Life, 1911-09-21 · page 18 of 52
Life — September 21, 1911 — page 18: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This satirical piece mocks marital discord and the emerging divorce industry of early 20th-century America. The illustration shows a man (likely representing a divorce profiteer or "marriage counselor") presenting his case to a court surrounded by women and officials. The text describes a fictional "Husbands' Correspondence Bureau"—a scam business accused of deliberately creating marital strife to sell "treatments" to desperate husbands. The satire targets: - The commercialization of divorce and relationship problems - Yellow journalism's sensationalism - Corrupt judges and congressmen allegedly patronizing such services - The absurdity of a monopoly on marital misery The narrator's casual admission that half of Congress were "customers" suggests widespread corruption. The headline "AND THEY COME THROUGH IT ALIVE" implies the scheme survives despite exposure—satirizing how money and connections shield wrongdoing from accountability.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
AND THEY COME THROUGH IT ALIVE own wife—to whom we have been married only a few short months and who is now living in Reno preparatory to a small flat in Harlem (at our expense)—was one of the principal witnesses against us. In spite of this interesting fact, how- ever, we still continue to pay her expenses, and although we may get married again this year, thus adding materially to our already heavy financial burdens, we shall continue to pay the alimony due her—unless, after presenting the court with the facts in the case, we can get it cut down tp a reasonable basis. We may mention that the judge himself has for some time been one of our best customers, and we entertain the highest respect for him and believe that he is strictly impartial. We re therefore hoping for the best The counts against us were presented in a document of four or five hundred pages, set up and printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the moncy to pay for it coming. as it is unnecessary for us to state, out of the pocket-books of the American people. Not only this, but the moment we reached the dock, a pearl necklace which we had brought over to present to the tall blonde who has charge of our of fice was promptly seized, and we had to pay thrce thousand dollars duty upon it. In our opinion, it is matters of this sort which make Socialism an absolute certainty for the near future. Among the numerous counts against us, we have only space or patience to notice a few on account of their amusing qualities. It was asserted that we maintained a Bureau known as the “ Husbands’ Correspondence Bureau” for the treatment of all suffering husbands, and as we had undersold all competitors in every State in the Union, we constituted ourselves a monopoly; that we stirred up trouble between husbands and wives in order to get them to subscribe to our course of treatment; that we were the secret cause of most of the marriages of American girls to titled strangers; that we had bought up the yellow journals, paying them as much asa thousand dollars an editorial in order to exploit us; that ur entertainment committee was nothing but a vaudeville ir; that our Sceing-the-Tenderloin auto was a chariot of iniquity; that the tall, handsome blonde in charge of our of- fice was responsible for more broken hearts than we had ever cured in the whole course of our business; that our own mat- rimonial troubles—our getting married on the average every two years—were an indication of our fake methods; that hus- bands everywhere should be warned against a concern that subsists on the fears of mankind, ete., etc. As we grow older we grow more charitable. There was a time when a paper of this sort would have aroused our in- dignation. But the human heart contains both good and bad in abounding measure. In the present instance we wasted no time. Knowing that the affair would come up before Con- xress, we simply went over our books, discovered that over half of the members of both houses had been from time to lime customers of ours, most of them happily cured, and we then sent a circular telegram to all of them stating the cir- cumstances. Inside of two days the whole indictment was quashed and we were triumphantly vindicated, the only paper comicbook $.co