What Is This Depression Glass?

Commentary

I was tottering around the grounds of a massive antique fair, looking for something to buy. The effect of being surrounded by the sheer vastness of the place—so much stuff!—had an opposite effect on me. I kept thinking that I don’t really need anything so the extra cash I was carrying did not get deployed in service of adding more material goods to my possession.

Plus, honestly, I was shocked at the high prices of everything. Maybe they were the correct prices and it’s probably wrong to expect yardsale pricing at such an event. Still, remembering that the consumer is king here, I declined to buy.

One line of products did stand out near the end of my antiquing journey. There was a lady who specialized in collecting and selling dinnerware. I spent so much time in her tent, imagining the uses of these large and elaborate punch sets and gigantic martini shakers. This was party central circa 1948, a time when the domestic arts was in the process of being perfected.

There were glasses of every shape and size along with serving pitchers and trays. One wonders how this stuff would be used today now that dinner parties are rare, the homestead is not what it was, storage space is scarce, and people like to stay mobile. Still, the romance of it all is attractive.

Near the end of my shopping, a man came up to the front table which was stacked with delightful plates, saucers, and cups in colored glass: green, pink, blue, and otherwise. They were priced at the shockingly low price of $1 for each piece. I recognized this as Depression Glass but suddenly realized that I did not know where it came from or why it exists.

I spoke with the merchant for a while about it. And she confirmed a vague sense that I had about this style and product. It came free inside bags of flour, oats, detergent, and other products that people would buy in the 1930s. It was not a retail product to buy separately, she explained. It was an inducement to purchase.

This is odd, don’t you think? It’s true that cereals have come with free things inside. Candy too. But it seems strange that you would buy a bag of flour and pull out a plate or cup or saucer of a fun little color. Tells you something about the times, one supposes. People in the Great Depression still wanted to build sets of dinnerware and this was one way to do it.

I somehow knew that there was more to the story. Looking it up confirmed my economic suspicions. The addition of plates and glasses to bags of groceries was designed to get around price floors that were both statutory and informal. It was a way to charge prices that were higher than they might otherwise be—this is what the powers that be wanted—while giving the consumer something of value in exchange.

There is no way to understand this practice without knowing something about the prevailing price theory of the 1930s. That generation of economists and statesmen scrambled for a reason for the sudden loss in output, rise in unemployment, and declining business prospects for everyone.

Under the influence of a new theory coming out of high academic circles, the general conclusion was that the economy suffered under deflation as characterized by falling prices. They theorized that the solution to economic doldrums was higher prices that would lift business profitability and put people back to work.

In other words, they mistook the symptom for the causes, not an unusual error in the social sciences. For that matter, this error is not unusual in medicine, epidemiology, or the sciences more generally.

Part of the program of the New Deal, then, was an overt attempt to raise prices. Sometimes that involved paying farmers not to grow crops so as to restrict supply and hence raise prices. They attempted to expand money and credit with lower interest rates in hopes of generating inflation. They even imposed strict price controls on goods and services.

These were heavily enforced. And they pertained to everything, even cleaning clothes.

For example, on April 21, 1934, the New York Times reported that:

“Jacob Maged, 49 years old, a tailor of 427 Palisade Avenue, Union City, was sentenced to thirty days in the county jail and ordered to pay a $100 fine yesterday because he charged 35 cents for pressing a suit instead of 40 cents …. Mr. Maged, who is the father of four children, has not paid much attention to the changing order and was only vaguely aware of the existence of a code. He pleaded guilty to the charge that he violated the State code of fair competition for cleaners and dyers.”

The entirety of economic life was affected and fundamentally distorted by these price floors, all an extension of a fanatical effort to keep prices high. Indeed retailers and wholesalers actually feared lowering prices on anything because doing so could run afoul of the regulators’ ambitions. People could be, and often were, arrested for doing so.

The creative solution of adding prices to products was one answer. You are buying flour but actually you are getting a nice piece of dinnerware to add to the household collection. It was even more creative because industrial processes were newly invented to allow charming colors to be added, incentivizing people to collect in hopes of gaining a full set.

To be sure, these are not brilliant pieces. You can see the manufacturing seams on them and they are glass, not crystal and certainly not porcelain. Indeed, they were kind of mass-produced junk in some ways, surely looked down upon by the finest households and estates. But for the middle class, these would do just fine. Today, collectors really enjoy them and people buy them and use them with some sense of irony.

Such schemes for getting around price controls became extremely common and they lasted far beyond the Supreme Court’s edict that the National Industrial Recovery Act, the source of many price controls, was unconstitutional.

Once the United States entered the war, an opposite “problem” presented itself. Prices and wages were rising too fast, a consequence of loose monetary policy. The price controllers got to work again, limiting the ability of employers to attract labor with higher salaries.

And this is precisely where medical insurance via employers came from in the first place. The larger corporations decided to bundle these benefits as part of a payment package as a means of getting around price controls, this time in the form of ceilings on prices.

That’s right: the employer-provided medical insurance we know today was the equivalent of Depression Glass a decade later: a free-inside prize to induce the purchase (in this case, accepting the job).

This should be a lesson to all policymakers for all time. Don’t mess with market prices. Producers and consumers will always find a workaround.

To finish the story of my antiquing trip, the only thing I bought was an $8 lemonade, sold from a stand in the shape of a lemon. Yes, I was shocked at the price but did it anyway. I could have bought eight dinner plates of Depression Glass for that.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.