PRICES AND PATRIOTISM
Prices and Patriotism Review of Article in The New Republic by William Hard: Sees Social War at Home if Cost Burdens are Not Taken From Shoulders of the Common People WILLIAM HARD is a writer well...
...21,974,263 9,720,475 6,064,839 7,907.710 Pittsburgh Steel Company...
...2,445,189 1,424,654 452,074 881.055 American Hide and Leather...
...The year 1917 is apoplectic...
...The flag emerging from it is the red flag of the blood of all the peoples and of their hope of a world cleansed and redeemed...
...One of the profoundest reasons why many professional revolutionists do not like this war is that it is a competitor—and a successful one...
...4.884,587 2,172,013 653,264 652,358 U. S. Smelt...
...Unless something is done the writer hints that we may have a social war at home as well as a military war abroad: "If the legislative branch or the government at Washington resents the "autocracy' of the executive, if it resents it not only with its lips but with its brains, here is its chance to give the executive what it has not yet once given it since the war broke out—a lead...
...Fifteen months...
...What About Wages...
...13,898,861 6,393,327 6,185,974 6,663,123 U S. Steel Corporation...
...2,524,378 *126,956 *08,310 *229,190 Armour & Company...
...12,218,234 2,409,108 *1,652,444 2,755,883 Morris & Company (packers...
...2,417,803 913,742 548,756 761,274 New York Air Brake Company...
...In the year 1913 the United States Steel Corporation, after paying all expenses of operation and of maintenance and of depreciation, and after also paying all interest-charges on bonds and mortgages, still had $81,000,000 for stockholders' profits...
...Out of this $81,000,000 It paid seven per cent bn its preferred stock and five per cent on its common (which once was water) and then still had $"0,000,000 for surplus...
...Its market is a diseased market...
...In the middle of the year 1916 it was $42.00...
...In the middle of the year 1913, when billets were $20.50, plates were $33.GO...
...Manuf...
...10,769,429 *1,491,980 2,076,127 6,185,306 American Steel Foundries...
...Will anybody pretend that the gain for labor was in harmony with the gain for capital...
...They will then be as fantastic as prices...
...But prices, in time, will crash...
...Plates are supremely important because of thoir use in cars and ships...
...was $271,000,000...
...13,223.655 3,073,750 1,015,039 4,905,886 Cuban-American Sugar Company...
...That way ends in enormous strikes...
...1,912,624 522,388 490,139 678,466 Swift & Company...
...16,058,873 4,886,102 1,247,255 1,017,212 International Agricultural Corp...
...Let the Food Administration tell the workingman's wife how to spread a pat of butter over a week...
...20,100,000 11,000,000 7,509,908 6,028,197 Atlas Powder Company...
...appalling...
...82,107 693 57,257.308 4,831,793 4,582,075 General Chemical Company...
...3,710,805 1,363,229 374,545 1,121,660 Republic Iron and Steel Company...
...5,863,819 4,080,865 2,788,602 *1,179,791 American Writing Paper Company...
...when compared with the prices of the year 1916, are monstrous...
...Individual industrial volunteering is as absurd, as nn-unjust, as ineffective, as individual military volunteering...
...Certainly not by the individual effort of the individual producer...
...The year 1916 was more than a good year...
...1,467,757 240 322 495,890 710,464 Central Leather Company...
...The year 191:1 was therefore a good year, and the sum of JS),000,000 for stockholders' profits was a good sum...
...Then wages will have to be reduced...
...Every senator, every representative, who really wants to see consumers protected against oppressive prices of primary commodities, will surely be driven to doing his best to help the administration to devise a competent method of public price-control...
...And will anybody pretend that the wage-advances and the salary-advances of the first half of the present year have kept pace, have come anywhere near keeping pace, with a price-market in which, for Instance, during the eleven weeks immediately succeeding our declaration of war, the price of billets advanced $25.00—an amount nearly equal to the whole price of billets four years ago...
...1,308,641 1381,387 *59,868 564,427 United Fruit Company...
...It is unthinkable...
...The only way out of the present price-market is backward—backward to prices within sanity...
...Let us suppose, wildly, that the cost of proceeding from the billet-stage to the plate-stage is twice as great now as it was four years ago...
...In 1916 it paid out $263,000,000...
...The rise from 1916 to 1917 was $58.00...
...On the other hand, let wages remain out of harmony with prices...
...His incisive and analytical style, his ability to consistently marshal facts and figures and his contempt for sham and hypocrisy have won for Hard an American following of readers keen for the truth rather than for entertainment...
...20,405,000 14,087,500 9,450,000 9,250,000 Texas Oil Company...
...The prices of-the year 1916, when compared with the prices of the year 1913, were high...
...2,201,171 *334,6U *05,968 1,727,193 Crucible Steel Company...
...8,214,962 1,343,285 641,046 654,512 Phelps Dodge Corporation...
...He says: "Of what avail is ft for senators and representatives to attack such situations with a Are of moral maxims leveled at the "patriotism" of the individual business man...
...12,2S0.826 5,958,746 2,857,898 2,809,442 Hercules Powder Company...
...In such a moment will labor take domestic science and scientific charity in lieu of an ample and spacious human equity...
...There is no moral analogy whatsoever between the civilized solidarity of the battlefield and the suspicious savagery of the market," says Hard...
...toward giving us a social war at home in addition to our military war abroad'' Net Profits of American Industrial Corporations "Figures shown are the net profits earned for the stockholders, after deducting cost of ma-terialsi labor, depreciation, overhead, interest, reserve, amortization, and all other charges-All figures arc official, having been taken from the companies' annual report...
