This Wouldn't Stand Inspection!: Berryman's woman of Hungary, December 1956

A Washington Star cartoon by Jim Berryman, dated 7 December 1956. A woman in a long black shawl, lettered "Women of Hungary," stands in rubble in front of a tank marked with the hammer and sickle, its gun pointed past her.

What the cartoon shows

One woman and one machine. She is wrapped in a long black shawl and stands in rubble. The tank faces her, a hammer and sickle on its turret, and the barrel points past her rather than at her. She is drawn standing her ground.

WOMEN OF HUNGARY

Contrast more than fear

FRAME tags fear appeal, and the threat is plain enough: the tank is the instrument and the woman is unarmed. But the drawing works less by fear than by contrast. The only words on it name her, not the tank; the label makes her a whole category of people, the women of a country, rather than one person. The title's "inspection" comes from the catalog; this copy prints no caption. The record does not say what inspection Berryman meant, and the drawing does not name one.

On Hungary, a private cartoonist and the government's information service were on the same side. The U.S. Information Agency told audiences abroad about it in 1957 and 1958, in sheets like Communism Gives You Justice? and the photo poster Story of Hungary for the Philippines. The two are not the same kind of speech. The agency's sheets were made by a government office and could carry a local group's name instead of its own; the Justice? sheet names the Federation of Free Farmers. Berryman's drawing ran in a Washington paper, under his signature, for American readers who could take it or leave it.

That difference is the point of reading the cartoon here. A citizen who agrees with a government message can say so in his own voice, and that voice is worth more than the official one because nobody ordered it. The woman in the shawl is a private man's picture of a public crime, and the judgment in it is his.

Other Berryman cartoons from the Soviet side of the period include On Soviet Scales and Soviet Scales of Justice. The full run is on the Berryman cartoons hub, and the agency's posters are on the USIA posters abroad hub.