Batchelor, Clarence Daniel, 1888-1977

Clarence Daniel Batchelor (1888-1972), known as C.D. Batchelor, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American editorial cartoonist.

A transplanted Midwesterner, C.D. Batchelor worked for the New York Mail and the New York Journal as a staff artist and occasional political cartoonist before landing his first full-time job as a political cartoonist for the liberal New York Post . In 1931, Batchelor joined the staff of the New York Daily News as its chief editorial cartoonist. In The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons (New York: Gale Research Company, 1980), Richard E. Marshall noted that at first the News supported the New Deal, "but the paper and its cartoonist eventually grew disenchanted with liberalism and bureaucracy....Batchelor's strong cartoons were drawn with irony, a moralizing viewpoint and direction; with labels and captions written on scrolls, they have the appearance of documents. In effect, with his crisp style and strong ideas, they are proclamations in cartoon form."

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, Batchelor, having retired from the News in the early 1970s, wound up his career at the National Review, a journal of the political right.

Between 1963 and 1979, Batchelor and his wife, Allegra, donated over six thousand original cartoons to Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.

From the guide to the C. D. Batchelor Papers, 1938-1972, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)