Life, 1918-04-04 · page 16 of 40
Life — April 4, 1918 — page 16: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**Top Cartoon ("Genius"):** Depicts a writer or journalist at a desk surrounded by papers, facing a stern figure in the doorway—likely representing editorial authority or censorship during wartime. **Main Feature ("Red Tape"):** A personified "Red Tape" character delivers a first-person monologue about bureaucratic obstruction during what appears to be World War I. Red Tape boasts of hampering military effectiveness through administrative entanglement, killing soldier enthusiasm, and evading public criticism. It claims invulnerability except to "national wrath." **Lower Cartoon ("A Sporting Offer"):** Two soldiers bet that Germany will be defeated—a confident prediction of Allied victory. **Historical Context:** This satirizes WWI-era military bureaucracy and inefficiency. The Red Tape piece particularly criticizes how administrative procedures supposedly undermine military morale and effectiveness, while resisting public accountability. The page critiques both wartime governmental dysfunction and self-serving institutional resistance to reform.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
I AM Red Tape—red because I mean murder, the murder of our own soldiers. The barbed-wire entanglements of the enemy find their best aid in my entanglements. I can take the most enthusiastic, skilful, altogether effective worker, and in a month squeeze all the enthusiasm out of him and render his skill as ineffective as a sucked orange. There is only one thing I am afraid of, and that is the sharp knife of public criticism. Even that I manage to snarl up in time, though it has slashed me viciously; for I have many coils to spare. Indeed, like all lower animals, I can be cut anywhere and two new animals grow at each cut; so the slashing is painful to me, but multiplicative. Some day—I shudder to think of it—they may try the fire of national wrath. That would be the end of me. Antition ONGR fAN: I've just been reading over my speech in the Congressional Record. A SPORTING OFFER Friexp: How did it seem? “AW! I BET YE A BILLION DOLLARS GOIMANY GETS LICKED” “First rate. T only wish I could talk like that." comicbooks.