OLD NEWS

Exchanges broke the chains of poverty

Excerpt of front page of the Oct. 24, 1916, Arkansas Gazette
Excerpt of front page of the Oct. 24, 1916, Arkansas Gazette

One hundred years ago today, a little news item out of Minneapolis appeared on the front page of the Arkansas Gazette:

Women Still Fall For That Old "Chain Game"

"Minneapolis, Oct. 13 -- Many thousands of letters, each 10 cents, are pouring into the local post office daily for women in various parts of the country, who have joined in an 'endless chain' scheme promoted by the so-called National Brokerage Exchange.

"Federal agents are searching for officers of the 'exchange,' who are wanted for using the mails to defraud. A room in a local business block, to which all the letters are addressed, was suddenly vacated three weeks ago, the authorities say.

"To every woman who would send 10 cents in silver and write five friends urging them to join in the chain the 'exchange' promised a 'new 1917 model silk petticoat.'

"'The volume of mail for the "exchange" is rapidly growing,' said Postmaster Purdy, 'and today we received 25,000 letters enclosing 23,000 dimes. Thousands of the letters have been returned to the writers, but a large majority carry no return marks and as a result the dead letter office is becoming clogged. Other mail channels of the local offices are clogged daily by the influx of mail.'"

NEXT MODEL PETTICOAT

Was it a slow news day or was this problem at the Minneapolis post office a big deal? Why was "exchange" in quotation marks? Was the headline writer taking a dig at the campaign for women's suffrage?

There's no way to know what the headline writer thought about women's fitness for voting, which was a sizzling topic that fall after visits to Arkansas by famous activists including Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt.

The headline implies that women ought to have known better, chain-letter cons being old hat. But even today, if friends tell us about a bargain

from what sounds like a nonprofit, sensible people can be snookered. Witness the "Secret Sister" gift-exchange scam in social media.

Which brings us to the quotation marks around the word "exchange."

SISTERS HELPING SISTERS

Today we have exchanges on military bases and in financial centers. A hundred years ago, the word also was used by nonprofit women's business cooperatives sponsored by philanthropists.

Beginning in Philadelphia, these women's exchanges were consignment stores that allowed "the educated poor" woman to earn a real income from goods she made at home, such as food, flowers and crafts. This income spared "gentlewomen" the humiliation of accepting charity. (See The Business of Charity: The Women's Exchange Movement, 1832-1900 by Kathleen Waters Sander.)

In the 1880s and 1890s, the Little Rock Exchange for Woman's Work operated a shop and restaurant on Second Street. It got a lot of ink in the Gazette.

For example, the Dec. 8, 1895, Gazette quoted verbatim the club's 10th annual report, submitted by Mrs. R.A. Edgerton. The exchange had sold more than $2,000 worth of women's products, and to "those involved in this helpful, benevolent institution this means actual financial aid to the women consignors who resort to our doors for assistance when other agencies fail."

But the exchange also relied on donors.

"A chain letter adopted for our benefit has proved a blessing," Edgerton wrote, "and the amount of $107.20 has lifted our exchange out of the difficulties wherein we found ourselves during the dull summer months. Over 700 letters were received and all moneys to the amount of $1 and over personally acknowledged save in one or two instances, when no address could be obtained."

In a 2015 study titled "Chain Letter Evolution," Daniel W. VanArsdale, a California-based mathematician and "amateur folklorist," writes that such charity letters were common into the 1920s. In 1888, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans bemoaned "the progressive or 'chain' system of subscription to charity, which has been made such a nuisance of late by the philanthropically disposed."

The first Little Rock exchange winked out before the turn of the century. In 1912, the Gazette reported that Miss Jane Brooks and Miss Addie Lennox had opened another one, first in the Young Women's Christian Association building at 114 E. Seventh St. and then in the Hollenberg Music Co. building (newly rebuilt at Seventh and Main streets after a fire).

"It is not a giving of charity," the Gazette reported. "It enables women to help themselves."

An ad in the Gazette: "Buy your Home-Baked Bread, Rolls and Cakes and know you are getting pure and wholesome edibles. Many fancy articles, hand embroidered and hand painted ornaments, sold at most reasonable prices."

GRAB AND GO

I found more details of the 1916 silk-petticoat mail fraud in the February 1917 issue of The Post Office Clerk, a former publication of the United National Association of Post Office Clerks, and in The Postal Record from January 1917. (The Record is still published by the National Association of Letter Carriers.)

In fall 1916, the U.S. postmaster general twice ordered postmasters to return to senders all mail addressed to "National Mail Order Brokerage Exchange, 520 Globe Building, Minneapolis, Minn."

In a "novel endless chain letter scheme" this exchange "having no existence whatever" sent out letters promising that a $4.75 silk petticoat would be furnished in return for 10 cents, providing the person remitting the dime would mail copies of the letter to five friends.

There was no such tenant in the Globe Building, and so the letters went to the general delivery office. "The mysterious promoter of the scheme called once at the general delivery window of the Minneapolis office for this mail and obtained a quantity of it. Soon after he took alarm: for never yet has he made a second call for his dimes."

But the dimes kept coming.

"Hundreds and even thousands of people are being defrauded of their dimes and the postal service is being put to great expense and labor to search out the senders and return them their money," the Record reported. Some letters bore no return address. "The orphan dimes that reach the Dead Letter Office are turned over to the dead letter fund of the United States Treasury.

"No one complying with the terms of the letter has received a petticoat."

D'oh!

Next week: Grandma and Flapper Dress Alike Now

ActiveStyle on 10/24/2016

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