Abstract
“For the past few years the air of fear around here has been pretty thick,” Block wrote in The Herblock Book, his first anthology of political cartoons, which was published in late 1952. “There’s not always something you can put your finger on,” he continued, “but there are plenty of people anxious to put the finger on somebody.”¹ Block was writing at the height of the second Red Scare, a moment in American history that stretched from the late 1940s into the early 1950s and beyond, when the fear that communist spies had infiltrated American politics and society reached almost