line in the title.

The cartoon

An ordinary man stands on the steps of a building with a red cross over the door. His hat is battered, he has a cigar, and he is rolling down a shirt sleeve: he has just given. His jacket, slung over his arm, carries his name. A bulletin board beside the door states the need.

BLOOD DONOR CENTER

BULLETIN

CRITICAL SHORTAGE OF WHOLE BLOOD FOR WOUNDED U.N. FIGHTING MEN!

THAT'S ONE KOREAN PROBLEM I CAN SOLVE!

J.Q. PUBLIC

Who made it

Berryman drew for the Washington Evening Star, a private daily, and FRAME classes the source as openly identified. The drawing is held with the Senate's Berryman cartoons at the National Archives, and the rights line records it as public domain. It is newspaper commentary, not a government poster.

How to read it

FRAME tags it plain folks: an everyman demonstrates the act the cartoon wants its readers to copy. The joke underneath is the word "problem." By June 1953 the war in Korea was a set of problems no single citizen could fix. Berryman drew those too: the same month he drew a storm of headlines that included "SYNGMAN RHEE REJECTS TRUCE," and War wiping his brow at the news that Rhee said Korea would "go it alone." Here he picks the one problem an ordinary reader could do something about, and has him do it.

Nobody is threatened. Nobody is drafted. The man gives blood because he chose to, and the cartoon asks other people to make the same choice. A free country that needs something from its citizens can ask like this, in a newspaper, and let them decide. How short the supply actually was, the cartoon does not say.

Berryman's earlier cartoon on the war, the 1950 Labor Day holiday toll, also used the war to speak to the home front, with Death instead of a donor. His armistice cartoon, "Let us pray it means peace", followed eight weeks later. The hub US and UN Command messaging in the Korean War sets this cartoon beside the armistice drawing.