Judge, 1918-02-02 · page 15 of 36
Judge — February 2, 1918 — page 15: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is wartime propaganda satire from Judge magazine, likely from WWI era. The cartoon depicts a grotesque, oversized **sausage monument** replacing the Worth Monument in Madison Square Park, New York City—a real civic landmark. The satire warns American readers what would happen if Germany's Kaiser conquered America: German occupiers would destroy American symbols of liberty and replace them with crude representations of German culture. The term **"Kultur"** (deliberately spelled German-style) was used mockingly to mock German claims of cultural superiority. The sausage—a stereotypical German food—represents the authors' contempt for German aesthetic taste and serves as deliberate ridicule. The text calls this an "atrocity," inverting the language Germans used for their own grievances. The series format ("No. 1") suggests multiple predictions of post-conquest humiliations, designed to rally American patriotic sentiment against German victory.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
If The Kaiser Conquered America—No. 1 H8geu PELE UST what might happen to our cherished symbols of liberty, set up in the public places of American cities, is delicately foreshadowed in this veracious snapshot of the Worth Monument in Madison Square, New York. After the subdued citizens of Gotham had been ruthlessly injected with a large and powerful dose of Kultur, our Teutonic masters would doubtless hasten to improve our art taste by erecting a cast-iron Frankfurter sausage where the famous old shaft once reared its granite finger to the sky. Next week we will show you the photograph of another German atrocity.