Life — August 8, 1912 — page 9: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Enterprising Local Reporter; AS AN AVIATOR, DO YOU THINK THE AEROPLANE HAS COME TO STAY? “THIS ONE HAS.” he writes to the Springfield Republi- can: The real purpose of Roosevelt, so far as there is any reality in his aims, is to have a strong, lawless government, with himself at the head of it. Nothing else nd in the way of gov- les Bird, and many of his other supporters, do not mean anything of the kind; but seek a new and squarer deal in politics, which would surely fol- low the break-up of the millionaire-re- publican domination, established in 1896 by Mark Hanna, ' To promote that, Roosevelt has so far consented as to do what his waning strength will allow in breaking up the party that re-elected him in 1904. He may do much or little, but that is now his purpose. So there are Progressives like Mr. Bird, above, who find it their most urgent duty to smash the present con- trol of the Republican party, and who work with Roosevelt to that end; and others like Mr. Brandeis and Norman Hapgood, who follow what seems to them a more effective method by sup- porting Wilson; and others still—a large company, La Follette, Cummins, Borah, Bristow, the very backbone of the Progressive faction—who see noth- ing ahead in the Roosevelt revolt but Roosevelt, and don’t want that, and who prefer to stick to the Republican hull and salvage it if they can. are getting the scholar into poli- tics in this country. Maybe presently we shall be getting him into the profession of letters, and possibly even into journalism. He would not necessarily be ill-placed there. At present the great and indispensable man in journalism is the man who gets the advertisements. There is no sign of his becoming any less indispensable than he is, but it is possible that we may sce advancement in the fame and salary of his coadjutor, the man who puts into the paper the pieces that keep the advertisements coming. Which recalls that Andrew Lang has died; a death to be deplored both because he was a scholar in literature, and because he followed so acceptably for so many years the employment of feeding to the press the necessary reading matter which is the profitable advertisement’s running mate. It is thirty years next New Years since ad- vertisement, at first so timidly, began to walk hand in hand with entertain- ment in the pages of this journal. 1549 During all that time Andrew Lang has been a name familiar by constant asso- ciation with books and printed pieces, and one always suggestive of liveliness of mind and skill of touch and a well digested erudition. Mr. Lang was the greatest hack-writer of his generation, the most widely known, read, admired and liked of all the large and diligent hack-writer family. T seems that there is hesitation on the part of Park Commissioner Stover to assign a place in Central Park to the monument to Dante, which has been provided for the decoration of this partially Italianized metropolis, through the efforts of the editor of a local Italian journal. Everyone knows that there is a club of eminent bronze literary persons in the Park—Shake- speare, Burns, Daniel Webster, Fitz Greene Halleck and others—and no one has suggested but that Dante's qualities and literary output entitle him to join this company. Mr. Stover’s hesitation seems to be based on doubts if the Italian candidate is being suit- ably introduces. It is pointed out that facts of record favor the theory that the real motive for running Dante into the Park club is not to do Dante honor, nor to better the Park, but to win per- sonal profits of one kind or another that projectors sometimes find in en- terprises of this sort. It seems that the present instigator of the Dante monument has been im- plicated already in the erection of four Italian memorials in New York, and he is thought to lean to this particular activity to a degree that threatens to run into excess, That makes us sympathize with Mr. Stover’s hesitations. Mr. Stover thinks the Dante monument should be better backed than it is. He thinks the Ital- ian Government should approve th: application for a site for it. He wishes fuller assurance that it stands for something more than the advertis- ing instinct of an Italian newspaper man. Those seem to be reasonable desires. comicbooks.com