Life — February 16, 1922 — page 26: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This W.J. Enright cartoon satirizes the "See America First" tourism campaign by depicting Swiss mountain climbers holding their annual reunion atop New York City's skyscrapers. The joke plays on the absurdity of treating urban architecture as equivalent to natural mountain peaks. The climbers scale the buildings using ropes and equipment, treating Manhattan's vertical landscape as mountaineering terrain. This mocks both the campaign's nationalist appeal (encouraging Americans to visit domestic sites) and the incongruity of applying Alpine climbing traditions to an urban environment. The cartoon appears to criticize either the campaign's overselling of American attractions or the humor in how immigrants adapted their cultural practices to American urban life. The signature "TAB & SON" appears on a storefront below, grounding the fantasy in recognizable New York street-level reality.