Life, 1925-09-24 · page 23 of 41
Life — September 24, 1925 — page 23: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This single-panel cartoon satirizes reckless driving and urban safety in 1920s America. The image shows a driver in an old automobile nearly hitting a well-dressed pedestrian (identified in the caption as "an eminent publicist and author of several scientific works"). The driver's crude dialogue—"HEY, BOZO! ARE YOUSE TRYIN' TO TAKE A NAP ON DE STREET? SHAKE YER DOGS—NO BRAINS! NO BRAINS!"—employs working-class slang and insults the pedestrian's intelligence while being himself the reckless one. The bitter irony is the title: "The Streets Are Safe for Democracy." The joke suggests that in 1920s America, with all its talk of democracy and progress, the streets are actually quite *unsafe*—controlled by aggressive, uneducated drivers who endanger even educated citizens. It's social commentary on how technological progress (automobiles) has outpaced civic responsibility, and how working-class aggression trumps intellectual authority in public spaces.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
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