Iconoclast in Ink: The Political Cartoons of Jay N. "Ding" Darling by Richard Samuel West

Abstract

Reviewed by: Iconoclast in Ink: The Political Cartoons of Jay N. "Ding" Darling by Richard Samuel West Paul V. Murphy Richard Samuel West, Iconoclast in Ink: The Political Cartoons of Jay N. "Ding" Darling. Columbus: The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, 2012. 194 pp. $24.95. Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling began his nearly fifty-year career as a cartoonist in 1900 when he joined the staff of the Sioux City Journal. Newspapers of that era were in transition, still at the center of partisan politics but also part of an emerging mass media that played an important role in integrating the towns and cities scattered across the country into a national popular culture. Darling contributed to both projects. He gained a national following, eventually earning two Pulitzer Prizes, while advancing a progressive political vision fostered by two prominent and gifted [End Page 179] Republican newspapermen. The first of these, George Perkins, initially hired Darling for the Journal. Gardner Cowles later lured him to the Des Moines Register and Leader in 1906, where Darling spent the bulk of his career. Darling perfected the gentle but biting single-panel, front-page political cartoon, using homey and charming images to bring public figures down to size and to translate complex issues into "everyday terms that anyone could understand" (5). He eventually gained a national audience through syndication by the New York Tribune. In collaboration with The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Richard Samuel West has produced a handsome, large-format, and copiously illustrated volume attesting to Darling's abilities. West pairs a knowledgeable, well-illustrated eighty-page survey of Darling's art and politics with a selection of over one hundred cartoons, presented on a scale that almost matches the six-by-eight-inch format in which many originally appeared. Read together, they give a glimpse of a political world lost. Born in the tiny lakeshore village of Norwood (from which his middle name derived) in the upper stretches of Michigan's lower peninsula in 1876, Darling moved throughout Michigan and Indiana before his family settled in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1886. He was an energetic, irreverent youth, expelled from Yankton College in South Dakota for commandeering the president's horse and buggy and suspended from his next school, Beloit College, due to poor attendance and scholarship. At Beloit, he drew satirical drawings of his professors, signing himself as Ding, from "D'ing", a contraction that had become a habit with his father and brother. "Ding" Darling became the name by which he was known. He first attracted national notice as a cartoonist in 1907 with a fine panel featuring President Theodore Roosevelt sitting at the end of a makeshift diving board over a rural stream, splashing idly in the water, unsure what to do, while seven would-be rivals for the 1908 Republican presidential nomination—from William Howard Taft to Robert La Follette—lined up impatiently behind him. Darling exemplified a type of progressivism almost unknown in the Republican Party of today. He was skeptical of trusts and the business selfishness they embodied, optimistic regarding the regulatory power of government (to end child labor and regulate railroads, for example), and passionate in his belief in international government to prevent the scourge of war. He idolized Herbert Hoover and generally criticized Democratic policies, but he supported Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt when they advanced progressive aims, particularly in foreign affairs. He often [End Page 180] assumed the stance of a gentle prophet, skewering the inattentiveness, emotionalism, irrationality, hypocrisy, and alarmism that led to unjust and destructive policies. He hailed, instead, the enlightened, forward-thinking, disinterested, and fraternal impulses that promised a better future. In one wartime fantasy, Darling depicted a businessman and workingman becoming solicitous brothers in the trenches despite their mutual hatred in peacetime. Darling wrote a remarkably sober-minded assessment of the Soviet Union after a brief visit there in 1931. It revealed much about his temperament, condemning authoritarianism but issuing a biting warning as well. "If you are … afflicted with conservatism, one dose of Russia will make you well," Darling wrote. "Every American ought to make a trip to Russia at least once...