Life, 1916-07-06 · page 25 of 42
Life — July 6, 1916 — page 25: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This 1920s *Life* cartoon satirizes American government dysfunction through mock "resolutions" for Fourth of July reform. The illustration shows various modes of transportation (cars, horse-drawn carts, boats), a visual pun on "neigh for a neigh and a toot for a toot"—traffic chaos representing legislative disorder. The text attacks: 1. **Bloated legislation**: 90% of laws from the past 25 years are "undigested" and incomprehensible 2. **Corrupt courts**: Legal proceedings require millions in fees and multiple appeals 3. **Moral busybodies**: "Monopolists of Virtue" and "Chautauquists" (self-righteous reformers) push unenforceable prohibition laws 4. **Government removal**: Proposals to exile the House and Senate to distant locations (Patagonia, Andaman Islands) to silence them The satire suggests American government has become so dysfunctional and filled with sanctimonious reformers that removing politicians entirely would benefit the public—a scathing critique of legislative incompetence and the Prohibition era's moral crusaders.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
A NEIGH FOR A NEIGH AND A TOOT FOR A TOOT A Fourth of July Suggestion & [F:,85 some day, perhaps, they will do, a the United States, in order to show their entire independence of the rest of the world, including the Calendar, shall decide to make the Fourth of July their real New Year's Day, we venture to sug- gest a few resolutions which, if scrupu- lously adhered to, will result in great good for the Body Politic. I. To swear off ninety per cent. of the undigested, in- digestible, laws placed upon the statute books during the past twenty-five years by Congressional and State Legis- lators whose brain development has been Entomological rather than Anthropological. Il, To recast the remaining ten per cent. in terms which can be understood by the average man of affairs without recourse to seven or cight appeals to high, higher, and still higher courts, involving the retaining of legal talent at a cost of millions to public and private interests; and in so far as it is humanly possible to bring them into reasonable accord with the Ten Commandments. III. To curb the activities of those Monopolists of Virtue, the great army of cloistered invertebrates, and loquacious Chautauquists, who never having been tempted themselves, and are therefore sinless, are devoting their so-called lives to a concentrated effort to make crimes of the predilections and regulated human tendencies of others, hy advocating, and in some cases ramming through, silly and unenforceable measures of prohibition and restraint, whose sole ultimate achievement is to produce a large and growing class of furtive law-breakers and widely adver- tised Pecksniffs. IV. For the of Representatives for a period of ten years from Wash- ington to the heart of Patagonia, and hold them there incommunicado, making it a penal offense for any Amer- ican newspaper to publish a word of what its members may say, cither as individuals or as a body V. With the same object in view, the Common Good, to transport the United States Senate to the Andaman Islands, or some other remote point on a distant map, to be (Continued on page 33) afety of the Public to transfer the House comicbooks.com