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The biggest fortunes—and the shady fortunes—were mostly made outside of the U. S. in countries which remained neutral. Before 1913 the Swedish match business was divided between a great number of small individual match factories and the large combine of Jönköping. Just before the War Ivar Kreuger had managed to combine the smaller companies into the United Swedish Match Factories, with a capital of four million kroner. This company, like its rival Jönköping, was faced with War-created difficulties in getting raw materials. But Kreuger made deals with belligerents, guaranteeing to supply them with matches in return for raw materials.
In December 1917, the new combine had built itself up to the point of amalgamating with Jönköping on very favorable terms. The new trust, called the Swedish Match Company Ltd., was capitalized at 45 million kroner, and Kreuger emerged as boss. Faced with renewed competition after the War, Kreuger took advantage of depreciated currencies to buy up match factories and real estate in Poland, Belgium and Germany. He emerged from the War as the match king of the world—to fail and go crooked in the 1929 depression.
In Spain, the prize War baby was Juan March, who had been born of poor peasants on the island of Majorca. Before the War, March was a small Barcelona trader who sold onions and chickens during the day and smuggled tobacco and silk by night. His smuggling flotilla came in handy as early as October of 1914, when he made a killing by cornering all available pigs on the coast of Spain and selling them to the Entente powers for a fantastic profit. Shortly his smuggling fleet had become the Compania Transmediterranea. This company supplied food to the Entente nations and to German submarines with cool impartiality. By 1916 March had cornered the Spanish oil and petrol business. He sold shoes to the French army, traded coal and munitions to both sides, delivered American wheat in his ships, and built up a spy service that was available to all comers. Some of his profits went into Majorcan real estate, some into the National Sugar Trust. By the time the Spanish revolution broke in 1936 this grasping old man, now an octogenarian, had so compounded his World War profits that he was able to lend General Franco at least $50,000,000, according to an estimate printed last April in the New York Times.
Second Time Around? Those who assume that present economic conditions in the U. S. are surely going to continue for a long time, are inevitably startled when they consider what would happen to the U. S. as a neutral in another world war like the last. Subsidizing merchant shipping is the only way that the U. S. can keep its flag on the high seas. In a world war U. S. shipping might become a highly profitable business. Keeping heavy industry, particularly steel, busy is a No. 1 national problem. In a war steel, copper, chemicals, oil would be due for a boom.
The farm problem is one of the New Deal's gravest. U. S. surpluses of corn and wheat would vanish like magic at ever rising prices. Greatest of all present economic problems is unemployment. During a prolonged war the problem would be to find not jobs but men—WPA would become a fantastic memory of an archaic era. The political as well as the economic problems of U. S. life would be entirely different.