As Ding Saw Herbert Hoover by Jay N. Darling

This overarching wildlife thesis was the path-forward recommendation from a cadre of top conservationists, headlined by Aldo Leopold, who would author the definitive text Game Management in 1933.Īmerican Game Policy shook the world. Eventually, years later, at the bequest of what is today known as the Wildlife Management Institute, an American Game Policy was unveiled during December 1930.

Perhaps worst of all, the Great Money Grab of the maturing Industrial Age was simply thrashing the rapidly diminished natural resources of America.īefore and after President Theodore Roosevelt went public with his Square Deal manifesto, America’s greatest statesman and hunter-conservationist was inspiring and enabling the birth of a national conservation movement.

Nor was there a hard-wearing, science-based conservation agenda to fix that last problem.

He developed close relationships with political elites and creative types to include Walt Disney.Īmerican life in the early 1900s, with its Great Influenza Epidemic, Great War, Great Depression and Dust Bowl, didn’t leave much room for the country’s decimated wildlife populations. But it was his evolution to syndicated editorial cartooning that gave frequency and reach to his voice during a 49-year publishing career, which also included stints with the Des Moines Register and Leader, the New York Globe and the New York Herald Tribune. With college behind him, Darling entered the newspaper business in 1900 as a reporter for the Sioux City Journal. The young hunter’s first lesson on the importance of wildlife conservation was dispensed by an uncle who corrected Darling for shooting a wood duck during the nesting season. Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling (1876-1962), the Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist, the hunter, was a conservation legend in his own time, and one for all time.īorn in Norwood, Michigan, Darling’s appreciations for nature began to coalesce on the sun-splashed prairie surrounding Sioux City, Iowa, the place his parents moved the family when he was 10.

As Ding Saw Herbert Hoover by Jay N. Darling