Life, 1906-11-22 · page 10 of 28
Life — November 22, 1906 — page 10: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes Puritan ancestors and their supposed moral superiority. The text mocks the Pilgrims' pretension to religious virtue while noting their actual ancestry included "all kinds of brass, and, what is more, they hanged it down to their children." The main illustration shows the Mayflower arriving with Pilgrims greeting the shore—a romanticized historical moment. However, the accompanying text undercuts this: it ridicules the Pilgrims' narrow-mindedness, their need to avoid Dutch ancestry for "harder to pronounce" names, and their religious rigidity (Old Testament Christians with "vagrancies in head-gear"). The satire suggests that Americans' celebrated Puritan heritage masks hypocrisy and inherited moral compromise, deflating the mythic status of the Pilgrims in American consciousness.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Ancestral 'T WAS not till they were in midocean that the Pilgrims found all the miscel- laneous ancestors who had shipped as stowaways on the Mayflower. Of course, there wi scene. “Any person,” exclaimed the Fathers, sternly, ‘‘who steals a ride on a vessel especially chartered by parties of a place where the rolling wa high, on a stern and rockbound coast, and the woods against a stormy sky, their giant branches will have tossed, and where they may leave, comparatively unstained, what there they find, to wit: freedom to worship God—any such per- son, we say, is smaller than the little end of nothing.” The ancestors were not abashed. “Precisely,” quoth they. “Otherwise there wouldn’t begin to be room for us in this dinky ship.” These ancestors had all kinds of brass, and, what is more, they handed it down to their children and their children’s chil- dren, unto the fourth generation. Among them may be mentioned the ancestor of the celebrated brown-tail moth. ‘The vexation of the Pilgrims was all the greater, for the reason that they had gone to the pains of shipping from Hol- land expressly on purpose to avoid the rush of ancestors. They figured that Dutch ancestors would naturally prefer to operate in New Amsterdam and get the advantage of names harder to pro- nounce, but in this they were only meas- urably correct, as the sequel proved. ‘The Puritans had to be narrow-minded in order to wear the hat they had picked out for themselves. They were Old Tes- tament Christians, and Old ‘Testament Christianity fosters vagaries in head-gear, as witnesseth the celebrated Paul Kriiger lid of our own time, not to speak of the OUR BEGINNING scarcely less celebrated Oscar Hammer- stein block, which is thought by many to be the effect of a fond and constant study of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Puritans affected long faces at first, or until pie was invented. A pie was cut in quarters and it was soon found that a long face was at a disadvantage in the Vast hiv Gemtar Faee THE ARRIVAL OY THE MAYILOWER WITH 4 CARGO OF FIVE THOUSAND SELECTED ANCESTORS comicbooks.com