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Getting By: Earners Confront Changing Real Incomes

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Inflation Decade, 1910—1920

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Abstract

Basic economic arithmetic meant not every institution or individual could keep up with the rising cost of living. The American economy was nearing the short-term limit of its productive capacity by 1916. Compared to 1916, a bad crop year, the physical production of agriculture rose 4 percent in 1917 and was almost 10 percent higher by 1918, but manufacturing declined slightly, down almost 1½ percent in 1918. In real dollars, per capita gross domestic product dipped slightly in 1917 and peaked in 1918 just 3.7 percent above 1916. This modest growth and more was consumed by war costs—approximately 11.5 percent of total GDP in 1917 and 23.9 percent in 1918.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Simon Kuznets, National Product in Wartime (New York: NBER, 1945), 148; John Maurice Clark, The Costs of the World War to the American People (1931; New York: Augustus Kelley, 1970), 121; HSCam, Ca10, Ca11.

  2. 2.

    U.S. Bureau of the Census, Financial Statistics of Cities Having a Population of Over 30,000, 1916 (GPO, 1917), 92; 1918 (GPO, 1919), 86; Lawrence Officer, “An Improved Long-Run Consumer Price Index for the United States,” Historical Methods 40 (Summer 2007): 142; William T. Cross, “Charity,” The American Year Book 1917, ed. Francis G. Wickware (New York: Appleton, 1918), 406 (quotation).

  3. 3.

    Anne E. Geddes, Trends in Relief Expenditures, 1910–1935, Works Progress Administration, Research Monograph 10 (GPO, 1937), 3–4; Howard W. Odum, “Public Welfare Activities,” in President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 2: 1251; Officer, “Consumer Price Index,” 142; Joanne L. Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers’ Pensions in Chicago, 1911–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 174.

  4. 4.

    CR, May 6, 1918, 6116 (quotation); “Pensioners Increase Checks Are Delayed,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), June 14, 1918, 28.

  5. 5.

    Ralph G. Hurlin, “The Mounting Bill for Relief,” Survey 57 (Nov. 15, 1926): 207–8; Charles H. Fahs, Trends in Protestant Giving: A Study of Church Finance in the United States (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1929), 29; Officer, “Consumer Price Index,” 142.

  6. 6.

    Price V. Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor, “The Political Economy of Workers’ Compensation Benefit Levels, 1910–1930,” Explorations in Economic History 35 (1998): 117 (quotation), 118–19.

  7. 7.

    Ronald L. Numbers, Almost Persuaded: American Physicians and Compulsory Health Insurance, 1912–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 10–14, 37–50.

  8. 8.

    Ohio Health and Old Age Insurance Commission, Health, Health Insurance, Old Age Pensions (Columbus: F.J. Heer, 1919), 131–32; Beatrix Hoffman, The Wages of Sickness: The Politics of Health Insurance in Industrial America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 29, 96; Arthur J. Viseltear, “Compulsory Health Insurance in California, 1915–18,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 24 (April 1969): 169, 181.

  9. 9.

    Hoffman, Wages of Sickness, 115–136, Numbers, Almost Persuaded, 5–6; John E. Murray, Origins of American Health Insurance: A History of Industrial Sickness Funds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 35, 108; BLS, Cost of Living in the United States, Bulletin 357 (GPO, 1924), 4, 452.

  10. 10.

    John F. Woodruff, “The Young Doctor and Health Insurance,” Journal of the American Medical Association 68 (March 10, 1917): 796 (first quotation); Hoffman, Wages of Sickness, 84, 181 (2nd quotation); Numbers, Almost Persuaded, 4–5, 32–33, 66–70, 87–91, 113 (3rd quotation); “Physicians Raise Fees,” Medical Record 94 (Sept. 7, 1918): 421; Health Insurance Commission of Pennsylvania, Report, January 1919 (Harrisburg: J.L. Kuhn, 1919), 96–97.

  11. 11.

    Willford I. King et al., Income in the United States: Its Amount and Distribution, 1909–1919, vol. 2, Detailed Report (New York: NBER, 1922), 334; Kuznets, National Product in Wartime, 119, 138.

  12. 12.

    HSBC, 483; HSCam, Ba4314, Ba4319, Ba4323, Ba4332–4334, 4349.

  13. 13.

    HSCam, Ba4282; HSBC, 473–74, 483–84; O.R. Johnson, Costs of Family Living on the Farm, University of Missouri College of Agriculture Experimental Station, Bulletin 213 (Columbia, Mo., 1924), 7–9.

  14. 14.

    Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 380; “We Turn to the Pursuits of Peace,” LD 59 (Dec. 14, 1918): 13 (2nd quotation).

  15. 15.

    HSCam, Ba4323, 4330.

  16. 16.

    Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Origins of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 79–112 (quotation 79).

  17. 17.

    Daily Clarion-Ledger, July 22, 1917, quoted in Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 132; Emmett J. Scott, comp., “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918,” Journal of Negro History 4 (Oct. 1919): 423 (2nd quotation), 426 (3rd quotation).

  18. 18.

