Sunday News on Shortages
The city was "confronted yesterday with what might develop into the most severe meat shortage since the early days of rationing" the paper reported . Among other ominous developments, the Cudahy Packing Co in Jersey City had shut down it said because of its inability to purchase cattle at a reasonable price. The major packers claimed that business had been grabbed by a combine of "Johnny-come-lately" operators feeding a black market while the market share of the big boys was down from 80% to 20% because of OPA restrictions. However the meatpackers union, some butchers and consumer groups, as well as other supporters of the Office of Price Administration, accused the packers of deliberately holding meat off the market this holiday week as a ploy to blackmail the government into an early end to price controls and to spur government action to help restore the oligopoly formerly enjoyed by packers like Armour and Swift. But what had happened to the meat? Surprise raids by OPA inspectors found ham, lamb and beef in the distributor warehouses. Some was being sent overseas to feed American servicemen and to support the relief effort. Some meat was being sold at black market prices, not in back alleys but under-the-counter by neighborhood butchers forced to buy meat from established suppliers at over the ceiling prices. Some went to restaurants and hotels that were legally charged a premium for the best cuts. Increased demand due to higher incomes had contributed to the perception of shortages. But nothing in the supply/demand equation explained why meat should mysteriously all but disappear the week before Easter. As the cynics noted, cows and pigs had not suddenly disappeared from the farms and feedlots, but the packers said the ranchers and farmers demanded above ceiling prices for their stock. At least the situation was less dire than Easter 1945 when chickens and turkeys were also in short supply. This hard-fought conflict between the desire of business to reap their customary post-war windfall profits and that of the New Dealers to prevent the customary post-war inflation that could wipe out the post-Depression economic gains would rage throughout the remaining years of the decade. The News was among those who felt the problem was largely the fault of the interference with the free market.
Meanwhile the price of milk was also becoming an issue. The News reported that Henry Rathbun, president of Dairymen's League Cooperative Association, 11 W. 42nd St, had named a committee made up of the state's principal milk producers to carry a demand for higher milk prices to Washington. The situation with sugar, one of the few items still rationed, threatened to grow even worse with two-thirds of the nation's refineries facing strikes over union wage demands. The administration was looking to cut the domestic use of grains to allow the country to meet its commitment to provide food relief to famine-stricken Europe and Asia. Brewers already had been hit with a cutback in grain deliveries and the Agriculture Department was expected to issue an order limiting flour deliveries to millers to 75 percent of the amount that had been delivered in a base period the previous year. In his new capacity as director-general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, former New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia urged the government to cut domestic flour production by 10 percent. The News editorially disapproved of sending all this food abroad and asking US consumers to sacrifice. A headline that day complained that the "US to Spend $2-million a Day to Feed Enemy," referring to the commitment to provide emergency war relief in vanquished Germany and Japan.
Food was not the only item in short supply. Inexpensive and moderately-priced clothing was also hard to find, particularly menswear. High-end women's fashion was readily available as the ads for Bergdorf's, Bonwits and Saks Fifth Avenue in The Times and The New Yorker attested and retailers reported the best Easter season in years, but recently discharged veterans were still wearing parts of their uniforms for lack of an alternative. An article in a recent New Yorker followed an out-of-town department store buyer on his Garment District rounds. Gone were the days when manufacturers put on a glitzy showroom display and entertained their customers at restaurants and night clubs. Now the buyers were begging for deliveries of whatever they could get.
The Sunday News carried an AP report on a radio address by Stabilization Director Chester Bowles assuring the public that the shortage in inexpensive clothing would ease up in three months. He appealed for patience. His explanation for the current shortage:
A wartime shortage of textile workers
Previous government inaction during the war. Rationing should have begun earlier and controls instituted as soon as it became apparent that manufacturers were shifting into higher-priced clothing lines at the expense of affordable garments
Premature removal of controls after the war's end. Mills should have been required to make essential fabrics for low-cost clothes
The rising cost of raw cotton