Life, 1920-11-11 · page 11 of 44
Life — November 11, 1920 — page 11: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The top cartoon depicts a farmer and city man discussing a cow. The farmer boasts about the cow's productivity ("she's a gran' li'l cow"), while the city man asks "with cream?"—a joke about urban consumers' disconnection from agricultural reality and their assumptions about dairy products. Below, "Why Waste Money on Battleships?" presents a satirical argument that the cost of one battleship (reclaimed from million acres) could fund numerous public goods: poets, roll-top desks, private carriages for Brooklyn residents, golf balls, and "spotters" for Broadway bars. The satire mocks military spending priorities by listing absurdly specific civilian alternatives, critiquing defense budgets during what appears to be an early 20th-century period of naval expansion debates.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Farmer: yrs, sut's A GRAN’ LI'L’ CAOW, SUNDAYS AND HOLIDAYS—RAIN OR SHINE—SHE'LL GIVE HER FOURTEEN QUARTS 0° MILK EVRY DAY—YEAR ROUND, City Man: ex—Wwitit CREAM? Why Waste Money on Battleships? It would provide sufficient paper and ink for 7¢ Peace poems by Greenwich Village poets; It has recently been figured that.the cost of one hattle- Or. ship Would reclaim two million acres of land. Multiply this by forty-eight, the number of states, : ng the plan of one battleship for cach state, and you have a stagger- ing total. . . . The expenditure required in total would reclaim one hundred and fifty thousind square miles of waste, It would build ten nently paved arteries en- tirely across the United States—Governor James M. Cox, in a speech at Helena, Mont. It would suffice to pay about one-tenth of the war levy which would one day be exacted by some invading nation if we had no battleships. ROBABLY this is all very true. But why did the Governor not carry his line of argument a little further? The ques- , tion of what might be done with the money which is now ex- pended for battleships offers an almost illimitable field for speculation, It would buy roll-top desks for 876.432 extra clerks at Wash- ington ; It would provide private flivvers for every resident of Brook- lyn in times of strike and stress; It would insure an adequate supply of golf balls for the Novices’ Club at Van Cortlandt Park; It would pay the salaries of a sufficient number of spotters to watch the spotters watching the Broadway booze resorts; Mrs. Monk: coovness! 1 poN'T KNOW WHAT I'D DO WITHOUT A VACUUM CLEANER comicbooks.com