Missouri and the Beef Trust: Consumer Action and Investigation 1902

When William McKinley ran a successful campaign for reelection in 1900 on a slogan that promised the American worker a “full-dinner nail,” he indeed appeared optimistic. Perhaps more people were working and the worst aspects of the depression had passed, but severe fluctuations in the cost cf living and retail price indexes created a more dreary picture. From 1891 through 1897, real hourly earnings in all industries remained almost stationary and from 1898 through 1902 rose only slightly. But after falling 9 percent for 1891-1597, the cost of living index ominously pushed upward after 1898. By 1902 it had increased 9 percent above the 1898 level. results appeared in the retail price index for food. For 1891-1597, food prices dropped 5.2 percent, but in 1898-1902, they actually jumped 8.3 percent. 1 Prosperity had not come to rural and urban America, but to corporate America. Such changes created problems of serious consequence. The director of the Board of Charity of St. Joseph, Missouri, worried that monthly grants of money, usually not more than $5.00 per family, would soon be inadequate to meet rising food prices. The cheapest kind of beef had increased in cost from 5 cents a pound to 123 cents a pound in just one year. Potatoes had more than doubled in price in a year from 40–50 cents to $1.05 a bushel. According to the director, an allotment which had once been good for the purchase of twenty pounds of soup meat and two bushels of potatoes would now have to be stretched to buy twelve pounds of meat and one bushel of potatoes. 2 Price increases had accentuated the age-old problem of making means and ends meet.