Concern Intensifies in 1910: What or Whom to Blame?

President William Howard Taft concluded his annual message to Congress, on December 7, 1909, with a mixed assessment of rising prices: “We have just garnered a harvest unexampled in the market value of our agricultural products. The high prices which such products bring mean great prosperity for the farming community, but on the other hand they mean a very considerably increased burden upon those classes in the community whose yearly compensation does not expand with the improvement in business and the general prosperity.” Lest the rising cost of living reflect badly on the Republicans’ recently passed Payne-Aldrich Tariff, Taft observed that price increases were worldwide and argued that other factors—expanded gold production, population increase, a “more expensive mode of living,” and failure to increase agricultural production per acre—were to blame. Having absolved the tariff, Taft proposed no solution.