A Washington Evening Star cartoon by Jim Berryman, dated 20 August 1954. A tailcoated performer labeled "Professor Mendes-France, Scrambling Expert" juggles the letters E, D and C on a stage while a nervous globe marked "Free World" peeks from behind the curtain. Held in the Senate's Berryman collection at NARA (NAID 5743188).
What the cartoon shows
A stage act. A caricatured man in a tailcoat, identified by a sign on an easel, keeps three letters in the air. From behind the curtain a nervous globe peeks out. Every word in the drawing is a label.
FREE WORLD
E D C
Professor MENDES-FRANCE
Scrambling Expert
Jim Berryman
WASHINGTON STAR.....
From the Evening Star to the Senate records
The record dates this Washington Evening Star cartoon 20 August 1954. Like the other Berryman originals in series NAID 5730852, it sits in the Records of the U.S. Senate at the National Archives. FRAME classes the source as identified: the cartoonist signed it and the paper's name is on it. The archive files the audience as the domestic public, and the event as the European Defense Community.
Ridicule as the argument
The archive reads the cartoon as an argument that the French premier's handling of the European Defense Community treaty, the "E D C" in the air, left Western allies anxious. It tags the drawing fear appeal and then calls that a weak fit, which is honest. The only fear in the picture is the globe's nervousness.
The real device is ridicule. Calling a head of government a stage "professor" and a "scrambling expert" says he is performing, not governing, and that the treaty is a prop in his act. The cartoon does not say what Mendes-France did, what the treaty contained, or why it mattered. A reader who did not already follow the story would learn only that the cartoonist disapproved.
A private artist mocked a foreign leader in a private newspaper, under his own name, and readers could disagree with him the next morning. Readers knew who was talking, which the unsigned government sheets elsewhere on this site did not allow. Other Berryman cartoons here include It's Time to Lay This Needle Aside! on polio vaccine politics and the Faubus landslide.
Sources
- FRAME object record, The Juggler, August 20, 1954. Jim Berryman, Washington Evening Star.
- U.S. National Archives, Records of the U.S. Senate, Jim Berryman Political Cartoons (series NAID 5730852), item NAID 5743188, catalog.archives.gov, retrieved by the archive October 3, 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain.
