Great War inflation

31 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Uncategorized, WW1

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Food prices jump from $.90 to $1.29, Brooklyn Daily Eagle: January 31, 1918

This striking headline appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle one hundred years ago today. A jump from $.90 to $1.29 represents a 30% increase in the price of groceries. The way I have always understood it American food producers had done well the first three of the war, selling food stuffs to European governments to feed their hungry armies out in the field. This demand in turn set off inflation here in the United States, not to staggering proportions but at least enough for American consumers to feel the pinch. Rationing and price controls too contributed to inflation at the dinner table.

As of late January 1918 the United States still had few troops stationed overseas, though the number of men in uniform and in training stateside was growing exponentially. This was putting additional strain on both the food supply and the transportation systems that brought goods from here to there within the United States. One can only imagine what Americans were thinking when they saw headlines like this in the winter of 1918.

FDR, 1882-1945

30 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Those we remember

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The desk Franklin Delano Roosevelt kept in the family’s East 65th Street townhouse

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on this date in 1882. On these winter days I sometimes think of the coming summer, when among other things I usually make a day trip to Hyde Park. When I was there last summer I asked the ranger if the site does something every January 30 to commemorate the occasion of the only four term president’s birth. She said the library & museum hold a brief ceremony every year, often with a contingent from the West Point Band just down the Hudson on hand to play. She emphasized the brevity of the ceremony. The winds blowing cold off the river in late January make a longer event untenable.

The photograph of the desk you see above was not taken in Hyde Park. I took the photo this past November at the Roosevelt House on East 65th Street. I sent the image to a friend of mine the night I took this. He was shocked at how modest and unadorned the desk was. I explained that, for all the wealth the Roosevelts had, they tended toward Dutch restraint. Roosevelt once famously said while president that he did not want a memorial in his honor after his death to be any larger than his desk. They honored that request in the mid 1960s. That it took twenty years to build even such a modest edifice is testimony to how long these things take.

When we think of the Hudson River Roosevelts we think of Hyde Park and Washington. Over course there were the twelve White House years. Thirty years before then, during the First World War when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin and Eleanor rented a house from her Aunt Bamie just off Dupont Circle. Still the Manhattan home, with his mother Sara living next door in a detached townhouse, was very much the family domicile for large stretches throughout their lives. I kept the image above in my photo stream for the past 2 1/2 months waiting until this winter day to mark the 136th anniversary of FDR’s brith.

More “eyes” for the Navy

28 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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1917 poster produced by the Sackett & Wilhelms Corporation of New York for the Navy Department

In the final week of January 1918 the U.S. Navy Department sent out a request to all Americans to please send any binoculars, telescopes, spy glasses, sextants, and visual aids of similar nature to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt care of the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue. This was the second such plea put out by the Navy in the past two months. Binoculars were the most desired item on the wish list. Strictly speaking any items sent were to be loans not gifts; the Navy offered $1 for the use of any item for the duration of the war. The dollar was actually a technicality; government agencies were prohibited from taking possession of any goods without payment. Thousands of packages flooded in to the Observatory over the last five weeks of 1917 and first several weeks of 1918. Still, the need was so great that the Navy issued the second plea.

Apparently word got around too that some people were holding back because they were unsure of if/how/when they would ever receive their items returned. There were enough letters to the editor of various newspapers complaining of packages sent but not acknowledged that Roosevelt felt the need to draft a communiqué explaining that the Navy was doing all it could to address the backlog. He made clear too that, while all items would be duly tagged before being sent to ships, submarines, and lookout points, the Navy could not realistically be expected to return every item to its proper owner. Equipment can be lost or destroyed in time of war.

Unpacking binoculars and other visual aids at the Naval Observatory, 1918

The return of items was no small thing. One citizen noted that his binocular set cost $50, which is more than $1000 in today’s currency. One of the reasons the visual equipment was so expensive, and for the shortage itself, was because many of the premier manufacturers of such items were Swiss, German, French, or other European concerns. These makers were either now on the other side in the Great War; or, if the country of origin were an American ally, it was just logistically impossible for companies to send such things. Also, it was not uncommon during the war for manufacturers to retrofit their factories to produce different goods for the war effort. Thus the call from Roosevelt in late 1917 and early 1918.

(images/Library of Congress)

Vonnegut in winter

21 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Kurt Vonnegut, Rod Serling, WW1, WW2

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February 2010 image of the slaughterhouse where, sixty-five Februaries previously, Kurt Vonnegut survived the Dresden firebombing

One of my undertakings for this winter is to re-read the Kurt Vonnegut catalog. Like many, I read Vonnegut extensively in high school and college but got away from him over the years, though I did return to Slaughterhouse Five from time to time. Vonnegut is one of those writers one can return to at different points in one’s life, reading him with fresh eyes from the changing perspectives of one’s age. I intend to read both the fiction and non-fiction. I will have to do a literature review before diving in fully, but I am considering some type of project in which I analyze the World Wars on Vonnegut’s family. I know that a fair amount has been done on Vonnegut but I think there are some threads left to untangle. If this happens, it will not be until summer or fall.