    W.T.B. Williams, “The Negro Exodus from the South,” in R.H. Leavall et al., Negro Migration in 1916–17 (GPO, 1919), 94 (quotation), 100–110.

  19. 19.

    Willard E. Hotchkiss and Henry R. Seager, History of the Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board, 1917–1919, BLS Bulletin 283 (GPO, 1921), 10–57; Clark, Costs of the World War, 43; Alexander Bing, War-Time Strikes and Their Adjustment (New York: Dutton, 1921), 203 (quotation).

  20. 20.

    Hotchkiss and Seager, Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board, 45; Thomas Stapleford, The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 84–85.

  21. 21.

    Report of the Board of Review of Construction to the Assistant Secretary of War, August 31, 1919 (GPO, 1920), 20, 56, 75, 78 (quotation), 209–216; Stuart D. Brandes, Warhogs: A History of War Profits in America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 152, 326n35.

  22. 22.

    HSCam, Ba4323, Ba4324; Walker D. Hines, War History of American Railroads (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), 160; United States Railroad Administration, Report of the Railroad Wage Commission to the Director General of Railroads, April 30, 1918 (Washington: the commission, 1918), 16 (quotation), 20–24, 31, 80–89; John B. Andrews, “Labor,” in American Year Book 1918, ed. Francis G. Wickware (New York: Appleton, 1919), 469.

  23. 23.

    Robert Ozanne, Wages in Practice and Theory: McCormick and International Harvester, 1860–1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 39, 41, 149; Theodore H. Price, “The Index Number Wage,” Outlook 121 (Apr. 30, 1919): 742 (second quotation).

  24. 24.

    Stephen Meyer, “Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory, 1914–1921,” Journal of Social History 14 (Autumn 1980): 78; John Olszowska, “The Niagara Frontier Defense League’s Patriotic War on Labor: The Case of Curtiss Aeroplane, 1917–1918,” Labor History 53 (Nov. 2012): 451–460.

  25. 25.

    Mark W. Robbins, “Awakening the ‘Forgotten Folk’: Middle Class Consumer Activism in Post-World War I America” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2009), 79 (quotation); Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 68–70; George Nox McCain, War Rations for Pennsylvania: The Story of the Operations of the Federal Food Administration in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1920), 180.

  26. 26.

    “Soft Coal Miners Win Wage Increase,” NYT, April 18, 1917, 9; Bing, War-Time Strikes, 97–98; McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 125–26.

  27. 27.

    “The Outlook Delayed by a Strike,” Outlook 120 (Nov. 6, 1918): 323.

  28. 28.

    Bing, War-Time Strikes, 293; HSCam, Ba 471, Ba472, Ba4790.

  29. 29.

    P.K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 300–301.

  30. 30.

    Bing, War-Time Strikes, 188 (quotation), 293–94.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 296.

  32. 32.

    Elma B. Carr, The Use of Cost-of-Living Statistics in Wage Adjustments, BLS Bulletin 369 (GPO, 1925), 254–56.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 24; McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 83; Valerie Jean Conner, The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 51–52; Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of the Consumer Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 3, 66, 134–40; “Labor Award in Packing House Industry,” Monthly Review of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 6 (May 1918): 116–124 (quotations 122–23); “$1288 a Year Far Too High to Support Family of Five Packer Morris Declares,” Evening World (NY), Feb. 19, 1918, 1.

  34. 34.

    Conner, National War Labor Board, 28–31.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 29–30, 54–66, 65 (last quotation); National War Labor Board, BLS Bulletin 287 (GPO, 1922), 32–33 (earlier quotations); William F. Ogburn, “Measurement of the Cost of Living and Wages,” Annals 81 (Jan. 1919): 116.

  36. 36.

    Carr, Use of Cost-of-Living Statistics, 32, 47, 50n4; Taft to Frank Walsh, Oct. 20, 1919, ser. 3, reel 199, Taft Papers; Conner, National War Labor Board, 67, 78–83, 158–172.

  37. 37.

    Carr, Use of Cost-of-Living Statistics, 34, 40; Paul H. Douglas, Real Wages in the United States, 1890–1926 (1930; New York: Augustus Kelley, 1966), 182.

  38. 38.

    McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 46–48, 57, 96–97.

  39. 39.

    Conner, National War Labor Board, 130–31; Bing, War-Time Strikes, 77–80; McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 137–140; To the Members of District Lodge No. 55 and Other Striking Workers, Sept. 13, 1918, WWPLink, 49: 519–522, 539–540 (quotation).

  40. 40.

    Conner, National War Labor Board, 143–157 (quotation 144).

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 78–83; Bing, War-Time Strikes, 158; Taft to Walsh, Oct. 20, 1918; McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 114–17.

  42. 42.

    HSCam, Ba4321, Ba4323; Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, on the Proposed Revenue Act of 1918 … Part I (GPO, 1918), 214–15; “Will Labor Cooperate or Obstruct?” LD 56 (March 2, 1918): 14; Douglas, Real Wages, 137, 326, 353.

  43. 43.

