The Best of Batch

C(larence) D(aniel) Batchelor’s political cartoons, which have enhanced national review’s pages since 1956, have the elegance and dash of an honored era in American journalism, an era of great syndicates and great circulation figures, an era that valued probity and patriotism. Batch learned cartooning as the occupation of a full artist, an illustrator rather than an editorial side-man. He epitomizes to this day the gentleman stylist. His silvery vistas and delicately pencilled line, his technical solidity, have not changed with the years and bespeak a love of craft. If his drawings often seem too academically beautiful in the context of the day’s news, they retain an individual flavor as personal as thumbprints, and no one else uses the classical allegorical conceptions (Uncle Sam, Columbia, the Ship of State) with such authority.

As a boy Batchelor worked on the Kansas City Star in his native state. His first political contribution was made at an early age to the Boers in the Boer War. In 1930 Joseph Medill Patterson hired him away from the Post-Ledger Syndicate and installed him at the New York News, where he still flourishes, lending his talents to magazines like The Freeman and national review or illustrating books like Wedemeyer Reports.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

C(larence) D(aniel) Batchelor’s political cartoons, which have enhanced national review’s pages since 1956, have the elegance and dash of an honored era in American journalism, an era of great syndicates and great circulation figures, an era that valued probity and patriotism. Batch learned cartooning as the occupation of a full artist, an illustrator rather than an editorial side-man. He epitomizes to this day the gentleman stylist. His silvery vistas and delicately pencilled line, his technical solidity, have not changed with the years and bespeak a love of craft. If his drawings often seem too academically beautiful in the context of the day’s news, they retain an individual flavor as personal as thumbprints, and no one else uses the classical allegorical conceptions (Uncle Sam, Columbia, the Ship of State) with such authority.

As a boy Batchelor worked on the Kansas City Star in his native state. His first political contribution was made at an early age to the Boers in the Boer War. In 1930 Joseph Medill Patterson hired him away from the Post-Ledger Syndicate and installed him at the New York News, where he still flourishes, lending his talents to magazines like The Freeman and national review or illustrating books like Wedemeyer Reports.