Life, 1919-09-25 · page 16 of 40
Life — September 25, 1919 — page 16: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page critiques two contemporary issues through text and cartoons. **The Mormon content** discusses Joseph Smith Jr. and the Mormon church's Brooklyn missionary activities. The article dismisses Smith's "revelations" as fake while noting that since polygamy was suppressed, Mormons have gained respectability. It sarcastically compares them to "queer people" in Russia, suggesting American Mormons, while unusual, aren't uniquely strange. **"The Labor Understudy"** satirizes a labor scheme where workers demand high wages, then hire substitutes at one-third the pay and pocket the difference—doing no actual work themselves. The article cites Genoa longshoremen as practitioners, earning $6.50/day while paying substitutes $2, netting $4.50 for zero labor. The satire suggests this arrangement is absurdly simple yet exposes worker exploitation and wage arbitrage. The cartoon vignettes provide social humor: a child's rudeness, marital banter about avoiding bridges, and a man's etiquette about phone calls with ladies—unrelated to the main text.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
542 From the time Joseph Smith, Jr, began to he heard of, the ¢ always been generally current that his revelations were pure fake, and not nator Smoot's reliance on them, nor the prosperity and growth of the Mormon community, is likely to alter that view. But since polygamy was suppressed the Mormans seem to have gained assurance in putting forward the rest of their religion. Their weekly advertisement in the Sunday World is usually interesting. A great deal of what their preachers preach is plain Bible Christianity, for they seem to accept all the Bible and merely annex Jo Smith and his revelations to the Jewish and Christian docu- ments. The centre of their proselyt- ing activities hereabouts is in Brook- lyn, and from their mission station there come the discourses that one may read in the Sunday World. Their preacher, Dr. Talmage, for August Bist, disclosed that it was revealed to “a'M s’rRISED AT You, KITTY DON'T YOU KNOW IT's VERY RU} TO MAKE FACES AT ANYONE YOU HAVEN'T BEEN INTRODUCED Te Pessimistic Wife: yes-s, HENRY! YOU ALWAYS WERE A GREAT FELLER “NOT TO CKOSS BRIDGES” Smith in 1833 that both strong drinks and hot drinks and tobacco were in- jurious to the body, so whenever the movement against tea, coffee and to- bacco gets under way the Mormons may be expected to back it Queer people; very! But not so queer as great communities of people in Russia. TILL YOU GOT TO "EM The Labor Understudy Witt the Labor Understudy be a permanent feature of the land- scape? It is an alluring picture. A workman wrings out of his em- ployer an exorbitant wage. He then lures another man to do his work at about one-third of what he is receiv- ing, and takes the rest and lives at case. Nothing could be simpler. To the longshoremen of Genoa should go the credit of putting this over. They got six dollars and fifty cents a day, and paid others two dollars to do the work. Net result: doing nothing at four dollars and fifty cents per day. In some cases it might be hard to hire substitutes, depending upon the nature of the job. In the case of presidents of republics it would prob- ably be easy MR. GOODFORM ALWAYS REMAINS UN- COVERED WHILE TALKING WITH A LADY OVER THE PHONE, comicbooks.comiy