Brad DeLong, who has been doing great World War II blogging, tells us that today is the 60th 70th [math is hard!] anniversary of FDR’s seizure of Montgomery Ward, the once-ubiquitous catalogue and retail operation whose chairman refused to comply with wartime labor agreements. It’s a fascinating story.

But why did Montgomery Ward ultimately disappear from the scene? It wasn’t the wartime obstructionism; it was bad macroeconomics. As the Times report on the final demise put it,

Retail historians date the start of [Montgomery Ward’s] decline to the postwar boom of the 1950’s, when its rival, Sears, Roebuck & Company, moved aggressively into the then nascent suburbs, while Ward, under the steely leadership of its then chief executive, Sewell Avery, hoarded cash and waited for a second Great Depression.

Or to put it a bit differently, Avery was a firm believer in secular stagnation, and a firm disbeliever in the ability of policymakers to do anything about it.

One interesting point here is that in the 1950s right-wingers like Avery didn’t necessarily believe that big government leads to hyperinflation; he seems to have believed that it would cause deflation instead.

Anyway, an interesting tale. In many ways, the history of Montgomery Ward from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries is the story of America.