Life, 1914-11-26 · page 31 of 44
Life — November 26, 1914 — page 31: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page from *Life* contains three distinct satirical pieces: **"Little Hope"** sarcastically questions whether labor expert W.L. Mackenzie King—despite his extensive credentials as Canada's former Labor Minister and Harvard-educated scholar—can solve "industrial unrest" for the Rockefeller Foundation. The implication: if someone so thoroughly trained hasn't solved labor problems already, additional research seems pointless. **"Keeping Calm"** is a joke about oil industry dissolution during WWI: when oil companies were broken up, they simply "poured dividends on troubled waters"—mocking how financiers profited from crisis. **"An Exception"** praises the U.S. Postal Savings Bank for remaining stable during wartime financial panic, contrasting it with other institutions' failures. The final caption, with Alsace and Lorraine (French regions) discussing displacement, references WWI territorial warfare. The cartoons mock labor politics, corporate greed, and wartime financial instability while praising government fiscal responsibility.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Little Hope [" is going to take a long time, they tell us, for the Rockefeller Foundation to discover just precisely what is the cause of “industrial unrest”. Every effort was made to put the investigation in charge of the most com- petent man obtainable, and W. L. Mackenzie King, C.M.G., of Toronto, was finally selected. Mr. King has spent his life studying this subject, was Deputy Minister of Labor, and then Minister of Labor under Sir Wilfrid Laurier, is a graduate of the University of Toronto, took post-graduate work at Chicago University and at Harvard, received the degree of Master of -Arts and Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard, edited the Do- minion Labor Gasette, was Registrar of Boards of Concilia- tion and Arbitration and author of numerous reports on labor troubles. Indeed, he knows so much about the subject that one might expect him to be able to give Mr. Rockefeller some valuable information right offhand without resorting to further protracted research. In other words, if he hasn't got to the bottom of the matter with all that training and experience, there is really little to be expected from addi- tional cogitations. Keeping Calm Weer did the oil men do when they were dissolved?” “Oh, just poured a few dividends on the troubled waters.” THE WAY YOUR LIP FEELS JUST AFTER YOU SHAVE OFF YOUR MOUSTACHE “TELL YER MAW I'M THE INSTALLMENT COLLECTOR, AND IP SHE DON’T PAY UP I'LL HAVE TO TAKE THE PIANO” “I WISH YE WOULD TAKE THE DARN THING, THREAT'NIN’ TO GIMME MUSIC LESSONS” SHE'S An Exception HE many sincere, honest and upright citizens of the United States have been noticing that the Postal Savings Bank has been in no way embarrassed by the war. It has been troubled neither by emergency, runs, panic nor moratorium. It has done nothing that financial experts had to explain in order to make us misunderstand it properly. Whether this is because it had no foreign en- tanglements or because it is conducted for banking pur- poses rather than for speculative interests or whether be- cause of something else, it is perhaps too soon to say, but such an example of fiscal serenity amid so much fiscal alarm ought to contain some kind of valuable lesson for us, “TUST as we begin to feel settled we may have to move again,” said Alsace to Lorraine.