Herbert L. Block was always putting ideas in people’s heads:
• U.S. presidents should be held as accountable as everybody else.
• Public treasures shouldn’t be pillaged for private profit.
• The rights of citizenship can’t be packaged differently for different groups of Americans.
And even if his readers were aware of those general concepts, Herb Block could crystallize them into clearly recognizable images.
Under the name Herblock, he drew political cartoons from 1929 until 2001, when he died at age 91. Block won three Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning, in 1942, 1954 and 1979. In 1973, he shared a fourth Pulitzer Prize with Washington Post colleagues for public service in the newspaper’s coverage of Watergate.
Herblock observed 13 U.S. presidents, from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush. That 72-year-long documentation of global political and social transformation is represented by 14,000 original ink and pencil drawings in the Library of Congress.
Block wasn’t only a visual creator. He is credited with introducing the word “McCarthyism” in a cartoon published on March 29, 1950. Originally targeted at former Sen. Joe McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, the word is still is use today.