A Free Spirit

"A cartoon is really an editorial," Cartoonist Rollin Kirby once said. "It must be judged by what it says rather than the way in which it says it, and what art there is in cartooning is the art of driving the message home." For more than 40 years, slim, courtly Rollin Kirby practiced this art with such skill that he had few peers in U.S. newspaperdom.

At 35, Kirby, who had studied under Whistler in Paris, regarded himself as a failure as an artist when Friend Franklin P. Adams ("F.P.A.") got him a cartooning job on the old New York Evening Mail in 1911. His pen editorials soon proved too sharp-pointed for the ultra-conservative Mail and his liberal ideas quickly got him fired from the conservative New York Sun. When he joined Pulitzer's crusading New York World in 1913, Kirby found a world of his own.

He struck out at the evils of Prohibition, which he pictured as "Mr. Dry," a sniveling, psalm-singing, bluenosed personification of cant and bigotry. When the Ku Klux Klan invaded the Midwest in the '20s, Kirby flayed its leaders mercilessly. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, the last in 1928 for a pro-Al Smith cartoon, 'Tammany!", which showed a paunchy, string-tied figure labeled "G.O.P." raising his hands in horror at the very thought of Tammany Hall, while behind him stood an unsavory chorus of such figures as Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, Attorney General Harry Daugherty and other Republicans implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal. Next to the Depression itself, a Kirby cartoon ("Two Chickens in Every Garage") did as much as anything to defeat Herbert Hoover in 1932. After Repeal, which Kirby did as much as any man to bring about, he showed Mr. Dry being lugged off to the graveyard, mourned by a rumrunner, a bootlegger, a racketeer and a speakeasy proprietor. "I was almost sorry to see him go," said Kirby. "I was almost getting fond of the old bum."

When the World merged with the Telegram in 1931, Kirby stayed on, but by 1939 he had decided that Editor Roy Howard was too conservative for his taste; he moved over to the New Dealing New York Post. "When I'm through here," he said glumly, "I'm through for good." In 1942, when the money-pinched Post slashed his fat salary, he quit, never again joined a daily newspaper, although he did free-lance work. Last week, at 76, Cartoonist Rollin Kirby died in his sleep at the Manhattan hotel where he lived.

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