This book shows how inflation can disrupt politics and society. With no recent precedent, mild inflation spurred mass protests, myriad remedial schemes, and partisan political reversals between 1910 and 1914. Then wartime demand and inflationary fiscal policy doubled consumer prices from 1915 to 1920, triggering waves of strikes, food riots by immigrant housewives, class conflict, and elite fears of revolution. Middle-class households resented falling real incomes. Even more than today, food prices dominated consumer concerns. Yet farmers wanted high commodity prices. Accordingly, both sides blamed and attacked meatpackers, wholesalers, and retailers. Then as now, inflation hurt whichever party held the White House. Fumbling responses by Wilson’s administration and the Federal Reserve led to hesitant price controls, punitive raids and prosecutions, and a now-familiar fallback—high interest rates in 1920 and subsequent recession. An epilogue traces continuing popular and political responses to changes in the consumer price index down to 2020.
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"Inflation Decade serves as an excellent reference on the topic and should be in the library of any academic interested in this period or American inflation more broadly." (Gabriel P. Mathy, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, April 8, 2025)
This book will be equally valuable to economic history novices and researchers, as well as anyone looking to expand the scope of their understanding of the era in question, or gain a better way of understanding the American publics reactions to a meaningful and increasingly inevitable phenomenon. (S. K. Allen, Choice, Vol. 62 (4), 2024)
Chapter
1. Introduction.
Chapter
2. Prelude: Price Deflation,
18651897.
Chapter
3. Prices Begin a Slow Rise, 18971909.
Chapter
4.
Concern Intensifies in 1910: What or Whom to Blame?.
Chapter
5. Reform in
Detail: Attempted Remedies for Rising Prices, 19101914.
Chapter
6. Food
Prices, Democratic Political Gains, and Legislation, 19111914.
Chapter
7.
The High Cost of Living: Respite and Upsurge, 1915 to
Early 1917.
Chapter
8. The Inflation Muddle, 1915 to June 1917.
Chapter
9.
War Finance and Prices.
Chapter
10. One Commodity at a Time: Wartime
Attempts to Restrain Prices and Profiteering.
Chapter
11. Getting By:
Earners Confront Changing Real Incomes.
Chapter
12. Postwar: Brief Respite
and Resurgent High Cost of Living, 19191920.
Chapter
13. Confronting High
Prices: Pursuing Profiteering and Systemic Causes, 19191920.
Chapter
14.
Inflation vs. Deflation, 1920: Anxiety, Indecision, Reversal, and Electoral
Upheaval.
Chapter
15. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Cost-of-Living Index.-
Chapter
16. Deflations Consequences: Winners, Losers, and a Brief New
Normalcy.
Chapter
17. Epilogue: 1920s to Present.
Chapter
18. Conclusion.
David I. Macleod is Professor Emeritus of History at Central Michigan University, where he taught American social and political history. His publications include Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 and The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890-1920.
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