Rex Stout, The Silent Speaker, but mostly a discursion of World War II price controls

 Rex Stout, The Silent Speaker
© Estate of Rex Stout 1946
Bantam reprint

The Silent Speaker is one of my favorites f the Nero Wolfe novels, but I’m not really going to do a review of it.  Rather, I’m going to write about the background—the story of price regulation and rationing during and (briefly) after World War II.  The starting point is this:  

Following the mini-depression in 1938-1939, the economy continued its recovery.  But in 1941, economic growth really took off, as a rapid increase in the production of war material took hold.  Employment gains were large—8 million new jobs (about 20% of the 1939 level) in 1940-1942 combined.  And, actually, the effect was larger than that.  Not counted in the employment gains were the increases in the number of military personnel—an increase of 1.4 million between 1940 and 1941, another 2 million in 1942, and 5.2 million more in 1943.  Unsurprisingly, per capita income grew dramatically:  Per capita income was about 45% higher (adjusted for inflation) in 1943 than it had been in 1939.

But—and there’s always a “but”—a lot of that additional income came from war material.  During the war years, for example, we produced a lot more motor vehicles—but, from 1942 to 1945, almost no new cars for the domestic market.  Also no new tires.  Little new housing was built.  People’s incomes rose dramatically, but what were they going to buy?  Left to itself, businesses, faced with a dramatic increase in domestic demand and a much smaller increase in domestic output would do exactly what you would expect:  They would raise prices.  Between 1929 and 1939, the general level of prices in the US (as measured by the Consumer Price Index) actually fell by nearly 20%.  By 1943 (compared with 1939), the price level was up by 20%.  But that increase in prices was constrained by the creation of the Office of Price Administration of Price, created (by executive order) in1941.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Price_Administration) 

The OPA had the power to place ceilings on all prices except agricultural commodities, and to ration scarce supplies of other items, including tires, automobiles, shoes, nylon, sugar, gasoline, fuel oil, coffee, meats and processed foods. At the peak, almost 90% of retail food prices were frozen. 

A corollary of price controls in a time of rising incomes was, inevitably, rationing.  Rationing, of course, led to the emergence of black markets.  And, unsurprisingly, business organizations began to lobby for eliminating the OPA, or drastically reducing its authority,  Those lobbying efforts were led by the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Retail Dry Goods Association.  Stout, obviously, conflated the two, in The Silent Speaker, into the National Industrial Association.  And he renamed the Office of Price Administration, hence the Bureau of Price Regulation.

The OPA had three administrators:  Leon Henderson (1941-1942), Prentiss Brown (1943), and Chester Bowles (1943-1946).  And John Kenneth Galbraith, who became somewhat famous in the 1950s and 1960s, was the deputy administrator from 1941 to 1943 (from the wikipedia article: “…he “was forced out in May 1943, accused of ‘communistic tendencies’ ”).

Given the authority that the OPA had over much of the American economy, the possibility that someone working there might be offered a bribe, it’s perhaps remarkable that (so far as I can determine) there were no major (or perhaps even minor) corruption scandals.