!44 THE WORLD THE DOLLAR BUILT

cent of their capital assets before the war to 29.0 per cent in 1946.
Those of the eight meat-packing giants rose from 6.9 per cent to 21.0
per cent. The fourteen other mammoth food-processing corporations,
mainly bakery concerns, increased their profits from 15.8 per cent to
27.6 per cent. From 1946 to 1947 the profits of the food processors
rose another one-third. But 1947 was the year when the Rt. Rev.
Bishop Gilbert of New York, having warned of the malnutrition of
one-third of New York's babies, told the Joint Committee: 'We have
to find a way to encourage full-scale production, and if high profits
interfere I believe in all fairness something should be done about it.'

The great food distribution chains, too, bear a large share of the
blame for high prices. Eight of them raised their profits from 12.9
per cent in 1940 to 29.7 per cent in 1946, With their annual sales
volume of well over $4 billion, they control over one-sixth of the
nation's total retail food business, and an even larger share in many
densely populated regions.

Prices and profits have continued to rise since then. Many people
have been forced to buy less food in the late forties and early fifties
than in the peak consumption year of 1946. And when Washington,
under the anti-trust laws, began to prosecute the foremost retail chain,
the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company—'an industrial giant that
some people consider a shining monument to the uniquely American
institution of free enterprise and others as a monopolistic octopus
which has achieved unparalleled power by crushing its competitors in
ruthless disregard of the anti-trust laws' (New York Times, December
11, 1949) there was little hope of the Government winning its case.
For Big Business mobilized its publicity apparatus in protection of
the concern, echoing the spokesman of 'A & P* who declared that
*this action is a threat to the welfare and living standards of every
American citizen*.

Congress took no action to live up to the truth it had put on the
statute book in the Research and Marketing Act of 1946—that 'the
expansion of consumption, rather than the limitation of production, is
the basic answer to our problems*. Nor did it act on the findings its
Committee on Agriculture announced on August 18, 1947: 'there is
little doubt that, if the nutritional level of our economy can be raised
to the point of an adequate diet for all, we would consume every
pound of food our farms can produce'.

Congress preferred to accept the strangely incongruous afterthought
with which this Committee followed up its own challenging words:
'That goal cannot be achieved overnight, and in the meantime the