This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Born in Superior, Wisconsin, in 1891, Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick studied anatomy and life drawing for two years at the Art Institute of Chicago before getting his first cartooning job at the Chicago Daily-News in 1911. Two years later he moved to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he remained until his retirement in 1958. Acknowledged by many as the dean of editorial cartoonists, Fitz strongly supported the rights of the underdog while attacking the conservative establishment. With cartoons on equal rights for women and blacks, a clean environment, and concern for the militarization of America's post-World War foreign policies, he gained the admiration and respect of scholars, journalists, and statesmen the world over.
Fitzpatrick became a power in the Mississippi Valley. He drew with a grease crayon, but Fitz applied the weapon in a dour, shrouded style that cast a pall of gloom over his subjects. Fitzpatricks work was never funny, but his visual metaphors were powerful and uncompromising. "I was always for the underdog," he maintained.
Fitzpatrick's cartoons documented local, state, and national political and social issues. Locally the cartoons covered St. Louis' mayoral races, public transportation systems, school desegregation, strikes, river front memorial plans, Lambert airport, pollution and housing. Through his Rat Alley series begun in the 1930s, Fitzpatrick exposed vice and corruption in St. Louis. On state and national issues, Fitzpatrick editorialized on political corruption, social programs, highway projects, labor leaders, labor unions, and World War II.
Fitzpatrick won many awards for his work. He received the John Frederick Lewis Prize of the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts in 1924. Twice he won the Pulitzer Prize in cartooning: The Laws of Moses and the Laws of Today in 1926, a cartoon lampooning America's preoccupation with prohibitive laws; and again in 1954 for How Would Another Mistake Help?, a cartoon forewarning America's involvement in Indochina. Fitzpatrick's awards included an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Washington University and a citation from the University of Missouri for distinguished service to journalism in 1958. Exhibits of his cartoons appeared in the Moscow Museum of Modern Western Painting (1941); the Associated American Artists Galleries in New York (1941); and the St. Louis Art Museum (1946).
Aware of his contribution to the recording of twentieth-century history, Fitzpatrick donated nearly 1500 original drawings to the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia in 1945. Another donation in 1953 added 144 drawings to the collection.
Fitzpatrick was a supporter of womens suffrage and the trade union of movement, and during the 1930s led the attack against the emergence of fascism in Europe. One critic, Stephen Hess, has argued that Fitzpatrick played a significant role in changing American public opinion on Nazi Germany: "Daniel Fitzpatrick, one of the masters in the use of symbolism, transformed Nazi Germany's swastika into a horrific death machine. As Adolph Hitler's armies marched across Europe in the 1930s, Fitzpatrick used his symbol repeatedly to challenge America to rethink their isolationist stand and enter World War II."
He retired in 1958 and was replaced on the St Louis Post-Dispatch by another radical editorial cartoonist, Bill Mauldin.
Daniel Fitzpatrick died on the 18th of May, 1969.
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