Life, 1914-11-05 · page 18 of 48
Life — November 5, 1914 — page 18: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**The Cartoon:** "The Annual Thanksgiving Festival at Hollywood Glen" depicts anthropomorphic animals (a mother skunk scolding her son Willie) at a dinner table. The satire is obscure without knowing the specific Hollywood reference, but the joke appears to mock social pretense—animals imitating human dinner etiquette while the mother warns against bad manners ("come down the wind to dinner" likely refers to unseemly animal behavior). **"The Cotton Situation":** This article satirizes post-WWI economic absurdity. It mocks the "buy-a-bale" movement—where Americans voluntarily agreed to purchase expensive, unwanted cotton to artificially maintain high prices and prevent affordable clothing. The author ridicules this as illogical: paying inflated prices for goods you don't want to avoid cheap goods you do want, framed as patriotic duty for "sane and right-thinking" citizens. **"News of the Day":** Praises Congress for finally holding steamship owners financially liable for passenger safety—a measure opposed only by the shipowners themselves, highlighting corporate resistance to safety regulations. Both items satirize contemporary economic and political failures through irony and absurdist humor.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE ANNUAL THANKSGIVING FESTIVAL AT HOLLYWOOD GLEN The Bear: COME DOWN TH The Cotton Situation r is necessary to go into the cotton situation carefully in order to misunderstand it properly, On account of the war and the excessive industry of climatic conditions and the cotton growers, we have so much cotton that people who are badly in need of it for clothing and other purposes are in great danger of getting it. That is to say, unforeseen events have come about with such celerity that our speculators have been unable to adjust cotton to that high-cost-of-living standard to which we have accus- tomed ourselves during the reign of the trusts. Conse- quently something had to be done or we would sink into that barbaric condition known as low-cost-of-living, which would leave us more leisure time from the daily grind than we would know what to do with. The buy-a-bale movement was the answer of our expert FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, WILLIE SKUNK, HAVEN'T I TOLD YOU ENOUGH TIMES NEVER TO WIND TO DINNER? . economists. It means that we are to get together and agree to pay a high price for a lot of cotton that we don’t want in order to keep ourselves from getting cotton that we do want at a low price. Needless to say, it is the fervent prayer of every sane and right-thinking man and club woman that the movement meet with unanimous support. E. 0. J. News of the Day (As It Ought To Be.) HE only bill ever presented to Congress making the owners of steamships liable for the safety of passen- gers, and fixing their responsibility at one million dollars for every life lost, was passed by both houses and signed by the President amid the applause of everybody except the steamship owners. comicbooks.com