Life, 1914-03-19 · page 21 of 44
Life — March 19, 1914 — page 21: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This satirical piece attacks Progressive Era "uplift" movements and their advocates. The author sarcastically suggests that if critics truly believed their own rhetoric about social reform, they should join the Mormons—who, the piece claims, successfully provide food, health, and social order. The satire targets feminists, labor activists (the I.W.W.), and other reformers who advocate for women's suffrage, factory reform, and social change. The author mocks them as hypocritical: they criticize American society while refusing the "proven" Mormon alternative because they actually want power themselves rather than genuine improvement. The "Roman History" cartoon shows Cleopatra dissolving pearls (representing tradition) in grape juice—implying Mormon culture and other new movements are carelessly destroying established values. The piece's core argument: these reformers don't truly care about people's welfare; they just want to control society according to their own ideologies. It's a defense of existing institutions (religion, monogamy, constitutional government) against what the author views as dangerous radical experimentation.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Apparently it turns over its money to excellent purpose. It rules its people by a secret government which seems to be satisfactory to the governed. It receives all comers, so far as we know, and we hear no complaints about un- employed or starving Mormons. stead 2) F nothing matters but that people shall be fed and lead healthy lives and have healthy children; if our prejudices in favor of the old religion and monogamous marriage and indi- vidual liberty, and = manhood and womanhood and childhood and the home and the family as we have known them, are all “bunk” and old wives’ tales, why don’t we all join the Mor- mons, and achieve industrial and social regeneration, woman suffrage and the annihilation of white slavery all at one swoop and have good care taken of us ever after? Why should we sweat over so many theories, and fuss about laws to quell the railroads and curb the corporations, and soap-box about women votes and the compara- tive horrors of marriage and prostitu- tion, and make junk of the Constitution to get the little children out of the mills, when here at hand, is a going SHOWING HIS LINE concern, of American invention and demonstrated practicability, that will take us all in as fast as we come and save us a'l further trouble and anxiety about this world or the next? How dull we have been! Lo, this window opening into Utah, and here we dilly-dally and go to hear the Feminists debate! Come on, brethren! Come on, sisters!’ Come to the promised land of Utah, a Utah that shall stretch ROMAN HISTORY CLEOPATRA DISSOLVING THE PEARLS OF TRADITION—IN GRAPE JUICE from ocean to ocean; where all the cld prejudices shall he extinct, and grape juice shall flow like water, and no man shall want for bread! UT probably it wouldn't do. The Mormon elders would be our bosses. That wouldn't suit the Uplift, nor the leading Suffragists, nor the I. W. W., nor any of our politicians, all of whom prefer themselves to di- rect our destinies, and make our laws, and have the spending of our surplus earnings. And there are those who maintain that civilization and govern- ment as we have practiced them these last hundred years have not been such a fizzle and are not so clearly obsolete as the new teachers assert, and that even our prevailing religion is sounder without the Mormon improvements. But if we could induce the more obstreperous of the uplifters to join the Mormons and uplift them, that would be a real help. They wouldn't have so very far to go. What they would leave behind they don’t seem to care for, and much of what they might get is in pretty close ap- proximation to their expressed and suggested wants. comichooks.