Life, 1912-05-23 · page 9 of 44
Life — May 23, 1912 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This Life magazine page features a caricature labeled "Bring Forward!" depicting a figure carrying two grotesque characters in a basket toward "This Way to The Nomination." The accompanying text discusses a Congressman from Missouri being considered for presidential nomination, praised for his practical experience as a farm-hand, newspaper editor, lawyer, and twenty-year congressional veteran. The cartoon satirizes the Democratic Party's potential nomination of this candidate. The exaggerated, unflattering caricatures suggest the satirist views him as an unsuitable or problematic choice. The title "Bring Forward!" mocks the push to nominate him, implying the party is dragging forward an undesirable candidate rather than one of genuine merit. The text also discusses Pan-Islamic tensions and political forecasting—typical Life magazine content of the era.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
!biswioForward! obligation to work for a second term. Six years is not a perfect term. It is too long for a poor President and too short for a good one. But, on the whole, it seems as good a compromise as any. The Presidential office has come to be very laborious and exact- ing. Six years of it is as much as is good for most available men, and in that time there is a good chance to accomplish something worth while. To have to lay aside an exceptionally able and acceptable man after one term of six years in the White House seems wasteful, but against that we may balance the consideration that long possession and exercise of great power tends to breed in some men a sort of restless appetite for executive activity and popular prominence that is akin to the craving for hazards that so commonly results from activity in speculation. We don’t want to breed so much of the gambler’s spirit in our Presidents. We have seen how it works. It does not work well. T looks, just now, as though the Democrats would nominate Champ Clark, and that has made Mr. Clark 1061 a subject of inquiry and conteinpla- tion, There seems to be a good deal to learn about him. He comes from Missouri, the State that wants to be shown, and seems to have in good measure this Missouri quality of teachableness. It is an excellent quality. He has been a farm-hand, clerk in a country store, editor of a country paper, a practising lawyer, a colleg: president, a newspaper correspondent, and for about twenty years a Con- gressman. In Congress he has been able to get along with the other Congressmen, a quality which they have recognized by making him, first, Democratic leader, and, more lately, Speaker. Perhaps if we should make him President he would get along with us. HE papers talk a little of a Pan- Islam holy war, growing out the difference between Italy and Tur- key. Dispatches from Paris offer re- ports from Tunis that say the call to all the Moslems to sit up and take notice is moving steadily from tribe to tribe in every Mohammedan country. This is news fit to send curious per- sons to the Book of Daniel, the Apocalypse and other authorities that are used to be consulted by political forecasters who work on a large scale. For the Mohammedans are a large body, and once they got into motion might, if they held together and could be handled, considerably disturb the existing balances in human affairs. But how could they get together? How could they be handled? How could they get money? In numbers they are rated to include about one- seventh of the pious people on the earth. But what coherence have they? How much real twentieth century power? The unexpected happens so much nowadays that no sensation that one can imagine seems entirely credible, Pan-Islam on the war p is picturesque at least—too pic- turesque, no doubt, to happen, but not too picturesque to think about. any- comicbooks.com