    Helen Olson and A.B. Wolfe, “The War-Time Industrial Employment of Women in the United States,” JPE 27 (Oct. 1919): 658–666; Dorothy W. Douglas, “The Cost of Living for Working Women,” QJE 4 (Feb. 1920): 231.

  44. 44.

    “Cost of Living in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review 9 (August 1919): 117–19.

  45. 45.

    Health Insurance Commission of Pennsylvania, Report, 94–95; Michael M. Davis, “Food in Families of Limited Means,” Survey 39 (Jan 12, 1918): 415.

  46. 46.

    Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, Milk: The Indispensable Food for Children, Children’s Bureau Publication 35 (GPO, 1918), 8; Laura A. Thompson, “Child Welfare,” American Year Book 1918, 94–95 (quotation).

  47. 47.

    “Cost of Living in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review 8 (May 1919): 147 (quotation); BLS, Cost of Living, Bulletin 357, 4.

  48. 48.

    BLS, Cost of Living, Bulletin 357, 1–4.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 453; “Good-Bye Free Lunch” Day Book (Chicago), April 30, 1917, 9; “Liquor Dealers Optimistic over Beer Situation,” Bridgeport [Conn.] Times, July 19, 1918, 5; “Chicago Advances Price of Beer,” Washington Evening Star, Sept. 16, 1918, 2.

  50. 50.

    BLS, Cost of Living, Bulletin 357, 451. Subscriptions in 1918: Ladies’ Home Journal, $1.50; Saturday Evening Post, $1.50; Collier’s, $2.50.

  51. 51.

    BLS, Cost of Living, Bulletin 357, 106, 449.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 123, 131.

  53. 53.

    Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 52–53; HSCam, Cj812, Cj813, Cj815, CJ1193, Cj1195.

  54. 54.

    HSBC, 1004; Alexander D. Noyes, The War Period in American Finance, 1908–1925 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926), 202; King, National Income, 2: 248.

  55. 55.

    Kenneth A. Snowden, “Historical Returns and Security Market Development, 1872–1925,” Explorations in Economic History 27 (1990): 417–18.

  56. 56.

    Simon Kuznets, Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings (New York: NBER, 1953), 571, 668–676.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 570, 684–696; Simon Kuznets, National Product in Wartime (New York: NBER, 1945), 139–141.

  58. 58.

    Frank C. Wight, “Civil Engineering,” American Year Book 1918, 577; Report of the Board of Review of Construction, 196.

  59. 59.

    The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, 1913–1921, ed. E. David Cronon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 182 (quotation); Douglas, Real Wages, 373–78.

  60. 60.

    Douglas, Real Wages, 361, 364.

  61. 61.

    HSCam, Ba4349, Ba4350; Jürgen Kocka, White Collar Workers in America, 1890–1940: A Social-Political History in International Perspective (London: Sage, 1980), 83, 168.

  62. 62.

    Douglas, Real Wages, 381–82; “Boarding the Teacher,” Indiana Farmer’s Guide 74 (Nov. 9, 1918): 10; “Teachers’ Salaries,” NEA, Addresses and Proceedings 56 (1918): 724–747.

  63. 63.

    “The Laborer Is Worthy of His Hire,” LD 58 (Aug. 31, 1918): 17; Douglas, Real Wages, 386.

  64. 64.

    Viva Boothe, Salaries and Cost of Living at Twenty-Seven State Universities and Colleges, 1913–1932 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1932), 12.

  65. 65.

    Responses from 12 instructors, 22 assistant professors, 11 associate professors, and 28 professors, in folder 4, box 1, Louis Charles Karpinski Papers, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  66. 66.

    Respondent’s underlining.

  67. 67.

    Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 106, 175, 195–96.

  68. 68.

    David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 48, 61–63, 189–190; HSCam, Ba921; Washington Times, Oct. 9, 1918, 3; Francis Taylor Long, “The Negroes of Clarke County, Georgia, During the Great War,” Bulletin of the University of Georgia 19 (Sept. 1919): 37–42.

  69. 69.

    John Bruce Mitchell, “The Labor Hold-Back: Will Government Conscription Come?” Forum 59 (Jan. 1918): 32; Katharine Fullerton Gerould, “The New Simplicity,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 138 (Dec. 1918): 16–19.

  70. 70.

    Maximilian Foster, “Our Labor Plutocrats,” Saturday Evening Post 191 (June 8, 1918): 10–11, 105; Albert W. Atwood, “Big Money—How the Workers Are Saving It,” ibid. 191 (Sept. 21, 1918): 22 (first and 2nd quotations); Atwood, “Big Money and What the Workers Are Doing with It,” ibid. 191 (Sept. 7, 1918): 21 (3rd quotation); “Tickets or Taxes?” Collier’s 61 (June 1, 1918): 14.

  71. 71.

    Maude Radford Warren, “Married,” Saturday Evening Post 191 (Oct. 19, 1918): 70, 78; Anna Steese Richardson, “How I Broke My Husband,” McClure’s Magazine 50 (Jan. 1918): 8–9, 33–34.

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    David I. Macleod

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Macleod, D.I. (2024). Getting By: Earners Confront Changing Real Incomes. In: Inflation Decade, 1910—1920. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55393-6_11

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