Ruination & Despair

“… I resolved, if possible, to get to the ship; so I pulled off my clothes … and took [to] the water. … [Once aboard] I went to the bread-room and filled my pockets with biscuit …”

  —  Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719).

This cartoon may have appeared 92 years ago, but it seems more timely now than it possibly could have then. Drawn by Leo Birchansky (1887-1949), it was published in Life on July 5, 1917.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the first airplane flight across the English Channel. On July 25, 1909, French aviator Louis Blériot coaxed his fragile wood-and-canvas monoplane to cover the distance from Les Baraques, near Calais, to a field near Dover Castle (where it crash-landed) in under thirty-seven minutes.

In response, the Russian imperial secret police quickly formed a “Special Commission on the Means of Battling the Possible Implementation of Criminal Designs with the Assistance of Aeronautical Machines,” with an eye to thwarting air-minded revolutionary terrorists.

Source: Scott W. Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge, 2006), 11, 15-16.

This morning we shipped a substantial order to Kards Unlimited, a suitably deranged retail store in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Area residents are warned to take all necessary precautions.

Everyone is familiar with Wall Street’s bulls and bears, but how many of us remember that this iconography used to include a third animal? In the early decades of the last century, cartoonists regularly drew lambs to depict the small investors who were (at best) fleeced, or (at worst) slaughtered, by their larger and fiercer competitors. Presumably this was too unflattering a view of our titans of finance to be allowed to survive.

Below is one of the best of the many cartoons published on this theme. Drawn by Edwin George Lutz (1868-?), it appeared in Life on July 21, 1910. Note the use of stock-ticker tape to suspend the lamb.

After a short operational pause for rest and refitting, Archelaus’s forces have launched a new amphibious assault across Lake Michigan. Landings are expected shortly on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula, northeast of the city of Green Bay, at the village of Egg Harbor, where advance scouting has established that The Shops at Liberty Square should provide a suitable location for a military command post. A terrifying team of Egyptian mongooses and Peruvian llamas is expected ruthlessly to crush all opposition, with suitably scant regard for civilian casualties.

Most of the humor that Life magazine’s cartoonists attempted to extract from the women’s suffrage movement is predictable, misogynistic, and tiresome. This cartoon by R. M. Crosby (1876-1945) seems to me a worthwhile exception that relies instead upon social incongruity for its effect.

The cartoon appeared on January 13, 1910, at a time when many of the mostly upper-class members of Britain’s militant suffrage movement were actively trying to get themselves arrested as a protest tactic.