Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Famines: Shortages of all kinds and stripes
As the cost of war was felt across the nation in 1917, Arkansans used the word “famine” in a way we seldom do.
They did use it to mean widespread starvation, as we do today; but famine also applied to any sort of shortage — animal, mineral, vegetable or intellectual.
Both meanings appear in the Arkansas Gazette as early as 1869, when a drought was described as a “water famine,” a famine of water.
In 1870, extreme hot weather drove citizens off the streets of Little Rock and created an interest famine, “utter famine … in the way of local sensations.”
In 1875, gold merchants were warned to expect a gold famine. In 1912, Paris faced a famine in perfume when essence of violets hit $20,000 a kilogram.
In July 1890, Forrest City experienced “genuine ice famine” when “somebody blundered” and the local ice distributor failed to lay in enough ice for more than a third of its customers. With the town plant idle, distributors depended on ice from Memphis and Marianna. The Gazette reported a rumor that the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Co. in St. Louis had shuttered the Forrest City plant “on account of pique at the town and county for going dry.”
So all manner of famines came and went. Leap forward to 1917. The mustering, training and deployment of the National Army crunched the supply chain for commodities, inspiring higher prices and hoarding, which were blamed for bread famines and sugar famines.
In Little Rock, loss of dairy land threatened a milk famine. When the military diverted railroad cars to troop transport, that was “car famine.”
Another serious concern was coal famine, which had been predicted as likely back in May. It was exacerbated by the car shortage, and it exacerbated the discomforts of an extra chilly fall. Arkansas was cold and very dry until late October when a frigid rain broke the drought.
In Fort Smith, 6,000 coal miners went on strike in protest of Gov. Charles Brough’s plan to appoint a lawyer, Willard Pendergrass of Altus, as state mine inspector. A committee from the United Mine Workers of America objected, saying Pendergrass worked as a claims agent for the Missouri Pacific Railroad and that he didn’t have the requisite eight
years of experience in coal mining.
One hundred years ago
today, the Gazette reported: Little Rock now is entirely without coal, and the famine so long dreaded is at hand, according to local dealers, some of whom fear there is little prospect of immediate relief, while others are more optimistic. It is said that although the strikes have been settled and the miners have promised to return to work, the local situation will not be relieved until the operators take it upon themselves to ship coal to Little Rock.
Coal dealers in the past have found a way to get coal delivered, which was by the simple expedient of going to the mines and paying a little more for coal when they needed it badly, for which act of charity the ultimate consumer usually had to pay. But under the fuel administrator’s ruling this cannot be done now, because a certain price is fixed, beyond which no one can go. …
John Evans of the City Fuel Company reported that his company is not handling coal now because none can be had. Occasionally a car or two drifts in, but a car of coal is a mere bagatelle. If it arrives one night it is gone before 8:30 the next morning, and two cars do not last until noon. No orders are being taken by this company because it has 150 unfilled orders on hand.
By early November, Pendergrass had agreed to decline the job, stepping aside so Brough could appoint some- one else who was to be selected by a referendum among the members of 28 unions. That vote wasn’t certified until mid-December, but in the meantime, the miners went back to work.
But then oil and gas workers went on strike in northern Louisiana, so just as the coal famine eased, a gas famine threatened.
Pendergrass would go on to kill two men, in the first case being convicted of second degree murder and later pardoned, and in the second cleared on the ground of self-defense. He was shot to death by his second wife in 1948. But that’s a different story, or three.
TABLED
To avert famines, patriotic newspaper writers exhorted the American housewife to conserve food, fuel and fabric. Such patriotism resulted in peculiarly specific advice, by today’s standards.
The Oct. 28, 1917, Gazette carried the syndicated column Common Sense in the Home, Edited by Marion Harland, who took aim at waste created by the traditional tablecloth. Could the patriotic housewife retain decorum and elegance while sacrificing her linen tablecloth for napkins and bandages, and help the Army win the war?
Marion Harland was the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune (1830-1922), a Presbyterian minister’s wife whose 65-year career in letters included best-selling novels, biographies and cookbooks before, during and after the Civil War. You can read more about her in the online Encyclopedia Virginia here: bit.ly/2h8HmWb. She had a huge audience.
On the one hand, she wrote, a tablecloth was expensive, and it required frequent laundering, which cost money and led to the need for frequent replacement, costing more money.
When we are told that the surgeons on the fighting front are obliged to stop the wounds of the soldiers with straw and hay and newspapers for lack of sufficient dressings of the right kind, I wonder sometimes how we can bear to keep any linen for our own comfortable smug use instead of sending it all to contribute to the comfort of those who are fighting for us!
She described several fancy homes whose elegant mistresses had already dispensed with the tablecloth, allowing the beauty of their wooden tables to be seen.
On the other hand, one of her friends had declared that it saved her money to launder one large piece of linen rather than many smaller pieces, since she was charged the same for the large cloth as she was for two doilies, and her large household used a lot of doilies.
Harland saw ironing table runners and such comparatively small napery as a pleasant enough task that the housewife should enjoy it, and so “decidedly, one of the economies which will pinch least is discarding the orthodox tablecloth.”
But what did her readers think? She hoped they would write in.