Can ordinary people fight price gouging? Assoutenti’s call echoes an earlier, successful effort to resist price gouging, led in 1914 by the Providence, Rhode Island Italian Socialist Club, documented well by the historian Joseph Sullivan. Then, as is now the case in Italy, pasta prices skyrocketed. Then, as now, war was the factor merchants blamed for high prices. And then, as now, capital’s defenders exonerated business elites for playing any role in the price increases: the Providence mayor commissioned a study that found no price gouging was taking place.
However, Providence in the early 1900s was blessed with strong organized labor and socialist movements. The Labor Advocate newspaper, aligned with the Industrial Workers of the World, denounced the mayor’s study as a “whitewash,” and singled out the local monopolist, “Macaroni King” Frank Ventrone, for profiteering. (Ventrone had already been caught passing off Long Island–made counterfeit pasta dyed yellow to look like real semolina pasta. While centrist economists like to ridicule anyone concerned with quality products as an urban hipster, these working-class Italian immigrants valued the real thing.)
The Italian Socialist Club of Providence organized protests against what it perceived as Ventrone’s price gouging. On August 29, a rally attended by two thousand on the corner of Atwells Avenue and Dean Street in the Italian neighborhood of Federal Hill turned into a protest at Ventrone’s storefront. Some protesters turned rowdy, smashing storefront windows and scattering pasta on the streets. Police, who were predominantly native-born Yankees and Irish, skirmished with protesters throughout the day. In subsequent weeks popular frustration with police brutality would lead to still more protests. Newspapers dubbed the resulting disorder the “Macaroni Riots.”
Were these the actions of a crazed mob, scapegoating innocent merchants for the natural workings of supply and demand, as the Providence Journal and other mainstream commentators alleged? Once again, there are close parallels between then and now. In our own time, centrist economists and commentators have spent the past two years jeering at the idea that market power and profiteering can be responsible for price increases as “greedflation,” an irrational belief akin to a conspiracy theory. According to the centrists’ story, populists blaming “corporate greed” are looking for a scapegoat to blame for the workings of the impersonal forces of supply and demand, and are wrongly targeting corporations. Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell succinctly summarizes the centrist consensus with this rhetorical question:
Why are companies, which have always been “greedy” (or, one might say, “profit-maximizing”), able to raise prices now? What changed between early 2020, when corporate profits and inflation were plummeting, and today, when both metrics are “unconscionably” up?