# We Have Our Own 'Iron Curtain': Jim Berryman's voteless capital at the polls, November 1952

A Washington Evening Star cartoon by Jim Berryman, dated 4 November 1952. A dejected figure lettered D.C., in colonial clothes, stands outside a curtained booth marked The Polls while a hand lettered Rest of America reaches up from inside it.

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      We Have Our Own 'Iron Curtain'

      We Have Our Own 'Iron Curtain': Jim Berryman's voteless capital at the polls, November 1952
      Jim Berryman's November 1952 cartoon leaves the District of Columbia outside the voting booth while the "Rest of America" votes. Washington Evening Star

## Techniques named on the archive record

Transfer
      DateNovember 4, 1952Made byWashington Evening Star (cartoonist Jim Berryman)MediumCartoonCountryUnited StatesRegimeTruman AdministrationNARANAID 5730852; NAID 5743169SourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceU.S. National Archives (NARA), Records of the U.S. Senate, Jim Berryman Political Cartoons (NAID 5730852) , retrieved October 3, 2026SourcePublic domain (U.S. government work) Jim Berryman, Washington Evening Star. National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the U.S. Senate, 5743169 (NAID 5743169).
      Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

      Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  A Washington Evening Star cartoon by Jim Berryman, dated 4 November 1952. A dejected figure lettered D.C., in colonial clothes, stands outside a curtained booth marked The Polls while a hand lettered Rest of America reaches up from inside it.

## What the cartoon shows

A booth with its curtain drawn, and a sign over it. Inside, unseen except for a raised hand, is everyone else. Outside stands the colonial figure Berryman drew for the city his paper was printed in, a man in a tricorn hat and a ragged waistcoat, lettered D.C. The words on the drawing are few.

THE POLLS

REST OF AMERICA

D.C.

Text as transcribed by FRAME, signed "Jim Berryman." The title is the catalog's. Full record at propagandaarchive.org. NAID 5743169, in the series Jim Berryman Political Cartoons (NAID 5730852).

## The title

In 1955 Berryman would put a hammer and sickle on a riveted steel door and call the cartoon Second Curtain. Here, three years earlier, the curtain hangs in Washington. The joke is meant to sting: the capital city, in this drawing, is on the wrong side of a curtain of its own. The next sheet in the file, dated the following day, shows a ballot marked I LIKE IKE dropped into a padlocked box labelled U.S.A.

## A running complaint

This is not a one-off in the Senate's Berryman file. In 1946, among the speakers trading complaints about shortages outside a Rimrock, Arizona post office, one says "SPEAKIN' OF SHORTAGES--- IN THE D.C. WE DON'T EVEN HAVE A VOTE!" In 1950 the D.C. figure warns Virginia and Maryland, who are holding a paper about a Truman plan to expand the capital into nearby counties, to "HOLD ON TO YOUR VOTE!" In 1953 a colonial "D.C. Taxpayer" is handed a public works package with a ten-million-dollar tax increase on the tag and told it is no gift. That taxpayer wears the same costume as the 1952 figure: the dress of 1776.

## The borrowed costume

FRAME tags it transfer: Revolutionary dress lends the complaint the weight of the founding. On this point the borrowing is earned. Taxes levied on people who have no vote for the body that levies them is the grievance the costume comes from, and a capital whose residents, on the cartoons' own account, paid the taxes and had no vote was a real gap in the republic's own practice. The cartoon says so in three words and a hand.

Then there is the speaker. The complaint comes from a privately owned paper speaking for its own readers, not from any office of government. The original drawing now sits in the Senate's records. The full run of these cartoons, with the 1950 and 1953 District sheets, is on the Berryman cartoons hub.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, We Have Our Own 'Iron Curtain', 4 November 1952. Washington Evening Star, cartoonist Jim Berryman.

- FRAME object records cited for comparison: Soda Springs Discusses "the State of the Nation" (10 February 1946), Take my advice, neighbors... hold on to your vote! (1 September 1950), There's Your Package, Sir.. But It's No Gift! (22 November 1953), and Untitled (I Like Ike ballot in the U.S.A. box) (5 November 1952).

- U.S. National Archives, Records of the U.S. Senate, Jim Berryman Political Cartoons (series NAID 5730852), item NAID 5743169, catalog.archives.gov, retrieved by the archive 3 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/berryman-we-have-our-own-iron-curtain-1952/