Life, 1910-07-21 · page 19 of 40
Life — July 21, 1910 — page 19: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This 1910s *Life* magazine page satirizes how human appetites—especially hunger—drive society and politics, making utopian ideals impossible. **The Main Cartoon** ("Asleep at the Switch") depicts a railway worker sleeping while a train approaches, titled "A Romance of the Congo"—likely a colonial reference, though the specific allusion is unclear. **The Text Essay** argues that the stomach is humanity's true master. It mocks various political movements of the era—Socialists (advocating child nutrition programs), Single Taxers (land reformers), and Prohibitionists—as impractical because they ignore that humans will always be enslaved by hunger and appetite. The writer suggests eliminating the stomach would eliminate these reform movements, French cuisine, tips, and indigestion tablets, making Utopia possible. The satire targets idealistic reformers as naive: you cannot perfect society while people must constantly eat, work, and worry about food costs. It's a cynical commentary on progressive-era activism.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
The Stomach HILE the learned doctors and sur- geons are listing those parts of the body with which we can dispense, why not consider the stomach? It is proverbial that man is ruled by his stomach and, consequently, by women, all statements of the suffragettes to the contrary notwithstanding. Women know that men can be reached through their stomachs and that’s why they keep con- trol of the culinary department. Sic semper tyrannis. The worst is that, no matter how sane we may be, driving our appetites with the most rigorous of curb bits, neverthe- less the stomach needs regular and fre- quent attention. That's where the trouble lies, That's what keeps us on the jump in spite of the efforts of the Christian Scientists to make us think that mind is everything ASLEEP AT THE A ROMANCE. OF Nor is the stomach content with mere sycophantic dilettanteism or spiritual homiletics. It must have food, real (T will not say unadulterated) food. And food costs money and money costs energy and energy costs time; hence the alarm clock industry which gets us up in the morning in spite of ourselves. If we could get rid of the stomach we could at one fell swoop get rid of the Socialists who are trying to get the chil dren fed, the Single Taxers who are try- ing to make us all hayseeds, the Prohi- hitionists who stand exclusively on a Tae SWITCH conco stomach platform, the Democrats who consist of raw material and the Repub- licans who are the finished products of up-to-date grafting. We would cease to watch the crop reports and the farmer could take a much-needed and long-de- ferred rest. Tips would be abolished and French would go out of style. Dys- spepsia tablets would become a lost art nd delicatessen stores would no more ssai! the nostrils at every block We can, in short, never reach Utopia so long as we have stomachs E.0.1. comicbooks.com