Clifford Berryman cartoon, "Desire for Something Stronger" (5 October 1919)
A Clifford Berryman drawing of 5 October 1919 in the Senate's Berryman collection at the National Archives: two men with pails at a water pump under a sign on wartime prohibition. One says, "Bill, it looks like the good old days have gone forever!"
- Date
- 1919-10-05
- Kind
- photograph
- Source
- National Archives Catalog, Records of the U.S. Senate (RG 46), Berryman Political Cartoon Collection
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- NAID
- 6011584
- Rights
- A drawing by Clifford K. Berryman in the Records of the U.S. Senate (Record Group 46), series "Berryman Political Cartoon Collection" (NAID 306080), whose use note reads: "Some records in this series may be subject to copyright restrictions. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine the copyright holder and arrange for permission to reproduce the items, if necessary." The item record reads "Use Restriction: Unrestricted." Berryman was a newspaper cartoonist, not a federal employee, so 17 U.S.C. § 105 is not the basis. The catalog dates the drawing 5 October 1919. A work published in the United States in 1930 or earlier is in the public domain there, and an unpublished work by an author who died in 1949, as Berryman did, passed out of copyright at the end of 2019; on either footing, and on the item-level "Unrestricted" mark, a copy is stored here.
The catalog title is “Desire for Something Stronger,” local identifier E-051, and the catalog gives 5 October 1919 as the date. The drawing shows two men carrying tin pails at a street water pump. A sign behind them reads “WAR-TIME PROHIBITION LAW WILL CONTINUE IN EFFECT UNTIL TREATY IS RATIFIED,” and one man says to the other, “BILL, IT LOOKS LIKE THE GOOD OLD DAYS HAVE GONE FOREVER!”
The National Archives note says Congress had decided that the wartime prohibition law would stay in effect until the peace treaty ending the First World War was ratified. The same note ends by saying prohibition continued until “repealed by the 23rd amendment”; the repeal was the Twenty-first Amendment, as the joint resolution filed here shows, so that sentence of the note is not repeated here as fact.
This is an editorial cartoon, cited for what it shows and for what the National Archives says it is about. The archive’s schema has no separate type for drawings.
