According to The Inflation Calculator, $300,000 in 1921 is the equivalent of $3,728,886.20 in 2011 dollars. So when Professor Sowell says it’s equivalent to “far more than $1 million in today’s money,” he’s understating the matter greatly.
Yes, and in truth I think the inflation calculator greatly understates the truth. That is just six years after Henry Ford created a turmoil by raising his assemblers pay rate to five dollars a day for an eight hour day. That was a doubling of pay for them and they were already making what was considered a good wage in those days. Many people were happy to make five dollars a WEEK in those days. In fact my parents and others used to talk about working for fifty cents a day during the depression days of the thirties. That would have been ten days work to earn what Ford paid for eight hours in 1914. I have seen a report about this on TV and it seems that Ford actually sent people to teach his employees how to manage such a large paycheck and required them to live in a fashion befitting someone earning so much money.
I can vouch for the fact that I remember when my mother took a factory job in the late forties (I was born in 1944) and started for four dollars a day, after training her pay went up to six dollars a day, thirty dollars a week and she used to say that she hardly knew what to do with all that money! Thirty dollars then would easily buy groceries to feed a family for a month and for people who grew most of their own food as we did it was probably enough for our needs at the grocery store for a year. I recall that during the fifties if you found a dime and bought a ten cent candy bar you gave half of it to your brother or your cousin because only a pig could eat a whole candy bar that big at one time.