Life, 1910-03-03 · page 31 of 80
Life — March 3, 1910 — page 31: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page discusses Civil War memorial disputes rather than presenting political cartoons. The main article, "Unprofitable Discussions," addresses two controversies: 1. **Harvard Memorial Hall controversy**: Harvard faced debate over whether to inscribe names of alumni who served the Confederacy on memorial tablets. Union veterans opposed this, arguing the hall should commemorate only Union soldiers. 2. **Lee statue in Capitol**: A related dispute involved a Confederate statue in the Capitol's Statuary Hall in Washington. The editorial argues these debates are "unprofitable" and advocates ignoring provocative voices—citing Senator Heyburn of Idaho, who railed against lending government tents to Confederate veterans, with no one bothering to respond. The point: Post-Civil War America should discourage divisive war-memory disputes rather than relitigate sectional conflicts. The bottom cartoons ("Easter") appear decorative rather than satirical.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Unprofitable Discussions HE papers a fortnight ago had much to tell about a disturbance in Harvard College over a question of put- ting the names of the Harvard men who served on the Confederate side in the Civil War on tablets in Memorial Hall. The matter came up some time ago, when the proposal was temperately dis- couraged by some surviving Civil War veterans, who thought that Memorial Hall should be restricted to the uses it was built to serve—to wit, to be a me- morial to Union soldiers. That opinion quelled the discussion for a time, but it broke out again lately and seems to have come to be rather heated That's a great pity. All such Civil THE QUARREL War discussions, including the recent wrangle over the presence of the Lee statue in Statuary Hall in the Capitol at Washington, give opportunities to the indiscrect for mischievous discourse. They are entirely unprofitable and fit to be discouraged whenever they ap- pear. That the current disposition is to discourage them appeared in the Senate the other day, when Heyburn, of Idaho, brayed long and with great fury over the proposal to lend some Govern- ment tents to some Confederate veteran organization. Not a soul answered him, even Jeff Davis, of Arkansas, being dis- suaded from reply. When he got through the measure was passed and Heyburn’s vote was the only one cast against it Ay EASTER That was the way to deal with these cases, and it showed the general tem- per of the people about them The trouble at Harvard is that there is no place there except Memorial Hall in which 4 memorial tablet may suitably be placed. They need a new provision for such records. Maybe some day somebody will build Harvard a great chapel with walls fit to receive tablets and sculptured memorials. Every col- lege has need of such a place. HAT Congress should turn its at- tention to at once is the devising of some means to prevent strikes and bank failures just at the time when the country is most prosperous. 52 comicbooks.com