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Carey Orr (1890-1967)

A native Ohian and semiprofessional baseball pitcher in his youth, Carey Orr took the money he earned from baseball and enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. After a humble first newspaper job with the Chicago Examiner at fifteen dollars per week, Orr, at the age of twenty-four, joined the Nashville Tennessean as a full-time editorial cartoonist. By 1917, with his cartoons appearing in many national publications, Orr accepted an offer to work for the Chicago Tribune, in which his political cartoons were regularly featured on the front page for more than forty-six years. A crusader for public safety, Orr brandished his pen against gangsterism, waste and corruption in government, prohibition, communism, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Orr was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. In the course of donating more than fifty-four hundred cartoons to the Special Collections Research Center, Carey Orr offered this insight into the creation of his cartoons in a letter of 3 June 1966:

My fifty years as a political cartoonist has been unique in one respect in that I have always finished the drawing completely without submitting the idea to the editor beforehand. The normal procedure is for the cartoonist to submit two or three rough sketches, one of which the editor may O.K. for completion. This latter method is a great time waster, and causes the artist to depend on the judgement of others with regard to his own work. Eventually the artist loses the ability to distinguish a good idea from a poor one. It is a bad habit to be too dependent on others.

Turn Back! Turn Back!
Chicago Tribune, 1956
"Victory thru War" Delusion / Middle East Crisis / The Winners / War's Victims / The Losers
Colored Version

Lopsided Recovery
Chicago Tribune, 1936
We Want Work! / Look! Prosperity is Here! / 12 Million Still Unemployed / WPA Slave / Skilled Worker Sentenced to the Pick and Shovel. / Financial Page: Big Corporations Report Profits / WPA Project

The All-American Platform
Chicago Tribune, 1928
Here Lies the Religious Issue / Killed by Our Forefathers in 1787 / Let Me Out!