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Concern Intensifies in 1910: What or Whom to Blame?

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Inflation Decade, 1910—1920

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Abstract

President William Howard Taft concluded his annual message to Congress, on December 7, 1909, with a mixed assessment of rising prices: “We have just garnered a harvest unexampled in the market value of our agricultural products. The high prices which such products bring mean great prosperity for the farming community, but on the other hand they mean a very considerably increased burden upon those classes in the community whose yearly compensation does not expand with the improvement in business and the general prosperity.” Lest the rising cost of living reflect badly on the Republicans’ recently passed Payne-Aldrich Tariff, Taft observed that price increases were worldwide and argued that other factors—expanded gold production, population increase, a “more expensive mode of living,” and failure to increase agricultural production per acre—were to blame. Having absolved the tariff, Taft proposed no solution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    CR, Dec. 7, 1909, 33.

  2. 2.

    HSCam, Cc1.

  3. 3.

    “Record Prices for Hogs,” NYT, Dec. 29, 1909, 2; “Five-cent Meals Go Up,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Jan. 1, 1910, 1; F.P. Dunne, “Mr. Dooley on the Cost of Living,” American Magazine 69 (Jan. 1910): 327; “The Steady March of High Prices,” NYT, Jan. 2, 1910, SM2.

  4. 4.

    “Push Boycott of Trusts,” NYT, Jan. 3, 1910, 3; “Aim at Food Cost,” Washington Post, Jan. 5, 1910, 1; CR, Jan. 4, 1910, 290–92.

  5. 5.

    “Public Bares Arm to End Extortion,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Jan. 14, 1910, 1, 5 (quotation); “Workmen Launch Anti-Meat League,” ibid., Jan. 16, 1910, 1; “Boycott on Meat Forces Prices Down,” NYT, Jan. 19, 1910, 4; “Farmers Aim to Halt Food Probe,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Feb. 1, 1910, 2; “Legislative Flop Brings Food Quiz,” ibid., Feb. 3, 1910, 1.

  6. 6.

    Frank Greene, “High Prices and the Cost of Living,” Outlook 94 (Mar. 12, 1910): 569 (quotation); “75,000 in Pittsburg [sic] Join,” NYT, Jan. 22, 1910, 1; “Boycott Discouraged Here,” NYT, Jan. 22, 1910, 2 (first quotation); “Too Many Mouths to Feed,” NYT, Jan. 23, 1910, 2 (2nd quotation); “Meat Boycott Hits Boston,” NYT, Jan. 22, 1910, 2; “South Takes Up Movement,” NYT, Jan. 22, 1910, 2; “Dealers Ridicule Boycott Here,” NYT, Jan. 23, 1910, 2; “Women to Join Boycott,” NYT, Jan. 29, 1910, 3.

  7. 7.

    Greene, “High Prices,” 569 (quotation); “Record Price for Hogs,” NYT, Feb. 12, 1910, 1; “Boycotting Proved a Failure,” NYT, Mar. 18, 1910, 10; “Riots in Newark over Meat Boycott,” NYT, April 15, 1910, 18; “Women Raid Markets,” NYT, May 17, 1910, 1.

  8. 8.

    Willard W. Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 100, 103; HSCam, Cc84, Cc86; “Colquitt on Cost of Living,” NYT, Oct. 20, 1912, 5.

  9. 9.

    Proceedings of the Third National Conservation Congress . . . 1911 (Kansas City: National Conservation Congress, 1912), 16 (first quotation); Proceedings of the Second National Conservation Congress . . . 1910 (Washington: NCC, 1911), 193 (2nd quotation); F.A. Sirrine to James Wilson, Feb. 21, 1910, Reciprocity file, box 28, Secretary of Agriculture, General Correspondence, RG 16, NARA (third and fifth quotations); Mrs. M.E. Vanderbilt to David Houston, Dec. 10, 1913, Eggs file, box 82, Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, General Correspondence, 1906–70, RG 16, NARA.

  10. 10.

    CR, Jan. 28, 1910, 1144–1183; “Hope to Break Up Packers’ Combine,” NYT, Jan. 23, 1910, 1; “Gov. Draper Signed Cost of Living Bill,” NYT, Mar. 1, 1910, 5 (quotation).

  11. 11.

    Report of the Joint Select Committee . . . to Inquire into the Purchase, Storage, Sale of and Traffic in Food Products, Commodities and Supplies (Columbus, Ohio: F.J. Heer, 1910), 5–29.

