Quilts permeated realms outside the domestic spheres of needlework and home decorating. Americans understood quilts’ symbolic meaning, using the objects almost as a shorthand for “making do” amid trying times. By the 1930s, quilts were regularly used as a common metaphor, connoting the creation of something larger than the sum of its individual parts, even when those haphazard bits and pieces didn’t necessarily fit together neatly. That’s how this political cartoonist drew on quilts, describing congress as a quilting bee that stitched together various agencies and legislation.