Life, 1915-09-23 · page 10 of 48
Life — September 23, 1915 — page 10: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is editorial commentary, not a political cartoon. The piece satirizes resistance to automobiles in Mount Desert, Maine, where locals—particularly artist John Ruskin's admirers who valued aesthetic and pastoral ideals—initially opposed motor cars as incompatible with the island's beauty and tranquility. The image shows an absurdist vision: a massive industrial locomotive-ship hybrid violating the serenity Mount Desert sought to preserve. The author argues this juxtaposition is ironic: locals who romanticized horses and rejected cars as machinery's intrusion must accept that progress is inevitable. The "four harbors" reference suggests development pressures were mounting despite efforts to maintain the island's exclusive, undisturbed character.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
550 The Lesson of the Motor Car and the Four Harbors H*® ESS no longer moulds appre- ciably at the seashore. Not that sea air has changed in its qualities. Not at all. There is no harness to speak of any more; that is why. The last seashore fastness of harness was Mt. Desert. Its last harbor fell to the automobiles last spring. Its harbors harbor horses still, but they have ceased to be protected by law. The motor cars are after them, and we all know the end of that story. The only cure for motor cars is a motor car, and since the rise of the Fords it is not a hard cure. The story of the submission of the four harbors of Mt. Desert to the automobile is one worthy of con- templation. It is an epitome of the submission of our modern life to ma- chinery, Ruskin saw all the horrid portents of machinery and fought it off as hard as he could. It was the enemy of art, of beauty, of piety, of tranquillity, of painstaking, of leisure. Ruskin hated railroads. Stage-coaches were cleaner, quieter, sportier, better looking and followed the road in- stead of screeching through the fields. Just so the summer people of the four harbors felt about motor cars. Not one of them was in a hurry. They came to the harbors to escape the pres: sure of current life. Distances are not great at Mt. Desert; time is as abundant there as blueberries; the main road to everywhere is by salt water; the land roads are pleasure drives. Horses went plenty fast enough for pleasure driving. Why, then, motor cars? So the summer dwellers were almost a united band against motor cars, and they were able to array a superabundant majority of the island voters against them. Mt. Desert as it expressed itself in town meeting did not want automobiles. But, after all, Mt. Desert is in Maine, and Maine does not stand for local option, and it was presently disclosed that Mt. Desert did not legally have local option in the matter of automobiles, but must take its share of whatever went in Maine. So now the yoke of the motor car is on the neck of the four harbors; buck- boards and cut-unders edge off to the WHY NOT AN AMPHIBIOUS DREADNOUGHT? right when the horn blows behind; the world invades the sanctity of the more sanctified harbors on Sunday; people wonder what will become of roads built for hoofs, and how they can re- build and how soon they must oil them, and lovers of the world as it was are thankful that there are still long stretches of private roads from which automobiles are excluded. But, of course, the next step to ac- cepting the ine le is to like it. It was not to be expected that the machine that has overcome the world would make more than two bites of little Mt. Desert, once it got across its ferry. Some of the bolder summer dwellers admit already that a motor car is a very handy contraption, even in an exclusive and remote island which’ is never in a hurry. No one can compare the performance of even the most unpretentious motor car on the road with the performance of a horse with- out wondering why the Creator did not put the locomotive animals on wheels. But it would not have done, because Nature is not a roadmaker, comicbooks.com