Category: Business
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Re-enter the Guilds
Here’s a fact of FDR’s biography which has been almost completely lost to history: exactly 10 years before being elected president, he was elected president… of the American Construction Council. The highlights of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s political chronology leave a gaping hole in the middle. First he served as a New York state senator from…
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Wall Street’s Heel on the Prodigal Movies
A 1921 article predicted that the era of large movie budgets was over. Let’s just say that didn’t turn out to be the case. The final hour of profligate spending draws near — of million-dollar salaries and two-hundred-thousand-dollar sets. For the motion-picture-producing companies are putting their houses in order for the inspection of the bankers.…
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Hagenbeck’s Closes Its Doors
During WWI, so many animals starved to death at Germany’s famous zoo Hagenbeck’s that the park was forced to close in 1920. Fortunately, it reopened two years later and remains an attraction to this day. In 1907, Hagenbeck’s originated and pioneered the concept of the open-air zoo, with animals separated from human visitors by moats,…
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What’s Wrong With Labor?: Federation Threatened with I.W.W. Control from the Inside
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was a revolutionary socialist labor union. In 1919, a bitter debate brewed them and the more mainstream and moderate American Federation of Labor (AFL). One organization’s aim was to attain some method of cooperation between capital and labor and the consequent mutual benefit. The other aimed to eliminate capital.…
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Laboratory of Dry Law Enforcement
Government in 1919 began testing seized substances to determine if they violated Prohibition by containing too much alcohol. Medicines, after all, could contain some — but at a certain point the “medicine” would become illegal. Many attempts are being made to evade the prohibition law by disguising alcoholic beverages as patent medicines. Some of those discovered…
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All of Them Looking for a Man’s Job
After returning from WWI, many men who had previously been on the less stereotypically masculine end of the spectrum wanted more of a “man’s job” in employment. Most of the men who come back from the war want to do something of more consequence than the work they did before. Having had a hand in the…
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Collective Bargaining for Actors’ Wages
Theater actors in July 1919 wanted higher pay for extra performances. When managers refused, the first strike in American theater history occurred. The old contract had specified eleven national holidays in the year on which the actor was required to play a matinee without additional salary… The actors demanded that they be paid upon a…
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Plans For Dry New York
With Prohibition going into effect mere weeks away, what were the bars of New York City to do? Replacement options were sprouting in an attempt to replicate the bars’ former atmospheres, only without alcohol. The Salvation Army, for one, is getting ready to enter the field. It will run substitutes for saloons, which, it is…
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System In Our War
The War Department underwent a substantial change at the beginning of World War I, transforming from a largely combat-based agency to a manufacturing- and business-based one. Assistant Secretary of War Benedict Crowell explained in this 1918 interview: The War Department [has] become a business affair. He cited the aircraft work of the army as an example.…
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Business World’s Grievance Against Germany
President Trump spent the past few weeks ratcheting up his trade wars, which he claims would be “easy to win.” He has implemented tariffs on steel and uranium, in a move that even many or most of his own party’s Congress members oppose, not to mention most other world leaders. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong, and…
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