Life, 1918-03-07 · page 6 of 40
Life — March 7, 1918 — page 6: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page is **not a political cartoon or satire**—it's a straightforward **advertisement** for White Trucks, presented as editorial content in *Life* magazine. The image shows a nighttime industrial scene with multiple White brand trucks operating in what appears to be a mountainous or heavily developed area, illustrating commercial freight transport. The accompanying text promotes White Trucks' reliability for high-pressure interstate commerce, emphasizing their speed, durability, and ability to handle diverse cargo (food, fuel, leather, machinery, boilers). The ad highlights one fleet's 18-truck operation carrying 90 tons of phonograph records to New York daily. The rhetoric celebrates trucks as modern commercial heroes solving rail congestion—a common 1920s-30s advertising theme promoting motorized transportation's superiority over railways.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
RONS of LAND SQ the huge task devolving upon motor trucks to relieve the short haul rail congestion, White Trucks are taking an heroic part. They are buckling down to fast freight service between cities a hundred miles apart. They are reducing days en route to mere hours. Deliveries are being made daily on schedule time. One big fleet operates in nine differ- ent states, hauling every conceivable kind of merchandise—fuel, food, cloth- ing, leather, raw materials, machinery, giant boilers, pile drivers, rugs. Eighteen trucks recently carried 90 COMMERCE tons of phonograph records into New York in a single day. In this high pressure interurban service White Trucks are in their element. The long, hard, heavy pulls through snow, mud and ruts, on fast schedules rigidly maintained day after day, search out the very marrow of trucking power and endurance. The White Trucks stand up and keep going, as they have been doing for years in road building operations, heavy contracting work and in the severest department store service. They have the STAMINA. THE WHITE COMPANY CLEVELAND OMICBOOKsaeamay