A Washington Evening Star cartoon by Jim Berryman, dated 11 October 1954. A tumbledown shack lettered "FHA Scandal" sits among junk, dice and a roulette wheel, with a sign pointing to a sagging mailbox: "Leave bribes here." Held in the Senate's Berryman collection at NARA (NAID 5743189).
What the cartoon shows
A house that is not worth buying. The archive describes a tumbledown shack with "FHA Scandal" lettered on its roof, standing amid junk. Around it are a sagging mailbox, an overflowing garbage can, dice and a roulette wheel. A sign points to the mailbox. The title borrows a nursery rhyme.
FHA SCANDAL
LEAVE BRIBES HERE
JIM BERRYMAN... WASHINGTON STAR...
Who drew it and where it is kept
The signature reads "JIM BERRYMAN... WASHINGTON STAR..." The original belongs to the Senate's Berryman cartoon series at the National Archives (NAID 5730852), and the archive lists its rights as public domain, a statement about the archival copy. FRAME classes the source as openly identified and the audience as the domestic public. Its themes are economy and finance and elections and party politics. The record does not say what the scandal was, who was accused, or what came of it, and those blanks stay blank here.
How to read it
FRAME tags it name-calling and calls the fit weak. The label it means is a loaded one: the agency rendered as a squalid hovel, with a sign inviting bribes. The accusation is carried by the picture rather than stated. The dice and the roulette wheel seem to add a second charge, that the place is run as a game of chance.
This is a newspaper doing a newspaper's work. A cartoonist with his name on the drawing accuses a public agency of corruption, in print, in a Washington paper, and the agency has to live with it. That is the free press the First Amendment protects, and it protects it most when the target is the government. A reader can still ask what the drawing proves. It proves nothing by itself; it tells the reader what Berryman believed and invites him to look at the evidence elsewhere.
The archive files this under the Eisenhower years, but the drawing does not make the FHA a party symbol; no party is named on it. For other Berryman cartoons on this site, see Detroit Safari, from May of the same year, on antitrust, and It's Time to Lay This Needle Aside! from 1955.
Sources
- FRAME object record, The House That Jack Built (FHA Scandal), 11 October 1954. Washington Evening Star (cartoonist Jim Berryman).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the U.S. Senate, Jim Berryman Political Cartoons (series NAID 5730852), item NAID 5743189, retrieved by the archive 3 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain.
