Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, August 1921 · page 41 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #23 — page 41: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a cautionary poem, not a cartoon, appearing in *Captain Billy's Whiz Bang*, a satirical American magazine popular in the 1920s-30s. The narrator warns against the romanticized fantasy of tropical wealth: arrive in the tropics, relax, and profit effortlessly. Instead, he confesses a progressive moral collapse. Beginning honest, he's corrupted by dishonest competitors, committing increasingly serious crimes across Latin America—mining fraud in Guayaquil, theft in Argentina, and finally selling alcohol and weapons to indigenous peoples ("Santa Cruz"), causing a massacre. The satire targets two audiences: those seduced by "get-rich-quick" tropical schemes, and the exploitative colonial/imperial attitudes toward Latin America and indigenous peoples. The narrator's final remorse—that weapons-dealing will "double bar my soul"—suggests the poem indicts not just personal corruption but the systematic violence embedded in colonial trade.
📄 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 39 The Lure of the Tropics You've decided to come to the tropics, Heard all that you had to do Was sit in the shade of a cocoanut glade While dollars rolled in to you. You got that stuff down at the bureau; You've got your statistics straight? Well, hear what it did to another kid Before you decide your fate. You don't go down with a sharp hard fall, You just sort of shuffle along And lighten your load of the moral code Till you don't know right from the wrong. I started in to be honest, With everything on the square, But a man can't fool with the golden rule In a crowd that wont play fair. 'Twas a case of riding a crooked race, Or being an "also ran"; My only hope was to sneak and dope The horse of the other man I pulled a deal in Guayaquil, In an Inca silver mine; And before they found 'twas salted ground, I was safe in the Argentine. Where I made short weight on the River Platte; I was running a freighter there. And I cracked a crib on a rich estate, Without even turning a hair. But the thing that'll double bar my soul, When it flaps at heaven's doors, Was peddling booze to the Santa Cruz And Winchester forty-fours. Made unafraid by my hellish aid, The drink-crazed brutes came down And left a blazing, quivering mass Of a flourishing border town.