Life, 1918-11-28 · page 5 of 34
Life — November 28, 1918 — page 5: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page from *Life* magazine satirizes American war efforts and labor management. The headline "Patience Has Won the War" accompanies an editorial discussing wartime industrial production and worker discipline. The chaotic cartoon above depicts various caricatured figures—appearing to represent different worker types, government officials, and possibly profiteers—in disorderly celebration or conflict. The drawing style suggests satirical commentary on how diverse groups supposedly contributed to (or hindered) the war effort. The text criticizes amateur management of war production and praises workers' patience despite poor conditions, unfair treatment, and lack of advancement. It argues patience rather than strikes or complaints ultimately won the war, though with veiled criticism of government inefficiency and worker exploitation. The overall message appears tongue-in-cheek—praising patience while implicitly acknowledging legitimate grievances were ignored.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
LET THE NOBLE REDSKIN GO AS FAR AS HE LIKES N_ reckoning what has won the war, give th top place, so far as we Americans are concerned, to patience. Food has won it, oh, yes, as we have so often been reminded. Coa has won it; gasoline won it, and guns and gas and airplanes. But patience, most of all. For, oh, how patient we have been! Would you have thought it was in us! Mauled in our feelings, invaded in all our habits, separated and reseparated with consuming reiteration from our money, teased and meddled with often by fools in all our business, taxed equitably or inequitably, just as it hap- pened, and nothing to do about it but to pay! oh, my! And we have borne it all—paid and sweated and smiled, HOW TO GET EVEN Patience Has Won the War and thought of nothing but the end in view, If ever a people has borne fools gladly, we are that people. Any. put to do a new job for which he has not been trained is more or less a fool about that job, and if he is in authority those under him have to bear with his folly. work was very largely new job, and largely in charge of mateurs. That was true, from the President down. We all had to learn together, and largely from teachers who did not know. A great many of them don’t know now, and never wil but they have learned according to their experience and capacity, and the better ones have slowly come to the top or made up without promotion for the shortcomings of their superiors, If the complaints of the army could be Our war gathered, you would think that nothing was right. If the complaints of the nurses and Red Cross workers and “Y" people and, above all, of the thou- sands of men of business who have worked for the government could be tabulated, with proper headlines, they would that our effort failure. But it wasn't prove was a It was a howling, a magnificent success. Out of amalg mated ignorance has come knowledge; out of co-operative incapacity has come wonderful power, and all because the mass of us couldn't quit and had to have patience and do the next thing. Patience has won the war. It has not been won by biting thumbs at Mr. Wilson. geared to effort that began again every morning and gritted its teeth to see the job through. Patience has won it. Patience comicbooks.com