Echoes Dispatches From Economic History

By all accounts, dollar stores are doing quite well. Reports for the third quarter of 2012 show that the largest of them -- Family Dollar Stores Inc. (FDO), Dollar General Corp. (DG) and Dollar Tree Inc. (DLTR) -- are all enjoying booming sales.

Such one-price stores have been popular since the 19th century, offering an eclectic and ever-changing inventory at steep discounts. They have provided an efficient way for manufacturers and distributors to dispose of goods that are otherwise difficult to sell. And they have brought an array of consumer goods within reach of even the most cash-strapped Americans.

The Texas Tribune on the "illegals" in the 1830s
Bloomberg Businessweek on how the bar code took over the world
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on lessons from the Fed's first 100 years
Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland on the panic of 1907
Barry Ritholtz on the average daily change of the S&P 500 in December over the years
Hagley Museum and Library on the Pennsylvania Railroad
International Business Times on the history of failed doomsday prophecies
History News Network on the myth of the skyscraper index

Read more from Echoes online.

On Dec. 26, 1912, Representative Carter Glass visited New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson at his home in Princeton. The snows were piled high, and Wilson, the president-elect, was in bed with a cold.

Although he had canceled other appointments, Wilson insisted on seeing Glass -- who, he knew, was bringing a legislative proposal for a new system of coordinating bank reserves. Then as now, the U.S. had recently experienced a financial panic, and many argued that the monetary system was largely to blame.

The New York Times rarely honors inventors with a front-page obituary. But it gave one to N. Joseph Woodland, who received the original patent on bar coding in 1952 for the principle he had developed with his college classmate Bernard Silver.

Woodland’s epiphany came as he sat on a beach, running his fingers through the sand, contemplating ways to encode data about products. It struck him that he could adopt Morse code, which he had learned as a Boy Scout, visually -- in a series of lines of varying width that could be read with a scanner.

Millions of Americans lost their homes in the aftermath of the 1929 stock-market crash. The struggles of this army of the displaced created unique social challenges for a financially fraught government and revealed the impact of the deepening economic crisis on the U.S. worker and his family.

"Every group in society is represented in their ranks, from the college graduate to the child who has never seen the inside of a schoolhouse," Newton Baker, the chairman of the Welfare and Relief Organization, wrote in 1932. "We think of the nomads of the desert -- now we have the nomads of the Depression."

The New York Times on Joseph Woodland, inventor of the bar code
History News Network on what killed the talking filibuster
The American Prospect on how presidents historically approached disaster relief
Naked Capitalism on the history of gold
NPR's Planet Money on Americans moving less than they used to

Read more from Echoes online.

The music business was in turmoil at the turn of the century. Technological innovation had made songs much easier to copy, and established artists foresaw their sales plummeting.

The companies that had once dominated the industry were rapidly losing ground to upstarts who produced new devices for playing music. The established companies urged Congress to tighten up the law to prohibit copying, while the innovators argued that any such change would only harm consumers.

Saul Steinberg, one of the high-flying corporate raiders of the postwar U.S., who died last week, led the way for a generation of aggressive financiers. He was from the start a canny investor with seemingly unlimited reserves of adrenaline.

And before the giants of private equity popularized leveraged buyouts in the public imagination, there was Saul Philip Steinberg: archetype.

Anyone who has been following Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s latest foray into unconventional monetary policy, nicknamed Operation Twist, may think the Fed is up to something new.

It isn’t, really: Operation Twist is a modern cover of an early 1960s classic by the same name, a policy initiated during John F. Kennedy’s administration and dubbed “Twist” after Chubby Checker’s inescapable 1960s dance craze.

On Dec. 4, 1932, the Wisconsin Central Railway declared bankruptcy. Despite a $5 million emergency advance from the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the company was poised to default on $44 million in bonds.

It was the ninth railroad to seek reorganization since 1929, and its troubles were symptomatic of a once-mighty industry that had failed to adapt to a changing economy, and now faced a crisis as the Great Depression deepened.

Many corporate executives have defied the government. How many have been willing to be carried from their offices by soldiers for doing it?

Sewell Avery was. In 1944, Avery, the head of retail giant Montgomery Ward, was ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to settle a strike with his workers. When he refused, the government took over his company. In an iconic photo of the era, two soldiers hold Avery in a sitting position, his arms crossed, a look of insubordination on his face, as they remove him from the building.

The Atlantic on the biggest bank bailouts in history
The Public Domain Review on commentator Will Rogers's message to bankers (audio)
Real Time Economics on the slow growth in disposable income since the recession
History News Network on the hollowing out of the U.S.
National Review Online on how history shows higher taxes don't mean higher revenue
Owen Zidar on 50 years of federal income tax changes
Wonkblog on the death of think tanks
New Bedford Whaling Museum on a historic whaling database

Read more from Echoes, Bloomberg View's economic history blog.

Striking clerks at the nation’s largest port complex, in Southern California, agreed to return to work on Dec. 5, leaving Americans puzzled why a dispute involving a few hundred office workers could threaten the timely arrival of holiday gifts across the country and affect about $1 billion in trade a day.

The answer, of course, can be found in history -- in this case, the history of labor relations at the dawn of the container era.

If ever there was a time to celebrate your constitutional right to a glass of beer, today's the day.

On Dec. 5, 1933, the U.S. ratified the 21st Amendment, ending 13 years of Prohibition. What had started as a question of morality ended as a matter of economics. The country was in the midst of the Great Depression, and the government needed its liquor levies.

The construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) recently joined a long line of businesses that have threatened to move their operations because of onerous state taxes. The historical record offers some sobering lessons for those contemplating such a move.

In the years after World War II, chief executives began a sustained flight from the Northeast, Midwest and Pacific Coast. Their eagerness to relocate was a response to the continued experimentation by local and state governments with the kind of progressive taxation that New Dealers had promoted during the 1930s.

In late November 1932, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had seized control of the Persian government in 1925, canceled a petroleum deal that the U.K.'s Anglo-Persian Oil had held for three decades.

Persia, now known as Iran, believed that its royalties since World War I had been two-thirds lower than what they should have been, and it wanted a new deal.

PBS NewsHour on the U.S.'s historic struggle with debt and the role of federal government
Harper's on the antimonopolist history of the popular board game Monopoly
The Big Picture on changes in real median household income in the 21st century
The Past Speaks on the appointment of Mark Carney as governor of the Bank of England
The New York Times on the marriage of capitalism and conservatism over time
The Wall Street Journal on how today's foreclosure laws arose out of a historical accident
The Economist on the economics of raising the minimum wage

Read more from Echoes, Bloomberg View's economic history blog.

Since the financial collapse of 2008, the advocates of regulation and the supporters of competition (via breaking up the banks) have echoed a debate that took place 100 years ago.

The presidential election of 1912, which occurred at the climax of modern industrialization and finance capitalism, featured four candidates espousing different solutions.

The business of giving advice to other nations on how to manage their finances has always been a contentious undertaking.

In the 1910s, U.S. economists such as Edwin Kemmerer preached the virtues of a stable currency to Mexico and Guatemala; more recently, Greece has received plenty of advice from the International Monetary Fund.

Not every economic-development program works out. On a late April morning in 1801, most of Cincinnati’s thousand citizens lined the banks of the Ohio River, eager to watch one of the wonders of the age. A great new sailing ship, St. Clair, was passing downriver from Marietta for its maiden voyage on the high seas.

But something was terribly wrong: Those spectators were 600 miles from the closest salt-water port.