Profiteer Stories Reinvigorate the Boycott Narrative with World
War I
Related to boycotts was the emerging profiteer narrative. Figure 17.1 shows the
epidemic contagion of profiteer, a new word associated with anger against
businesspeople. The term was coined in 1912, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary. It was mentioned extremely frequently around World War I and just
after, with its use peaking during the depression of 1920–21. Profiteer is a play
on the much older word privateer, meaning a pirate ship that has government
support to prey on enemy foreign shipping. Such vivid mental images enhanced
profiteer contagion. Associated phrases at the time were excess profits and, as we
have seen, boycotts.
In 1918, the last year of World War I, the New York Tribune offered an
example of these narratives:
There is a local story, writes “The Cleveland Plain Dealer,” to the effect that
two men in a streetcar were discoursing upon the great struggle, when one of
them said: “The war has been a godsend to my plant,” and the other,
chuckling, replied: “If it lasts two years longer I’ll be on Easy Street.”
Whereupon, as the story runs, a woman stood up and smote both men
grievously with her umbrella, exclaiming as she did so: “If that’s what the
war means to you, this is what your remarks mean to me!”4
This narrative, accompanied here by a powerful visual image of an angry woman
using her umbrella as a weapon, was highly contagious. This narrative and
similar narratives persisted after the war, strongly affecting attitudes toward
business for several more years.
The sharpest depression (meaning fastest decline and recovery) in US history
since the advent of modern statistics occurred from 1920 to 1921. At that time,
people called the depression the “post-war depression,” and the unhyphenated
word postwar also emerged, unambiguously referring to World War I, which was
considered a unique turning point in history. The phrase describing it, the war to
end all wars, had gone viral during and just after World War I. A few decades
later, World War II eclipsed World War I, and the meaning of postwar changed
to refer to the period after World War II. As a result, the depression of 1920–21
lost a uniquely identifying name. In a 2014 book, James Grant suggested calling

it “The Forgotten Depression,” which was the title of his book about it.
FIGURE 17.1. Frequency of Appearance of Profiteer in Books, 1900–2008, and News, 1900–2019
Profiteer was a strong short epidemic starting during World War I but did not peak until the 1920–21
depression. Sources: Google Ngrams, no smoothing, and author’s calculations from ProQuest News &
Newspapers.
Nonetheless, the 1920–21 depression was a powerful narrative at the time of
the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was part of the script for that depression.
Ultimately, every important event from the depression of the early 1920s through
the Great Depression of the 1930s was put in the emotional context of either
“prewar” or “postwar.” For example, in 1933, twenty-year-old soldiers who
survived World War I, then in their midthirties, still maintained wartime
friendships and in many cases still nursed wartime wounds. Both depressions
also generated an atmosphere of public outrage toward business, as exemplified
by the angry woman attacking the two businessmen with her umbrella.

The Return to “Normalcy”
After World War I, with immediate postwar inflation totaling 100%, a deflation
narrative developed by 1920. The story that consumer prices would fall
dramatically was strongly contagious owing to its association with the profiteer
narrative. Indeed, during the 1920–21 depression, thousands of newspaper
articles noted that certain individual prices had fallen to their prewar 1913 or
1914 levels. The newspapers’ writers and editors knew that readers would
respond well to such stories because, to most people, it seemed natural that once
the war was over, prices would return to their old levels: a very important
perceived “return to normalcy” that might eventually encourage consumers to
buy a new house or a new car, but only after prices came down fully.
The idea that prices would fall to prewar levels was encouraged by the talk
during the 1920 presidential campaign. Presidential candidate Warren Harding
popularized the word normalcy to describe the world’s conditions before World
War I, promising to bring back those conditions. Use of the word normalcy long
before 1920 can be documented—it was not Harding’s invention—but the word
was used so rarely before 1920 that many people believed that Harding had
coined it. Harding used normalcy much as Donald J. Trump used the words bigly
and yuge in his 2016 election campaign promises to make America great again.
In both Harding’s campaign and Trump’s, words loaned a concreteness to the
narrative, were frequently joked about, and seemed almost to provide a name for
the narrative. For Harding, the word normalcy reflected a tendency to conflate
the depression conditions of 1920 with the still-vivid trauma of the war, making
for an emotionally intense narrative of the times.
In his March 1921 inaugural address as new president of the United States,
Harding summarized what he’d emphasized throughout his 1920 election
campaign:
The business world reflects the disturbance of war’s reaction. Herein flows
the lifeblood of material existence. The economic mechanism is intricate and
its parts interdependent, and has suffered the shocks and jars incident to
abnormal demands, credit inflations, and price upheavals. The normal
balances have been impaired, the channels of distribution have been clogged,
the relations of labor and management have been strained. We must seek the