Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, January 1921 · page 7 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #16 — page 7: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This post-WWI satirical piece mocks Prohibition and postwar American excess. The author sarcastically notes that senators who championed Prohibition secretly maintained illegal alcohol supplies ("cellars" and "stills in their attics"), exposing hypocrisy in the ban on "wine, women and song." The text references silent film stars Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin as emblems of frivolous entertainment priorities—Americans ignore presidential speeches to watch Fairbanks perform dangerous stunts or Chaplin perform slapstick. The vague reference to "Queen of Russia" likely alludes to anti-Bolshevik sentiment and wartime propaganda. The core complaint: while ordinary Americans lost money and lives in WWI, wealth flowed to military generals and movie actors. The satire argues that postwar society prioritizes entertainment and profit over addressing real consequences of the war.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 5 as popular as senators’ cellars, and the sentiment be- tween the two would have been much stronger than the antagonism between the Bolsheviks and the anti- saloon league. But here we are presenting this valu- able dope several years too late. Tell your children about it, and they can stop the next war though (if the pretty girls aren’t all dead). Then a bunch of senators, with big cellars and stills in their attics, passed a law that the combination of wine, women and song must be reduced to women and song. Suppose we substitute nut-sundays, women and song. Substitute your eye, we’ll just play the two undeceased members of the combination a little stronger, unless we get into some senator’s cellar. Don’t cry, little children, the war is over, and so is a lot of your money, but Uncle Sam will make a lot more, and the Brigadier Generals and the movie actors will get it. At present we can assume that this is the Movie Age and Out-rage. We walk right past a speech made by the President or some other vote-made man, and several miles to see “Doug” Fairbanks skin his shins by walking up the side of a seven-story building on his hands or to see Charlie Chaplin swing a broom at the villain and hit the Queen of Russia, who is dressed in sackcloth and ashes because of the murder of her last thirty-three husbands. Movie actors are all right, though. Why, they make more money than we ever hear about. Figures compiled by the Secretary of the Treasury show that a man and wife and family of seventeen children and