Life, 1925-11-05 · page 9 of 50
Life — November 5, 1925 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This satirical poem in *Life* magazine catalogs contemporary urban vices and crimes of the Jazz Age era. The accompanying cartoons illustrate various social ills: gambling, violence, sexual misconduct, bootlegging (during Prohibition), con games, kidnapping, and organized crime. The verse mocks both the criminals themselves and the sensational newspaper coverage of their exploits. References include "Passionate Parson Convicted of Arson," "Sweetie Slays Daddy," and "Dying, Flays Lynchers"—apparently real or semi-real scandals of the period. The poem's closing couplet asks sarcastically: "Ain't this a grand world we're living in, buddy?"—a rhetorical condemnation of American urban corruption and moral decay. The cartoons show pickpockets, car thieves, and various lowlifes operating freely in this lawless landscape.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Liffe The Criminal Follies UST take a slant at the calendar criminal From the pediculous to the subliminal: Scandals and vandals, vendettas and stickups, Women and children tanked up to the hiccups. Gunmen and robbers and murder odd-jobbers, Brazen bootlegmen and butter-and-yeggmen. Pool sharks and rent sharks and twenty-per-cent. sharks; Flappers and debbies in house-party orgies With lounge-lizard Rollos and garter-snake Georgies. Real-true confessions of sex-indiscretions; Gin-trysting, sin-trysting— Isn't that intristing ? Fall guys and suckers, society muckers, Simps and bolonies all playing the ponies. “Lay down that ace or I'll mash in your face!” “You clown, you!” “T'll crown you!” “Get out of this place !* Panhandlers, bcozers, manhandlers, bruisers, City Hall felons who divvy the melons; Hicks from the sticks getting stung with gold bricks. “Sweetie Slays Daddy.” “Golfer Kills Caddy.” “Passionate Parson Convicted of Arson.” “Dying, Flays Lynchers.”* “Jails Subway Pinchers.” “Great Fortunes Dwindle in Bucketshop Swindle.” “Actors Sing Lewd Ditties; Cops Shut Up ‘Nudities’.” Patricides, matricides, star-final fratricides. “Lookit this pitcher—I say, can you match it? X marks the spot where he slew her with hatchet; Y marks the place where he shoved her in ove Baby, now that’s what I call some hot lovin Law breakers, jaw-breakers, pork-and-bean fighters, Typhoid-germ killers and poison-pen writers. Strike agitators and seat speculators, Coke-fiends, smoke-fiends, yellow white-slavers, Runaway lunatics kidnapping shavers, Chinatown tong wars, imported Hong-Kong wars; Collegiate dances and spirit séances, And Bowery drifters, and lady shoplifters, And cover-charge pirates, fake bankrupts, and fences, And framed-up divorces and court consequences. Con games and shell games and Texas oil-well games, Check-raising forgers and restaurant gorgers, “And gold-digging dearies and fixed baseball series, And saxophone players and taxicab slayers. . . . Hearts that are hardened and hands that are bloody, Say!—— Ain't this a grand world we've living in, buddy? Max Lief. comicbooks.com