A Grand Forks native and UND alumnus, Stuart McDonald’s cartoons appeared in the Sunday edition of the Grand Forks Herald from 1961 until 1967 and in the North Dakotan from 1965 until 1968. In 1963, the Grand Forks Herald published a compilation of his cartoons in a book entitled The McDonald Book: A Collection of Editorial Cartoons by the Grand Forks Herald’s Award Winning Cartoonist. The preface to the book was written by Scott Long, an old friend of McDonald’s and himself an editorial cartoonist at the Minneapolis Tribune. Long reported that:
"No political cartoonist is worth his salt who misuses his valuable space by drawing inoffensive, pretty pictures about the news. A political cartoon is a weapon of attack to be used against the evils and the follies of society. It is potentially the strongest weapon in modern journalism. Often it is drawn in good humor and often it is not. It does not matter how it is drawn if it achieves the purpose of the cartoonist. His purpose is not to be well-liked and popular. It is to reveal injustice and deflate humbug. His purpose is to sting you to awareness of what he regards as a social evil.”
Stuart McDonald donated his original cartoons to the Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections in 1976. The finding aid to the Stuart McDonald Papers can be viewed here.
Stuart McDonald died on October 2, 2021, in Loveland, Colorado.
