Life, 1887-11-10 · page 12 of 16
Life — November 10, 1887 — page 12: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Life Magazine Page 266: Historical Satire Analysis This page contains several separate humor pieces satirizing American society and politics circa the 1880s-90s. **"A Trying Situation"** cartoon depicts a hungry donkey in a "Democratic Field"—political allegory suggesting the Democratic Party's weakened state or limited opportunities. **"The Lost Editorial"** is the page's most pointed satire. It presents a fictional editorial supposedly suppressed from the *Tribune* following Judge Ellett's death at a Cleveland reception. The piece viciously attacks President Cleveland, sarcastically implying his unworthiness to receive a judge's welcome by cataloging his supposed failures: draft-dodging during the Civil War, winning by a narrow plurality, and moral corruption. The editorial's concluding assertion that Providence "struck down" the judge for greeting Cleveland is bitterly ironic—suggesting Cleveland's presence itself is cursed. This reflects sharp partisan divisions of the Gilded Age, when political attacks were ferociously personal. The satire mocks extreme partisan rhetoric by presenting an absurdly venomous editorial as something that *would* circulate. Other pieces on the page are lighter anecdotes about everyday annoyances.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
266 AN ANNOYING CIRCUMSTANCE, walkin’ down Third Avenue to- said old Mrs. Bently, “ when somebody in an upper winder threw out a pail o’ water, an’ most of it landed on my new bonnit an’ jest ‘bout spiled it. 1 don't know when,” concluded the old lady, “ that I've felt so irrigated over ennythin’.” JOWDERED glass is largely taking the place of sand in the manufacture of sand-paper. This affords a new field of usefulness to the Irish servant-girls who come to this country to play havoc with our tableware. If any powdered glass company wants an efficient girl to reduce decanters, vases, or ordinary mugs to the original dust, applica- tion may be made at this office. HE following telegram was sent home by a member of the Yale baseball nine: “Nose broken—which do you prefer— Greek or Roman? Telegraph answer before doctor sets it.” VOCAL. pas are the voices of the body, So that if a man’s passions are evil, his body must have a bass voice. SIR, WE HAVE AT Last YOUR VALET, BUT SAD TO SAY HE’S CUT IN TWO, English Tourist : AW, VEWY DISTRESSING | SORRY TO TROUBLE YOU, DONTCHERKNOW, BUT I'VE NEVER TRAVELED IN THIS COUNTRY BEFORE; WOULD YOU SEE IN WHICH HALF 1S THE KEY OF MY TRUNK? A TRYING SITUATION. Huncry Democracy’s Oxty Cnance, THE LOST EDITORIAL. > OR some reason or other the following editorial did not appear in the Trdune on the morning following Judge Ellett’s death : “The country is profoundly shocked at the death of the venerable Judge Ellett, of Memphis, immediately after he had dehvered an address of welcome to President Cleveland. * Why the country should be so, and why so much sympathy for Mrs, Ellett and her bereaved family should be displayed, is not clear to us. “The President of the United States is a man who, when his country was in the throes of grim-visaged war, remained at home content to shed a substitute’s blood, that the Government which had fostered him might live on to eternity. “He is a man who attained his present position by a beggarly plurality of twelve hundred votes, which, but for the inopportune alliteration of an insane priest, would have been cast for a better man. “He is a man who, had he in his youthful days shot his aged grandmother in the back with his father’s shot-gun, would have stained his soul with red-handed, cowardly murder. “This is the man whom Judge Ellett welcomed to Memphis, Is it to be wondered at that an all-wise, far-seeing Providence, under whose protecting wing the Republican Party lived and grew during the twenty-four years of its glorious existence, should strike down into everlasting death one whose lips should have been palsied before they permitted the Roman pearls of welcome to escape them ? “It is not! “+ Justice Is swift, nis sure.” Retribu comicbooks.com