Clarence Batchelor

Clarence Batchelor was born in Osage City, Kansas on 1st April 1888. After attending Chicago Art Institute, he moved to New York in 1923. Over the next few years he worked as a cartoonist for the New York Journal, the New York Evening Mail, the New York Post and The Judge.

Batchelor was sympathetic to woman suffrage and contributed cartoons to the Women Journal and the Women Voter.

Batchelor usually wore a homburg hat, ascot and cane. He later commented it's "just as easy to be a character as not to be one - and a hell of a lot more fun."

In 1931 Batchelor became the lead editorial cartoonist for the New York Daily News. Batchelor was a strong supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Although he was a strong opponent of Adolf Hitler he feared that Roosevelt would get involved in an European war. This is reflected in his 1937 winning Pulitzer Prize cartoon, Come on in, I'll treat you right. I used to know your Daddy. As Brian Cronin has pointed out: "While FDR was a proponent of supporting England and France against the rise of Nazi Germany, Batchelor was strictly against going to war (I suppose you could then term him an Isolationist, but I think 'anti-war' describes him better)."

During the Second World War Batchelor produced material for the American Social Hygiene Association that worried that the war effort would be undermined by the spread of venereal disease.

In 1957 he finished a 48-foot-long mural depicting the history of communication for the Daily News Building. Although it took two years to produce it is no longer on show.

Clarence Batchelor died on 5th September 1978.