# It Shouldn't Happen to a Dog!: Jim Berryman's Uncle Sam at the radio, November 1957

Jim Berryman's Washington Star cartoon of 5 November 1957 puts Uncle Sam at a radio set in headphones, sweating, while two sounds reach his ears: "Beep-Beep" and "Bow-Wow." Those two words are the only text on the drawing.

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      It Shouldn't Happen to a Dog!

      It Shouldn't Happen to a Dog!: Jim Berryman's Uncle Sam at the radio, November 1957
      Jim Berryman's November 1957 cartoon: a sweating Uncle Sam in headphones hears "Beep-Beep" and "Bow-Wow" on the set. Washington Star; National Archives

## Techniques named on the archive record

Fear appeal
      DateNovember 5, 1957Made byWashington Evening Star (cartoonist Jim Berryman)MediumCartoonCountryUnited StatesRegimeEisenhower AdministrationNARANAID 5743254SourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceU.S. National Archives (NARA), Records of the U.S. Senate, Jim Berryman Political Cartoons , 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, 5743254 (NAID 5743254).
      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

  Jim Berryman's Washington Star cartoon of 5 November 1957 puts Uncle Sam at a radio set in headphones, sweating, while two sounds reach his ears: "Beep-Beep" and "Bow-Wow." Those two words are the only text on the drawing.

## What the cartoon shows

Uncle Sam at a radio receiver, headphones on, wide-eyed and sweating. A shield with stars is behind him. Two noises reach his ears, and they are all the lettering there is besides the signature.

BEEP-BEEP

BOW-WOW

Text as transcribed by FRAME, signed "Jim Berryman Washington Star." The title is the catalog's. Full record at propagandaarchive.org. NAID 5743254; the record gives no series number for this item.

## What it leaves out

Nothing on the drawing says satellite, Soviet, or space. The archive's own description says as much, and treats the space-race reading as an inference from the date and the two sounds. A reader in November 1957 would not have needed the label. The cartoon trusts its audience to hear the beep and the bark and know where they were coming from, which is a kind of compliment to the paper's readers.

## How to read it

FRAME tags it fear appeal: the country, personified, is shown rattled by signals from overhead. The picture is also funny, and the catalog title makes the joke at Uncle Sam's expense as much as anyone's. A cartoon that shows its own country flustered is not cheering for anyone. It tells readers the country had been caught off guard, which a newspaper is free to say and an official poster rarely does.

Berryman's paper ran a run of these that autumn. On 6 October an observatory lettered U.S. SCIENCE swings its telescope toward streaking objects under a sign saying the men are watching. On 10 November Santa reads that the Army promises a satellite by Christmas. On 28 November Uncle Sam sits down to carve a bird labelled COMPLACENCY. Read in order, they move from surprise to a demand that the country stop being complacent, and every one of them comes from a private paper. The government's own atomic-age messaging is collected in the civil defense and atomic age hub; the full Berryman run is on the Berryman cartoons hub.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, It Shouldn't Happen to a Dog!, 5 November 1957. Washington Evening Star, cartoonist Jim Berryman.

- FRAME object records cited for comparison: Anybody Working (6 October 1957), They'd better not be planning on a Saint-nik! (10 November 1957), and It's a pleasure to carve up this bird (28 November 1957).

- U.S. National Archives, Records of the U.S. Senate, Jim Berryman Political Cartoons, item NAID 5743254, catalog.archives.gov, retrieved by the archive 3 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/it-shouldnt-happen-to-a-dog-berryman-1957/