Life, 1912-07-25 · page 17 of 41
Life — July 25, 1912 — page 17: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**Top Cartoon**: Two nude male figures fight while children watch from behind bars. The mother tells her daughter Mildred to observe this as a lesson—specifically, not to let your "primitive human side" dominate. This satirizes Victorian-era anxieties about civilized restraint. The fighting men represent base human nature; the caged children represent civilization's constraints. The joke targets middle-class pretensions about suppressing instinct and maintaining propriety. **"Ready Made Men" Article**: A satirical piece mocking the ready-made clothing industry by extending the metaphor absurdly. Instead of blaming poorly-fitting clothes on manufacturing, the text suggests people should remake *themselves*—via physical culturists, chiropractors, and surgeons—to fit standard garments. It's humorous social commentary on both mass production and early-20th-century fads for physical self-improvement and body modification. **Bottom Cartoon**: Jonah, rescued from the sea, tells an old sport he couldn't be kept down. This appears to reference the biblical Jonah story as cultural shorthand for resilience.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
© Cie Cushag, “O MOTHER, THEY'RE fighting!” “YES, MILDRED, AND LET IT BE A LESSON NEVER TO ALLOW THE PRIMITIVE HUMAN SIDE OF YOU TO GET THE UPPER HAND.” Ready Made Men ue trouble isn’t so much with ready-made clothes as it is with ready-made men. It is perfectly possible. not only for sculptors, but for scientific craftsmen, to find out just what the proportions of the human body are and to design models which will set properly and hang prop- erly, If these shirts and coats and waistcoats do not fit you, something may be the matter with you. The remedy is not to have your clot made to order, although other considerations besides fit enter into good clothes: the rem- edy is to have yourself made to order. For this purpose, there exist physical culturists, osteopaths, chiropraciors, bone-setters and ordinary surgeons, and even the old fam- ily doctor might help out in a pinch. It is quite feasible to have yourself designed so that, no matter where you meet .a coat or shirt that is properly put together, you will fit it. Jonah: $0 LONG, OLD sport. 1 TOLD You THAT You COULDN'T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN.