BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
LUTHER DANIELS BRADLEY, whose cartoons commanded admiration everywhere, was never personally conspicuous. He did not make speeches, or sit on platforms, or seek office. His very portrait was almost unknown. In an age when publicity comes easily to less eminent men, when, indeed, popular persons are so much written about that their work is less known than their way of working, Luther Bradley managed to live unobtrusively. Yet he had friends, thousands of friends who never saw him, but who felt that in his cartoons he spoke directly to them. They wrote to him, not as "Dear sir," but as "Dear Mr. Bradley." In the scrapbooks wherein he methodically pasted every cartoon he had published for the last seventeen years, he laid away scores of these letters, some from people of note, the majority from that vast body of "plain citizens" he loved to serve. They said in these letters he had "helped" them. They asked his advice. Mothers poured out to him their thoughts. Little boys sent drawings painfully copying his style. He laid all these tenderly away where he could see them again. They were his banquets.
Now that he is dead it seems only fair to his public to tell something about how he lived, and what kind of man he was. A representative collection of his cartoons, such as this volume is intended to present, would be incomplete without the story of himself. It is a simple story, for his adventures were mainly of the intellect; but it has qualities arising from the fact that he was so sterling a man, and so patriotic an American.
THE story of Luther D. Bradley does not really begin with the date of his birth (September 29, 1853) but with the year 1857, when his parents embarked on the great adventure of moving to the "far West"—Illinois. They lived in New Haven, Connecticut, where they were highly regarded both for their own sakes and because of their ancestry. The father, Francis Bradley, was the grandson of Col. Philip Burr Bradley, who received
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