  12. 12.

    Massachusetts Commission on the Cost of Living, Report of the Commission on the Cost of Living, May 1910 (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1910), 92–111, 189–246, 316 (quotation), 334–426.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 504, 529 (quotation), 523–532.

  14. 14.

    U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee on Wages and Prices of Commodities, Investigation Relative to Wages and Prices of Commodities, 61st Cong., 3d sess., Senate Doc. 847 (GPO, 1911), 2: 357–362.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 1: 10, 23–36, 73–76, 112–124, 121 (first quotations); 1: 13 (2nd cluster).

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 1: 152 (quotation), 148–172.

  17. 17.

    “Review of the World,” Current Literature 48 (March 1910): 239; Albert S. Bolles, “Rising Prices: Their Causes, Consequences and Remedies,” North American Review 191 (June 1910): 795 (second quotation); American Periodical Series, accessed February 19, 2006. Ballard Campbell, “Economic Causes of Progressivism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4 (January 2005): 12, is an important exception.

  18. 18.

    Irving Fisher, The Purchasing Power of Money, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 307–315; NEA, Report of the Committee on Teachers’ Salaries and Cost of Living (Ann Arbor: NEA, 1913), 19 (quotations), 20.

  19. 19.

    “The Benefits of Cold Storage,” Independent 68 (1910): 821; “Falling Prices,” LD 41 (Nov. 26, 1910): 969 (second quotation).

  20. 20.

    “Charges High Prices to Poor Farming,” NYT, Jan. 13, 1910, 6 (first quotation); “Blames Farmer for High Cost of Living,” unidentified clipping, Apr. 27, 1914, case file 60, reel 128, WWPLC (2nd quotation).

  21. 21.

    Hill quoted in “Meat War Grows,” Washington Post, Jan. 26, 1910, 2; S.R. Guggenheim, “Extravagance the Real Cause,” Cosmopolitan 49 (June 1910): 34.

  22. 22.

    Simon N. Patten, “The Crisis in American Home Life,” Independent 68 (1910): 354; “Prelate Blames the Women,” Washington Post, Jan. 28, 1910, 1.

  23. 23.

    Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 79–84, 94–95; Richards’ italics, preface dated June 1910, Ellen H. Richards, The Cost of Living as Modified by Sanitary Science, 3d ed. (New York: Wiley, 1915), iv-v.

  24. 24.

    Alfred D. Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 638; Samuel Hopkins Adams, “The Real Reason for High Prices,” Cosmopolitan, 49 (Sept. 1910): 462, 464 (his italics).

  25. 25.

    Lawrence E. Mitchell, The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed over Industry (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2007), 47–65, 59 (quotation); Samuel H. Barker, “Burdens of False Capitalization,” Annals 48 (July 1913): 192 (2nd quotation); Charles Edward Russell, “Monometallism and ‘Water,’” Cosmopolitan 49 (June 1910): 23–24 (quotation); Scott Nearing, Reducing the Cost of Living (Philadelphia: George Jacobs, 1914), 155.

  26. 26.

    Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 202; Edward W. Hoffman, “Feeding an Ungrateful Public,” Rotarian 9 (Dec. 1916): 556–57; Harold Barger, Distribution’s Place in the American Economy since 1869 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), 56–70, 92.

  27. 27.

    M.E. Pennington, “Relation of Cold Storage to the Food Supply and the Consumer,” Annals 48 (July 1913): 154–163; Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order, 247.

  28. 28.

    Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 282–83, 352–54.

  29. 29.

    Massachusetts Commission on the Cost of Living, Report, 552; Clyde Lyndon King, Lower Living Costs in Cities (New York: Appleton, 1915), 71; Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 25, 59–65, 238–244; Select Committee on Wages and Prices, Investigation, 2: 413.

  30. 30.

    “The Filling of the Market-Baskets of the Nation Is Becoming Increasingly Difficult,” Cosmopolitan 49 (June 1910): 25.

  31. 31.

    Campbell, “Economic Causes of Progressivism,” 8–12; HSBC, 224; F&S, 173; HSCam, Ba476.

  32. 32.

    Select Committee on Wages and Prices, Investigation, 1: 52 (first quotation), 168 (second quotation); Theodore Roosevelt, “Progressive Democracy: The High Cost of Living,” Outlook 102 (Oct. 5, 1912): 247.

  33. 33.

