A Washington Evening Star cartoon by Jim Berryman, dated 31 July 1958. A smiling governor holds a newspaper reading "Faubus wins in landslide!" in one hand and a bayonet rifle stamped "U.S.A." in the other. Held in the Senate's Berryman collection at NARA (NAID 5743268).
What the cartoon shows
A man sits at a desk behind a nameplate. He smiles around a cigarette. In one hand is a newspaper with a victory headline. In the other, held up like a trophy, is a rifle with a fixed bayonet, and the stock is stamped with the initials of the United States. The caption puts the boast in his mouth.
FAUBUS WINS IN LANDSLIDE!
GOVERNOR
U.S.A.
JIM BERRYMAN WASHINGTON STAR
Who drew it
Jim Berryman of the Washington Evening Star, a private newspaper cartoonist with his name on the work. The drawing is kept in the Records of the U.S. Senate at the National Archives, in the Berryman political cartoons series (series NAID 5730852). The archive's rights line records it as public domain.
How to read it
The "issue" in the caption is the bayonet. FRAME reads the cartoon as saying that Orval Faubus won his election on the strength of his confrontation with federal troops, and tags it name-calling by visual association. The cartoon does not show the schools, the students, or the troops; it shows a politician holding a federal weapon as a campaign prop.
The cartoon's charge is that a governor profited from making a constitutional fight into a show. That charge is fair comment and was made in the open. The fight underneath it, as the archive's Little Rock records show, was over integrating the city's public schools. On that the answer has to be plain: a state may not sort its pupils by race, and a governor who campaigned on resisting that was wrong. Federal troops inside a state are a grave matter for anyone who distrusts concentrated power, and this record does not detail their deployment. The cartoon's target is narrower, and it hits it: a man who made the confrontation his platform. A year later, segregationists at the Arkansas capitol were still carrying signs that called integration "communism." The Citizens' Councils case study covers Faubus's use of the National Guard at Central High and the federal troops sent to carry out the court order.
Sources
- FRAME object record, With this Issue I couldn't lose, 31 July 1958. Jim Berryman, Washington Evening Star.
- U.S. National Archives, Records of the U.S. Senate, Jim Berryman Political Cartoons (series NAID 5730852), item NAID 5743268, catalog.archives.gov. Rights as recorded: public domain.
