Leftover Liberal

"Barring periods of illness and my regular holidays, I have gone each day for 27 years to a newspaper office and made a cartoon. On April ist I am leaving the [New York] World-Telegram.

"The reason for my so doing is my reluctance to support a point of view which seemed many times to be unfair, and the resultant dissatisfaction of the World-Telegram with my convictions.

"Whatever clash of personalities that may have occurred ... is beside' the mark. ... In all my dealings and association with Roy W. Howard [president and editor of the World-Telegram] I have found him kindly, generous and eminently fair.

"Hatred is a poor thing upon which to build a memory."

These words, written in pencil on a piece of copy paper last week, were the valedictory of the man most newspapermen rate as No. 1 U. S. cartoonist. Even if he wanted another daily job, there are few newspapers left today on which Rollin Kirby would be happy.

A thin, bright-eyed, cultured gentleman of 63, Rollin Kirby classifies his liberalism as "glandular," by which he means he cannot cure it. He thinks Joseph Pulitzer was also a glandular liberal. Believing that most men are kindly, generous and fair, Cartoonist Kirby has made his reputation by mercilessly caricaturing meanness, greed and hypocrisy wherever he has found them. Because he sees these qualities most often in reactionary politicians and businessmen, he has lately been more & more at odds with the front-office policies of the increasingly conservative World-Telegram.

Rollin Kirby had been a failure as a painter and a magazine illustrator when Columnist Franklin Pierce Adams got him a job as cartoonist for the New York Evening Mail in 1911. He went to the World in 1913, first of the small group of men who contributed to that brief flowering of literate criticism and liberal opinion, the World's editorial and "opp.-ed." (opposite-editorial) pages of the 1920s.

Heywood Broun began writing his column in the World in 1921; F. P. A. moved The Conning Tower from the Tribune in 1922; in 1923 Walter Lippmann took charge of the editorial page; from 1925 to 1928 Alexander Woollcott flourished as the World's dramatic critic. Rollin Kirby wrote editorials when he felt like it, besides drawing his long-chinned Prohibitionist, his side-whiskered, potbellied G. O. Partisan and many another famed character. He won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1921 (On the Road to Moscow), another in 1924 (News from the Outside World) and a third in 1928 for Tammany!, one of the most savagely comic cartoons ever printed.

When the World folded in 1931, Rollin Kirby said: "The Telegram is about the only paper I could work for after the World. During my entire 19 years on the World I was never once called off an issue or ordered to go light." This was not so on the World-Telegram. His contract obliged him to follow the policy of the paper, and last year he had to draw two cartoons (pillorying a borough president's assistant because he was a Communist) that outraged his sense of fairness. Since then, no love has been lost between him and Executive Editor Lee B. Wood.

Last December 31, Cartoonist Kirby's New Year's cartoon appeared in the World-Telegram crudely redrawn, his 1939 baby made fatter and healthier than Kirby had meant him to be. Cartoonist Kirby walked out of the office, and for a month no Kirby cartoon appeared. Roy Howard talked him into going back to work, promised that his cartoons would not be mutilated again. Kirby stayed on, missing his friends, of whom only a sulking Broun was left.

Last fortnight Executive Editor Wood told Cartoonist Kirby that his contract, which expires April 1, would not be renewed. To the man who once said: "Scripps-Howard and Joseph Pulitzer seem to have the same ideas," Mr. Wood added: "That's your wish, isn't it?"

That was Rollin Kirby's wish.

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