Life, 1921-02-10 · page 16 of 42
Life — February 10, 1921 — page 16: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This satirical article mocks wealthy car owners who insist on driving themselves rather than hiring professional chauffeurs. The piece argues that self-driving owners are penny-pinchers who create dangerous road conditions by their inexperience, yet ironically spend enormous sums maintaining vehicles and paying insurance. The accompanying cartoons illustrate the absurdity: one shows a chauffeur standing in freezing cold outside a theater (the owner's negligent treatment), another depicts what appears to be a traffic accident or collision. Glass's satire targets the contradiction of the nouveau riche—people unwilling to pay reasonable chauffeur wages while spending lavishly elsewhere, thereby endangering pedestrians and other drivers through their amateur driving.
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LIF & : Drive Your Own Car By MONTAGUE GLASS KEEP ON DRIVING YOUR OWN CAR F you are the type of car owner to I whom driving an automobile is just being bathed in one cold perspiration after another, you will hire a chauffeur. Precisely! You haven't nerve enough to run a car, so you imagine you will have nerve enough to run a chauffeur. My ad- vice to you is to keep on driving your own car. Suppose you do run over a few people, the chances are they will be utter strangers to you, and you carry insur- ARE YOU GOING TO DRAG A HUMAN BEING DOWN TO THE LEVEL OF DRIVING A CAR LISTED AT FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS OR LESS? ance, anyway. dent poli Under the ordinary acci- y you are protected against two. fatal accidents up to and including $5,000 per accident. By payment of a slightly higher premium, you could even indulge in two accidents at $10,000 apiece, but if lower You you insist sticking to the rate, very little extra care is needed. will soon find yourself running over the less-than-five-thousand kind almost by in- stinet, as it were. No doubt you shudder at the Well, if you haven't the firmness to in- convenience people who have never been introduced to you, how do you expect you are going to be properly hard-hearted to a chauffeur! After a chauffeur has heen driving a man of your tenderness for a few days, you will find it just as casy to run down a regiment of strangers as to keep him hanging around outside in the cold until daybreak, waiting to take you home from a poker game with a twelve- o'clock time limit and just one round of consolations. Anyone who cannot run a car as it ought to be run—I mean without reck- oning the consequences in terms of casu- upon idea. alties—will be spending a fortune in taxi- cab fares so as to maintain a chauffeur in the bosom of the chauffeur’s family all day Sundays and legal nvlidays and on week days before 9:00 a. M. and or 6:00 P.M. sufficient hardihood to make a chauffeur keep on the job from 7:00 a. M. to 12:00 midnight or later is the kind of man who regards pedestrians as thank-you-ma’ams, and if he reduces the speed of the car when approaching one, he is only taking a reasonable precaution against a broken leaf in the front spring or something like that. Of course, that type of car owner doesn’t necd a chauffeur, and if he hired one, and thereafter kept him waiting in front of a theatre on a zero night until the poor fellow was frozen stiff, the only object such a car owner would probably have in trying to revive him would be to The only car owner who has fire him on the spot for getting frozen, Search your heart and find out if you are that type of an employer. In other words, if as a driver of your own car you insisted on regarding pedestrians as human beings, with children to be or- phaned, instead of identifying them with the roadbed, you are unfitted to loy a chauffeur. To get the best out of a chauffeur, he must be treated as an in- tegral part of the chassis and engine. li he has a bilious headache, the correct at- titude to assume is that the chauffeur isn’t working right, and if the biliousness per- sists, the only thing to do is to send the car to the service station and have the chauffeur tuned up or have the old one taken out and a new one put in. Should this conception of a chauffeur revolt you, however, and you still believe you will be benefited by employing one, before doing so I implore you to ask yourself: “Can I support a chauffeur in the manner to which he has become ac- customed?” Do you own a car listed $8,000 f. 0. b. Detroit or even Bridgeport, Connecticut? Or are you going to drag a human being down to the level of driving a car listed at $3,000 or less, tra tion charges and U. S. cluded ? isporta- revenue tax in- I am aware that there are car owners who can sit back bursting with pride in + Never-mind-what Sedan, reduced dur- ing the recent depression of the automo- bile market to $710.35 f. 0. b. almost any- where, while a broken-spirited chauffeur KEPT HIM WAITING IN FRONT OF A THEATRE ON A ZERO NIGHT. comicbooks.com