Life, 1914-08-13 · page 16 of 40
Life — August 13, 1914 — page 16: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The top cartoon uses animal characters (zebra, wildebeest, gnu) as stand-ins for people, making a joke about romantic entanglement—the zebra claims his fiancée is "the pretty one" among indistinguishable gnus, suggesting he can't tell them apart or is being deliberately evasive. The article "Who's the Next?" directly addresses labor unrest and state government collapse. It references Colorado, West Virginia, and Michigan experiencing breakdowns requiring martial law to suppress labor disputes. The piece sarcastically suggests these states have inadequate legal frameworks and poor social justice systems, forcing them to resort to military force rather than constitutional means. The article expresses dark humor: it hopes remaining states will schedule their labor crises one at a time to avoid overloading newspapers, and sarcastically predicts fifty more years of documenting how "savage" civilized people become during labor disputes—while emphasizing martial law's futility in solving underlying problems. This reflects early 20th-century American labor conflicts and governmental responses.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
ser erlloatw Miss Hartebeest (in the background); THERE HE GOES NOW WITH THOSE TWO GNU GIKS. BY THE WAY, WHICH ONE IS HE ENGAGED TO? Mr. Zebra: THE PRETTY ONE. ells HOW AN IMAGINATIVE PERSON FEELS WHEN WEARING A NEW PAIR OF LIGHT TANS FOR THE FIRST TIME Who's the Next? OW that Colorado has been quieted by outside force, we have space in the news columns for a good, big sensational running account of how a State government has broken down and been compelled to resort to martial law in a sickly attempt to make up for the lack of a vital constitution and statutes and a fairly modern sense of social justice. There is no doubt, of course, that another State will step into this limelight in due season, but which will it be? Which will follow next in the glorious foot- steps of West Virginia, Michigan and Colorado? Our only hope is that the remaining States will talk the matter over and arrange to come along one at a time instead of two or more at a time, thus overtaxing the capacities of our newspapers. In this way we can easily spend fifty or sixty years more in showing how savage a civilized people can be and in proving the utter futility of martial law in settling labor disputes.