Anybody Got Meat?
While cynics suspected that there was ham, lamb and even beef hidden away at the corner butcher shop for preferred customers with deep pockets, the city’s butchers claimed they were the victims not the villains. They were receiving only about 10 percent of their needs at ceiling prices from the wholesalers. But, they added, meat was available to them “for a price.” A series of OPA raids the week before Easter turned up abundant supplies at the wholesalers in the city’s downtown meat packing district. According to The New York Times, some inspectors witnessed deliveries being shooed away when they were present. The wholesalers claimed that most of the meat the inspectors saw was earmarked for the armed services and government overseas relief efforts, but nobody, right or left, believed that. Obviously somebody was getting meat from the wholesalers.
One place meat was going was restaurants, which paid a higher ceiling price for their specialty cuts and were not reluctant to deal under the table. They also could work tie-in deals, paying above market, below ceiling prices for poultry in return for guaranteed shipments of beef and ham. That week a restaurant industry spokesman, walking a fine line, said that ham would indeed be on the holiday menu at most of the city’s dining establishments but that did not mean there would be enough on hand to satisfy every customer who might want to order it. Clementine Paddleford noted in her Herald Tribune column that the PR departments of almost every airline had sent her their Easter menu and every one of them featured ham.
One area of agreement was that no matter what groups were exacerbating or exploiting the situation, the root cause was the enormous postwar demand for meat, especially beef, and that this was a classic scenario for inflation, to which food prices were most sensitive. During the war, even with rationing and shortages, the average per meat consumption was significantly greater than before the war. So while rationing meant that affluent Americans were forced to cut back their meat consumption, most average Americans were eating more meat than they had before the war even with the shortages. This was particularly true for those in uniform but applied to the home front as well, thanks to higher salaries and fuller employment. The average American consumer was not willing to go back to doing without. In fact both meat production and meat consumption climbed in 1946. And prosperity had not come to all. Food prices had climbed steadily even under controls, hurting the most economically vulnerable: disabled veterans and retirees living on small pensions or savings, the unemployable, the sharecroppers of the South and the subsistence farmers of the Appalachian hollows. Further inflation could bring desperation to these people as it often did after major wars.
Another truth was that the OPA was a largely ineffective bureaucratic mess. A plethora of special interests from unions to businesses lobbied for exemptions, special treatment or relief. Every tweak that was made under pressure from one group or another created a new market distortion. There were not enough inspectors to police the market and the legal system showed little appetite for vigorously prosecuting businessmen for violating the rules. Some of the inspectors were on the take. Most Republicans and conservative Democrat politicians were opposed to continuation of market regulation and even New Dealers were hesitant to continue it much longer. A Georgia congressman took to the floor of the House to denounce the prosecution of a meat wholesaler in his district who had taken government subsidies meant to alleviate the effect of price controls and then sold his meat at above ceiling prices. Why that was good old American ingenuity to the congressman from Georgia. The Truman administration had made some serious blunders in economic and fiscal policy that complicated OPA efforts. Still, at this point in time, the public was generally supportive of price controls. But battle lines were being drawn and anti–OPA propaganda was relentless
Congress passed a bill the week before Easter with bipartisan support that would seriously weaken the OPA. Truman and OPA head Chester Bowles denounced the bill. Liberals rallied to preserve OPA. At one gathering that week at Hunter College, acerbic radio comedian Henry Morgan auctioned a car. When the price spiraled upward, Morgan called off the auction and instead held a drawing to sell the car at the ceiling price. Known for his mockery of his own sponsors, Morgan was radio's bad boy, the Letterman of his day. His lack of respect for advertisers would bring him under attack during the Red Scare of the '50s, but he would weather the storm to become a familiar face to television audiences as a panelist on “I’ve Got A Secret” and other television game shows of the '50s and '60s.
When meat controls were lifted temporarily in the summer, meat flooded the market. Then prices skyrocketed. Controls came back and meat disappeared again. Meat prices and shortages would be a political hot potato through much of the decade leading to a rout of Democrats in the congressional and statehouse elections in 1946 as shortages persisted. There was an even bigger backlash against the Republicans in 1948 after prices skyrocketed again.