Newspaper editorial cartoonist Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling lived and worked in Des Moines for most of his career, drawing for the Des Moines Register, but his editorial cartoons were syndicated nationwide by the New York Herald Tribune. He drew more than 15,000 editorial cartoons during his illustrious career. Photo courtesy of cbr.com
March/April 2026 (Volume 18, Issue 2)
(Publisher’s note: The second part of Don Doxsie’s series will focus on Ding Darling’s conservation work and will be published in the May/June 2026 issue of Iowa History Journal.)
By Don Doxsie
A leading beer company for years has aired commercials centered around “the most interesting man in the world.’’ Had they been making those ads in the first half of the 20th century, they easily could have featured a man named Ding Darling. At the very least, Darling was the most diverse and interesting man in Iowa.
Darling, who spent half of his childhood and almost all of his adult life in Iowa, had two astonishingly successful and vastly different careers. He was among the most popular editorial cartoonists ever, winning two Pulitzer Prizes. But he also essentially was the father of America’s conservation movement. He also was a sculptor, musician, pundit and philanthropist.
In everything he ever did, he almost never was dull.
His biographer, David Lendt, insisted that Darling never wrote an uninteresting letter or delivered a boring speech. “He was a man of strong and stubborn conviction; a man capable of tremendous human compassion; a man who enjoyed prodigious powers of expression, energy and commonsense intellect,’’ Lendt wrote in “The Life of Jay Norwood Darling.”
Darling’s friends and confidants included such men as Henry Ford, Will Rogers, Grantland Rice and Walt Disney. He was on a first-name basis with seven U.S. presidents and was especially close to Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.
Darling’s popularity wasn’t just limited to the U.S. He traveled the world in his lifetime. He once spent five weeks in Russia at the personal invitation of Josef Stalin.
His unique artwork and wry humor touched something in readers everywhere. Fellow cartoonist Rube Golberg said Darling perfected the art of “gentle ridicule.’’ Another contemporary, S.J. Ray, said “The viewer always could identify himself with Ding’s characters—they were either yourself or someone you knew. He may have been the best of them all.’’
Jay Norwood Darling was born on Oct. 21, 1876, in the small hamlet of Norwood, Mich., where Lake Michigan takes a detour into Grand Traverse Bay. His father, Marcellus Darling, had become disenchanted with the politics he encountered as an educator and transitioned to a career as a Congregational minister. He was assigned to a church in Norwood shortly before Jay was born.
The Darling family only stayed there for a year or two before moving to Cambria, Mich., and then to Elkhart, Ind. When Jay was 10, Marcellus became the pastor of the First Congregational Church in Sioux City and the family moved to the northwest Iowa town in 1886.
That is where young Jay Darling first fell in love with wildlife and the natural world. It’s also where he began to draw things. While still in Elkhart, a family friend had sent the Darling family an illustrated Pat and Mike card from England and something in it resonated with young Jay. He began carrying a notepad and pencil with him everywhere he went, making multiple sketches each day despite the disapproval of his puritanical father, who felt such things were a waste of time.
TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY AND OTHER FASCINATING STORIES ABOUT IOWA HISTORY, subscribe to Iowa History Journal.