    BLS, Retail Prices, 1890 to December 1913, Bulletin 140 (GPO, 1914), 11; I.M. Rubinow, “The Recent Trend of Real Wages,” AER 4 (Dec. 1914): 801–4, 812; “The Cost of Living—Discussion,” AER 2 (March 1912): 109.

  34. 34.

    HSCam, Ba4218, Cc1; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 236 (quotation), 234–240, 318; J. Noble Stockett, Jr., The Arbitral Determination of Railway Wages (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), xiv-xv, 77–94, 102–3; Paul H. Douglas, Real Wages in the United States, 1890–1926 (1930; New York: Augustus Kelley, 1966), 168.

  35. 35.

    Douglas, Real Wages, 364–387; Beardsley Ruml and Sidney G. Tickton, Teaching Salaries Then and Now (New York: Fund for the Advancement of Education, 1955), 54–70, 89.

  36. 36.

    Charles William Dabney, “The College Professor and the Nation,” in NEA, Proceedings 52 (1914): 62–63; NEA, Report of the Committee on Teachers’ Salaries, 11, 223–24 (quotation).

  37. 37.

    Mitchell, Speculation Economy, 204–5, 330n23.

  38. 38.

    Susan V. Spellman, Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 131–33; David Gordon, “The Beef Trust: Antitrust Policy and the Meat Packing Industry, 1902–1922” (PhD diss., Claremont, 1983), 21, 179–220; NYT, March 26, 1912, 7, quoted in ibid., 209; Mary Yeager, Competition and Regulation: The Development of Oligopoly in the Meat Packing Industry (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1981), 220–28.

  39. 39.

    “Bill In to Exclude Food Stored a Year,” NYT, April 8, 1910, 5 (quotation); Report of Committee and Hearings Held before the Senate Committee on Manufactures Relative to Foods Held in Cold Storage, 61st Cong., 3d sess., Senate Report 1272 (GPO, 1911), iii-xii; Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 103–5; “Inter-State Cold Storage,” NYT, Dec. 16, 1911, 12.

  40. 40.

    Frank Haigh Dixon, “The Mann-Elkins Act,” QJE 24 (Aug. 1910): 595, 602–3, 604 (quotation), 631.

  41. 41.

    David Brady and David Epstein, “Intraparty Preferences, Heterogeneity, and the Origins of the Modern Congress: Progressive Reformers in the House and Senate, 1890–1920,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 13 (Apr. 1997): 13.

  42. 42.

    Lewis L. Gould, Reform and Regulation: American Politics from Roosevelt to Wilson, 3rd ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1996), 122–23, 129; William Howard Taft to Theodore Roosevelt, May 26, 1910, reel 508, Taft Papers; National Democratic Congressional Committee, Democratic Campaign Book for 1910 (Baltimore: The Committee, 1910), 6–176.

  43. 43.

    HSCam, Eb298, Eb300, Eb303; “Meaning of the Republican Waterloo,” LD 41 (Nov. 19, 1910): 915–18 (quotation 915); “States That Saw a New Light,” LD 41 (Nov. 19, 1910): 918–920; Lodge quoted in Lewis L. Gould, The William Howard Taft Presidency (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 119.

  44. 44.

    John F. Reynolds, Testing Democracy: Electoral Behavior and Progressive Reform in New Jersey, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 91; Roger Edwards Wyman, “Voting Behavior in the Progressive Era: Wisconsin as a Case Study” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1970), 820–27; Campbell, “Economic Causes of Progressivism,” 15–16.

  45. 45.

    This approach, looking to shifts in voting within the same constituencies over short periods of time, differs from most voting studies. Commonly, those compare enduring loyalties (regional, ethnic, religious, etc.) and, understandably, explain a larger proportion of variance.

  46. 46.

    The dependent variables were the difference between the Republican percentage of a county’s vote for Congress in 1910 and the percentage in 1908 (1764 counties) and the same difference for the Democrats. Results were significant beyond the .0002 level. I omitted the 11 former Confederate states. Jerome M. Clubb et al., Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1986) [computer file]; Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–1970 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992) [computer file, update].

  47. 47.

    Republican results (613 counties) were statistically significant beyond the .0015 level, Democratic results only at the .026 level.

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    David I. Macleod

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Macleod, D.I. (2024). Concern Intensifies in 1910: What or Whom to Blame?. In: Inflation Decade, 1910—1920. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55393-6_4

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