Life, 1917-10-11 · page 13 of 40
Life — October 11, 1917 — page 13: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes a proposal to rename the United States of America to "Usonia." The Boston Herald reports that Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin (a real mathematician and suffragist) advocated changing the national name because "American" is too broad—it includes people from Canada, South America, and other nations. The two sketches illustrate the absurdity: a baby christened at birth ("The Miracle of Time") and the same person thirty years later ("Thirty Years Later"), suggesting the impracticality of renaming an established nation. The text argues that while "Usonia" sounds nice, the U.S. has no literary claim to it and the name "United States of America" is already "large, hospitable" and adequate. The satire mocks renaming efforts as pedantic and unnecessary.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
} | | THE MIRACLE OF TIME “Americans HIE Boston Herald reports that Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin has renewed her agitation for the adoption of the word “Usonia” as the name of the United States of North America Any subject for agitation is good for a writer, and Mrs. Franklin is a is also a professor, and writer, She studied in Gottingen and Berlin, where, she took on some of the Ger- man disposition to reach after the un- attainable. The prospect for Usonia is not good It is a nice story-book name, but the United States is not an orphan that has been left on any literary person's possibl “LIFE *: No Less doorstep to be christened. Names like Socony and Nabisco can be improvised for use in trade, but you can't name a country that way. What is going to happen, and indeed has happened, is that the United States, being the only considerable section of the American continent that has, as a whole, no delimiting title, will have get along with the name of the con- ion to that will be less whenever in the Lord's good time the rest of the continent comes into the The name is all right es of America —a ne! AML it ne 581 THIRTY YEARS LATER filling in. Tuck in the rest of the continent, and then Chilians, adians, Mexicans, w Yorkers and Californians, Argentir Texans, Yankees, Brazilians willall be Americans together. link? lf it involved loss of individuality. Will that ever be, do you or of control of affairs that are now national, nobody would like it. But the great American continental trust does not look so far off as it did. The United States of rope may emerge from the war, and if it does, how long would it take for a true United States ‘completed? There . and countries of America to be are fashions in poli follow them. comicbooks.com