Vonnegut in uniform during the Second World War, circa 1943-45

Again it has been a while since I have read him, but I recall him discussing the effect that the anti-German hysteria had on his family in Indiana during the First World War. Vonnegut, born in 1922, was a young enlisted man during the Second World War and famously survived the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden Germany as a prisoner of war. That experience in turn was the basis of Slaughterhouse Five, usually considered his most important work. He often downplayed the role that his Second World War experiences played on his personal life, claiming that people often go through cataclysmic events with little to no impact on their own psyches. That may or may not be true. It is without question true that the Second World War played a huge role in his writings. His mother’s 1944 suicide was also a factor in his worldview.

Right now I am focusing on the early novels. I finished God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater on Friday and started Mother Night yesterday. I am struck by how little science fiction there is in these considering that he is usually put in the Sci Fi/Fantasy genre. Some of those devices, time travel, etc., would come in later works but I would hesitate to put him in that category. A second thing that strikes me on reading these novels today is that, when Vonnegut was writing them, the Second World War was more current events than history. I never saw it that way when I was reading them in the 1970s & 80s because to my perspective the Second World War was already part of Ancient History. My sense and perspective on time has changed entirely now that I am in full blown middle age. So it goes.

If I indeed pursue some type of project on Vonnegut, perhaps a series of articles here on the Strawfoot, I may try to tie it in with Rod Serling. Perhaps it might be a compare and contrast of the two men and how they were influenced by their experiences in the Second World War. In some ways these are still current events: it is striking to see how the problems created by the events of the twentieth century are touching the world we live in today.

(images/top, Keith Gard; bottom United States Army)

On to 2018

20 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Florida, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Philately

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Hey all, I hope everyone’s 2018 is off to a good start. My timing was fortunate. I left for Florida the day before the snow came and returned the day after the freeze broke. I put the blog aside for a time since my return because I have been plugging away assiduously on the book about Civil War Era New York. I have another few thousand words to go. If I grind it out I may finish the draft as early as next weekend. I intend then to spend the rest of the winter revising, honing, fact checking and putting the bibliography into Zotero. I’m maintaining the energy level as I reach the finish line.

Last weekend I received the box you see below. About fifteen years ago my mother told me she wanted to start a stamp collection. She had had one when she was a girl, which ultimately went to one of my older cousins somewhere along the way many decades ago. She had great of fun building this new collection for about a decade until declining health rendered it impossible for her to continue. I told her when she began back in the early 2000s that there is no wrong way to collect stamps. One does it entirely for oneself and, if one goes about it well, the collection becomes an accurate representation of the individual who created it. Her knowledge of philately was never that extensive–neither is mine for that matter–but she managed with my help to create what grew into something special. Not valuable in a financial sense, but something that collectively was greater than the sum of the parts.

South Florida

As I mentioned she stopped adding to her stamp collection about five years ago due to health issues that rendered it difficult. Last year she asked if I wanted to bring it back to New York. I didn’t, hoping maybe she would pick it up again. This year she asked again and I knew that it was time; more than once she alluded to the fact that seeing the collection and not being able to work on it was painful. I didn’t press it. Two weeks ago today we pulled out the wicker basket containing the album and the supplies. It took fifteen minutes to dust it off–it had been that long. Then I sorted things out, packed them up for safe transport, and boxed them up. The following day, Sunday, we went to the post office in South Florida, put it on the machine, printed a stamp and label, and put it in the big locked box for USPS to start shipping the following day.

Brooklyn

It came in the mail later that week. The first thing I did was open it to make sure everything arrived undamaged. (I had put the items, including the album on the right, in separate bags within the box and added packing material for safer traveling.) Thankfully it was all good. Since then it has sat undisturbed. I told my mother that while I will build on the collection because I do want it to be a living thing. For the most part though it will remain intact and much as it is. In the box are a sizable number of plate blocks and first day covers representing my mother’s various interests. One could call it a very feminine collection. I will sort and organize things in a systematic manner once I figure out how best to do all this. In the much longer term I will probably give it to my niece or nephew, if they want it, somewhere down the line. Time will tell.

Thinking of James Reese Europe

01 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Uncategorized

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Hello all, I wanted to again wish everyone a happy and healthy 2018. I could not let the 100th anniversary of the arrival in France of James Reese Europe and the rest of the Harlem Hellfighters go unmentioned. Alas I could not find a recording of the rendition of “La Marseillaise” that they played upon their arrival on 1 January 1918. I don’t even know if a recording was made. If not, that is unfortunate. I intend to do more on Europe and the Hellfighters over the year. Enjoy this clip.

I will be off the computer grid for the next week. I am putting both the book and blog aside for a bit. Things will pick up again next week. I am looking forward to an exciting 2018. FYI, last week I received a reply from the person at the cultural institution I mentioned. Things are still in the planning stages and so I don’t want to give too much away, but it looks like we may indeed be doing something WW1-related this spring. I’ll have more on this in March.

Here is to a good 2018.

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