1926 - Commerce

Commerce

France stabilizes the franc at 20 percent of its prewar value, thus virtually wiping out the savings of millions of Frenchmen. The devaluation will have the effect of making the French Europe's greatest gold hoarders (see 1928).

A merger of German industrial giants creates the mammoth United Steel Works (Vereinigte Sthalwrerke) cartel, rivaled only by the great Krupp works at Essen. Major mining enterprises join with the Rhine-Elbe Union steel company that Albert Voegler, 49, has built up with help from the late Hugo Stinnes, Nazi-supporting industrialist Emil Kirdorf, now 79, and Nazi-supporting steelmaker Fritz Thyssen, 53.

Mesabi iron range discoverer Leonidas Merritt dies at Duluth, Minn., May 9 at age 82.

A British General Strike cripples the nation from May 3 to May 12 as members of the Trade Union Congress rally to the slogan, "Not a penny off the pay; not a minute on the day." The strike begins with a lockout May 1 by private coal mine operators whose workers refuse to accept a pay cut averaging 13 percent and refuse to work an extra hour each day (they average the equivalent of only $14.60 per week). Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill's return to the gold standard last year has squeezed export industries such as coal (which must compete with German and Polish producers and with oil) and forced mine operators to cut wages and increase hours over the opposition of labor leaders who include former coal miner Arthur J. (James) Cook, 42. Railwaymen, printing trade workers, building trade workers, truckdrivers, dock workers, iron and steel workers, chemical industry employees, and some power company workers walk out in sympathy with the miners in accordance with a strategy devised by Transport Workers chief Ernest Bevin, 42. The Royal Navy trains its guns on British strikers who try to prevent ships from off-loading food and other relief materials in support of the great strike; economist John Maynard Keynes has called Churchill's action "featherbrained" and "silly," but while 3 million workers respond to Ernest Bevin's strike call, volunteers who include most of the students of Oxford and Cambridge maintain essential services. The sympathy strike is called off May 12, but although Arthur Cook urges coal miners to return to work, they refuse; Cook then directs their strike, and they continue to resist any wage cut or lengthening of hours until November 19, when they capitulate unconditionally. The mine workers accept the terms of the mine operators plus drastic layoffs and will not strike again until 1972. Former Electrical Trades Union assistant secretary Walter (McLennan) Citrine, 39, becomes general secretary of the Trades Union Congress and will head it until 1946.

The U.S. Railway Labor Act (Watson-Parker Act) signed into law by President Coolidge May 20 sets up a five-man board of mediation appointed by the president to settle railway labor disputes (see 1934).

American International Group (AIG) has its U.S. beginnings in the American International Underwriters, founded at New York by California-born entrepreneur Cornelius Vander Starr, 34, who 7 years ago founded American Asiatic Underwriters at Shanghai to sell burial-plot life insurance. By 1929 he will have life insurance offices all across China as well as in Hanoi, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, the Philippines, and Saigon, and AIG will grow to become the world's largest insurance company.

Industrialist Zhang Jian (Chang Chen) dies at Nant'ung in his native Kiangsu Province August 24 at age 73, having built an empire of cotton mills, flour mills, shipping lines, and other enterprises.

Ford Motor Company announces a 5-day workweek September 25. Henry Ford writes in the October issue of Ford News, "Just as the 8-hour day opened our way to prosperity in America, so the 5-day workweek will open our way to still greater prosperity . . . It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege . . . People who have more leisure must have more clothes. They eat a greater variety of food. They require more transportation in vehicles."

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes at 166.10 September 7 and closes December 31 at 157.20, up from 156.66 at the end of 1925.