Teddy Bear's Father

To the white-haired, windsor-tied dean of U.S. political cartoonists last week came a crowning honor: the Library of Congress asked Clifford Kennedy Berryman, 75, for 2,000 of his originals to be housed as a permanent record of the last half-century of U.S. politics.

In his cluttered cubbyhole off the city room of the Washington Star, spry, ruddy Cliff Berryman began the job of arranging the 2,000 in order. Many of the estimated 40,000 he has drawn are scattered. Presidents from McKinley to Franklin Roosevelt, lesser statesmen, tycoons have befriended him, complimented him, collected his originals--which he gives away for the asking, never sells. Though never syndicated, his cartoons have been widely reprinted. Fellow craftsmen dedicated their cartoons to him on his 70th birthday. This year his cartoon "But Where Is the Boat Going?"--showing Congress, the President, McNutt, Hershey, Lewis, Green and Murray at sea in a "manpower" lifeboat, won the Pulitzer Prize.

But by far the most famed was one he drew in 1902 after hearing that Teddy Roosevelt, at the end of a bagless hunting trip in Mississippi, had refused to shoot a scrawny cub dragged into camp on a rope by two sympathetic Negroes. The "Teddy bear" he drew (see cut) passed into the national folklore, appeared in prose, verse, stage dialogue, political debate, persists as the toy bear which supplanted wooly lambs in the arms of children.

Kentucky-born Cliff Berryman went to Washington when he was 17, as a protege of Kentucky's Senator Joe Blackburn who had admired his youthful talent. Earning his living as patent office messenger, he got his art education "for 20-c- a week" by copying the political cartoons in Puck and Judge. He sold his first cartoon to the Washington Post in 1889, got a regular job there two years later. In 1907 he switched to the Star, where his daily front-page cartoon remained a Washington landmark until 1935.

When he fell seriously ill that year his sports-cartoonist son Jim, then 33, filled in for him. Now father & son share the front-page spot, Cliff four times a week, Jim three. Few readers can tell their work apart. So far as they know, they are the only father-son team in U.S. cartoon history.

Nonpartisan, Cliff Berryman has gone along easily with his paper's editorial policies, taken his fun in satirizing politicians' quirks and conceits. But of Franklin Roosevelt he says wistfully:

"It looks as if that man's in for good. My politics are this--I'd like to see some new faces to draw. I've had Madame Perkins and Harry Hopkins for a long time. I could draw them standing on my head. I'd like to draw Dewey with his teeth and little black mustache, instead of Roosevelt and his cigaret. If I have to work till I'm 90; I'd like to outlast that fellow and draw some new faces."

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