...Let the prices of industrial commodities swell the whole cost of living, through swelling the cost of agricultural implements and of everything else, while wages relatively shrink...
...23,252,248 14,402,732 9,271,565 9,756,540 American Beet Sugar Company...
...At present Hard is contributing a series of articles to the New Republic...
...15,489,201 5,626!S97 4,876,924 4,385,345 Colorado Fuel and Iron...
...In tho middle of the year 1917, when billets were $100.00, plates were $200.00—and more...
...That is, the margin between the billet-stage of manufacture and the platc-stago for cost, and for profit on cost, in 1913 was $7.10, in 1916 was $31.00, and in 1917 was $100.00—and more...
...Quoted from The Congressional Record...
...4,247,858 2,482,236 1,280,476 1,835,811 Brown Shoe Company...
...11,748,279 5,598,072 4,792,665 5,009,120 Lackawanna Steel Company...
...4,913,873 2,463,732 **1,511,52S 1,364,245 * Deficit t Nineteen months...
...This is a revolutionary war...
...5,982,517 2,827,816 350,230 4,017,800 Bethlehem Steel Corporation...
...3,832,213 2,321,415 2,205,672 1,916,997 National Enameling & Stamping Co...
...Tho plate-stage is one of the end stages...
...9,396,103 1,575,839 3,482,994 5,255,259 Westinghouse Eloc...
...The prices of the year 1917...
...Going forward from it, there are just two ways, each in the end impassable...
...Of what avail is it to try to make out that such situations can be mastered, that prices can be controlled, that the market can be stabilized, by a sort of individual indnstrial volunteering...
...Refining £ Mining Co---- 8,898,464 6,592,324 2,265,641 3,585,588 Wcstinchouse Air-Brake Co...
...In the middle of the year 1913 the price of billets at Pittsburgh was $26.50...
...4.5G4,068 858,160 416,551 1,193,669 Railway Steel Spring Company...
...That Is, for every dollar that went to employees in 1913, the amount that went to employees in 191G was $1.27...
...14,789,163 3,515,819 1,028,748 3,101,300 Sltss Sheffield Iron and Steel Co...
...The billet stage of manufacture is one of the middle stages...
...3,418,057 '219,574 6,231,481 1,003,592 American Woolen Company...
...It was a fat year, fat with a great fatness...
...In the year 1910 the sum for stockholders' profits, instead of being $81,000,000...
...9,666,789 2,009,744 4,058,809 3,164,032 Wilson & Company (packers...
...8,235.113 5,594,048 2,705,723 356,887 E. I. du Pont dc Nemours Powder Co...
...2,916,339 $ 4,376,173 American Smelting and Refining...
...American Can Co....................$ 7,962,982 $ 5,029,27...
...1,279,832 *160,022 84,908 «161,493 International Nickel...
...But how can that way be built...
...But for every dollar that went to stockholders in 1913, for dividends and surplus, the amount that went to stockholders in 1916 was $3.34...
...That way ends in industrial convulsions justified bu...
...It strikes torrents of daring and of change from a rock-face from which their puny hands drew only trickles...
...American Coal Prod...
...The rise from 1913 to 1910 was $15.50...
...43,593,908 17,7G2,S13 5,590,020 5,122,703 Barrett Co...
...middle of the year 1916, when billets were $42.00, plates were $73.'00...
...1916...
...He says: "In the year 1913 the United States Steel Cor-poratiou paid out, in salaries and wages, to all employees, high and low, $207,000,000...
...Prices and Patriotism Review of Article in The New Republic by William Hard: Sees Social War at Home if Cost Burdens are Not Taken From Shoulders of the Common People WILLIAM HARD is a writer well known to the American people...
...They will have to be reduced drastically, beyond parallel, against a resentment and a resistance therefore also beyond parallel...
...WAGES, Hard finds, have not been making the same dizzy flights that prices have...
...1,643,266 959,974 107,205 475,518 American Locomotive Company...
...On Industrial Appeals HARD doesn't place much faith tn appesli directed at the patriotism of the indrridnal business man...
...The price of that proceeding, granted by the market, is fourteen times as great...
...In the middle of the year 1917 it was $100.00...
...2,939,790 1,671,762 194,150 323,838 Baldwin Locomotive...
...The Steel Trust HE goes on to say: "Prices and profits in steel and in other high and narrowly held necessaries arc still Joy-riding while the mass of mankind drags itself on its knees from station to station toward Its great atonement...
...1915...
...1914 1913...
...is utterly untenable...
...11,943,151 5,900,522 2,264,911 5,315,631 U. S. Indnstrial Alcohol...
...In the...
...Let it present the executive with a mandate and a properly contrived power to use the War Industries Board—or any other better board, if a better board can be found—for the immediate public arrest of the privately uncontrollable industrial joy-riding which is advancing primary prices far beyond all possible advances by wages or by salaries and which is therefore headed, master-lessly...
...271,531,730 75.833,833 23,496,768 81,216,985 V S. Cast Iron Pipe...
...In a recent issue he goes into the question of "Prices and Patriotism...
...First, let wages be advanced to correspond with prices...
...The present price-market, in the matter of labor...
...Let the Red Cross and the Red Cross' Director of Civilian Relief send her an extra pat of butter now and then to compensate her, while her husband may be sick, for the loss of the earnings of her boy who is in France...
Vol. 9 • August 1917 • No. 8
