Life, 1914-09-17 · page 30 of 48
Life — September 17, 1914 — page 30: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes early 20th-century anxieties about radical social changes. The main article presents a dystopian scenario where marriage has been abolished and replaced with state-controlled child-rearing and "free love"—imagining a future society so horrified by the *return* of traditional marriage that newspapers editorialize against it as a dangerous trend. The cartoons support this inversion satire: 1. **Top left**: A man struggles with a bucking cow while another suggests "taking the bull by the horns"—a visual pun mocking impractical advice. 2. **Top right**: German immigrants (indicated by dialect: "vat," "iss") find humor in a friend's wife "eloping"—suggesting marital instability as comedy. 3. **Bottom**: "Seeing Father" depicts a child finally meeting his father, implying absent fathers were common enough to be noteworthy. The reference to Secretary Bryan and "grapejuice" mocks his well-known temperance stance. Overall, the page expresses conservative alarm about loosening moral standards and family dissolution.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
ISN'T THERE SOMETHING ABOUT ON! THE BULL BY THE HORNS?” “on, JouN! TAKING It's Only How You Look at It HE marriage laws having, by mutual consent, all been abandoned and free love established, the children became the property of the State. A few people, however, still insisted upon getting mar- ried, thus evoking the following editorial in the most re- spectable morning papers: There seems to be no doubt, from the statistics pre- sented by the authorities, that the number of marriages has been increasing to an alarming extent within a compara- tively recent period, It is with profound regret, but a stern sense of public duty, that we feel obliged to chronicle this fact. An occasional marriage here and there is to be expected in the still unsettled state of society and would not be the cause for any remark, but during the last month in this country alone there have been nearly one hundred. If this increase keeps up, what is to be the outcome? Our news columns already have noted a very significant cident the other day in which a child had been secreted hy its parents, and was caught in the act of saying “ papa”! One of the parents—we believe the female—was audacious enough to state publicly that she wished to take care of the child herself. Will this reversion to type, we wonder, become still more common? We shall soon, doubtless, ex- pect to have among us a class of lawyers who will subsist by defending marriages in the courts. We are no pessimists. We still believe in the spirit and institutions of our people. In pointing out this threatened danger, we desire to he recorded as of the settled convic- tion that the bulwark of our nation will still remain true to our most cherished ideals. IVF. your conscience the third degree occasionally. False alarms will happen in the best of consciences. “ ABOUT VAT ARE YOU SO HEARTILY LAUGHING, HANS?” “isu! 1 AM AT POOR OLD FRITZ LAUGHING. HE ISS MIT MY VIFE ELOPING.” Sceretary Bryan is in danger of becoming an experi- enced and seasoned diplomatist —Springfield Republican. W don't believe it. Mr. Bryan may have his faults, but he knows better than that. For one thing, he would have to abandon grapejuice. “SEEING FATHER” Comicbooks.com