Congratulations, Dad!: Jim Berryman puts Clifford K. Berryman in a Pulitzer frame, May 1944
Jim Berryman's May 1944 Evening Star drawing holds a Pulitzer frame up to Clifford K. Berryman at his drawing board. National Archives, Senate records
Techniques named on the archive record
Transfer
Date
May 2, 1944
Made by
Washington Evening Star (cartoonist Jim Berryman)
Medium
Cartoon
Country
United States
Regime
Roosevelt Administration
NARA
NAID 5730852; NAID 5743132
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
U.S. National Archives (NARA), Records of the U.S. Senate, Jim Berryman Political Cartoons (NAID 5730852) , retrieved October 3, 2026
Source
Public domain (U.S. government work) Jim Berryman, Washington Evening Star. National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the U.S. Senate, 5743132 (NAID 5743132).
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.
A Washington Evening Star drawing signed by Jim Berryman and dated 2 May 1944. The capital, in colonial dress, holds a frame lettered "Pulitzer Prize for Cartoon of the Year" up to an older cartoonist labelled Clifford K. Berryman. It is the only one of the archive's 211 Berryman rows in which Clifford's name appears.
What the drawing shows
Two figures and a picture frame. The man at the drawing board is older, with a small teddy bear on the board and a label reading INK nearby. The figure holding the frame is in colonial dress, the costume the Star's cartoons give to Washington itself, and the letters on him say D.C.
PULITZER PRIZE for CARTOON of the YEAR
CLIFFORD K. BERRYMAN
LET ME SEE HOW YOU LOOK IN HERE, CLIFF!
D.C.
INK
CONGRATULATIONS, DAD!
Two names on one sheet
Every one of the 211 cartoons in the archive's Berryman set credits the same maker: the Washington Evening Star, cartoonist Jim Berryman. Clifford K. Berryman is never the credited artist. He appears once, here, as the subject: a name lettered beside a man at a drawing board, inside a prize frame, addressed as "Cliff" by the capital and as "Dad" in the margin note above Jim's signature.
The record says nothing more about him, and this page adds nothing to it. What the sheet itself shows is a newspaper cartoonist using his own paper's space for a family congratulation, and doing it in the house style: the same colonial "D.C." figure appears in Jim Berryman's cartoons about the District's vote, its taxes and its visitors. Five years later a line printed under another of his drawings would claim a Pulitzer of his own, for All Set for a Super-Secret Session in Washington.
A tribute in a political run
FRAME tags it transfer and calls the tag a weak fit, and that is fair. Nothing is being sold. The frame borrows the prize's standing for the man in it, which is what a tribute is for. The reason the drawing belongs in a propaganda archive at all is that it sits in a run of political cartoons, and it is a useful reminder of what that run is: one working journalist's output for a privately owned paper, kept whole, including the days when the subject was his father's prize.
The teddy bear is drawn small and left unexplained. The archive record names it and does not say why it is there.
FRAME object record, Congratulations, Dad!, 2 May 1944. Washington Evening Star, cartoonist Jim Berryman.
U.S. National Archives, Records of the U.S. Senate, Jim Berryman Political Cartoons (series NAID 5730852), item NAID 5743132, catalog.archives.gov, retrieved by the archive 3 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
