Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II STRIKES AND THE HIGH COST OF CLOTHING When you had to pay $55, $65 or $75 for a suit of clothes during 1919 and 1920, about $20 to $30 of that price was due to strikes. Men's shirts went up out of all proportion to their increased cost of production and to the increased cost of other articles. The extra difference was because of strikes. Laboring men in 1920 had to pay four times as much for their overalls as in 1913, and about twice as much as in 1919. The chief reason was strikes by other laboring men. Certain cotton cloth went up nine cents a yard on account of one strike. Several hundreds of millions of yards of gray cloth went up five cents a yard entirely because of strikes. Scores of millions of yards of many kinds of the dress cloth made in the Providence district went up one hundred per cent. entirely because of strikes. Moreover these increases of nine cents a yard and five cents a yard and one hundred per cent. applymerely to increased costs caused by strikes that affect factory production. They apply only to factory prices. Railroad strikes, dock strikes, teamsters' strikes, and many other strikes have further so handicapped or held up the distribution and sale of those goods that you, the ultimate consumer, often had to pay many times this much extra. When the war ended, America began the task of demobilizing four million men, most of whom had been out of civilian life from one to two years. All the men and women who had anything to do with the discharged soldier, from demobilization officers to Salvation Army doughnut girls, will tell you that the discharged soldier in general—and four million families will tell you that their discharged soldier in particular —had just two ideas when he got out of the army: First, to get some goo... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.