May/June 2026 (Volume 18, Issue 3)

 

By Don Doxsie

 

As the Great Depression began to gain a stranglehold on the United States in the middle of the 1930s, Jay Norwood “Ding’’ Darling was on top of the world.

 

He had risen from modest roots as a minister’s son in Sioux City to become arguably the most popular and respected editorial cartoonist in the world. He lived and worked in Iowa, producing daily cartoons for the Des Moines Register, but his work also appeared nationwide in nearly 150 newspapers on the New York Herald Tribune syndicate. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1924 and he was destined to win another one in 1943.

 

Everyone knew the work of Ding Darling and he was well-compensated for his uniquely poignant artistic gifts. He earned a six-figure salary during a time when one-fourth of the national workforce was unemployed and dependent upon bread lines and soup kitchens for its daily sustenance.

 

But in 1934, at the age of 58, Darling gave it all up to take an $8,000-a-year job as the director of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey. It’s an indication of just how much conservation and the preservation of wildlife and natural resources meant to Darling.

 

He eventually returned to cartooning but over the span of a quarter century, Darling may have done more for the conservation movement than any man who ever lived.

 

He helped form the first state fish and game commission in Iowa, an agency that was copied by almost every other state. He was the first director of what came to be known as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He was the father of the National Wildlife Federation.

 

Darling’s interest in the outdoors began very early. His family moved to Sioux City when he was 10 and he and his older brother Frank began exploring the prairies, forests and river valleys of western Iowa and southeast South Dakota, sometimes on foot and occasionally astride a pony. He hunted, fished, trapped and frequently just observed the wildlife he encountered.

 

Darling also spent many summers in Albion, Mich., helping an uncle on his farm there. He frequently hunted ducks but when he shot a wood duck during nesting season one year, he was sternly reprimanded by his uncle. It was an early lesson in the proper preservation of waterfowl.

 

His interest in the subject never dissipated as he built a career in editorial cartooning. His passion for wildlife and his profession frequently became intertwined. On Oct. 21, 1916, on his 40th birthday, he published a cartoon captioned “The Annual Migration of Duck is on’’ that showed hunters blanketing the skies with buckshot.

 

As the years passed, Darling began to use his influence and affluence to affect changes in conservation. He noticed that any time any governmental body in any state tried to establish laws regarding conservation and ecology, the proposed legislation was mitigated if not squashed completely by political wrangling. He wanted his home state to have a way of evading politics in dealing with those issues. 

 

In 1931, as the leader of the Iowa division of the Izaak Walton League, he persuaded the Iowa General Assembly to establish a non-partisan, five-member Game and Fish Commission. He was one of the original five commissioners and in that capacity, he proposed the country’s first cooperative fish and wildlife unit, which deployed experts to research and manage the state’s wildlife. For the first three years the unit existed, he paid a third of the cost himself out of his own pocket.

 

Darling had become close friends with Herbert Hoover. He was a frequent visitor to the White House after Hoover was elected president in 1928, but he recognized that the Iowa-born chief executive had done little to address threats to the nation’s wildlife by many years of drought.

 

TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY AND OTHER FASCINATING STORIES ABOUT IOWA HISTORY, subscribe to Iowa History Journal.