What Was the Role of Chicago in the Beef Industry Apex

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Meatpacking

Meatpacking

The preparation of beef and pork for homo consumption has always been closely tied to livestock raising, technological change, government regulation, and urban market place demand. From the Civil State of war until the 1920s Chicago was the country'southward largest meatpacking center and the acknowledged headquarters of the industry.

Cattle Pens, Marriage Stock Yard, c.1920s

Europeans brought cattle and hogs to North America, let them forage in the wood, and slaughtered them only as meat was needed. Commercial butchering began when population increased in the towns. Since beef was difficult to preserve, cattle were killed year round and the meat sold and consumed while withal fresh. Hogs were killed merely in cold weather. Their fatty was rendered into lard and their flesh carved into hams, shoulders, and sides, which were covered with salt and packed in wooden barrels. Packers utilized hides, only claret, bones, and entrails normally went into the nearest torso of running water. Metropolis government, understandably, tried to confine these operations to the outskirts of town.

Americans took their cattle and hogs over the Appalachians after the Revolutionary War, and the book of livestock in the Ohio River Valley increased speedily. Cincinnati packers took advantage of this development and shipped barreled pork and lard throughout the valley and down the Mississippi River. They devised ameliorate methods to cure pork and used lard components to make soap and candles. Past 1840 Cincinnati led all other cities in pork processing and proclaimed itself Porkopolis.

Chicago won that championship during the Civil State of war. It was able to practise so because about Midwestern farmers besides raised livestock, and railroads tied Chicago to its Midwestern hinterland and to the big urban markets on the East Coast. In addition, Union ground forces contracts for processed pork and alive cattle supported packinghouses on the branches of the Chicago River and the railroad stockyards which shipped cattle. To alleviate the problem of driving cattle and hogs through metropolis streets, the leading packers and railroads incorporated the Union Stock Yard and Transit Visitor in 1865 and built an innovative facility south of the city limits. Accessible to all railroads serving Chicago, the huge stockyard received 3 million cattle and hogs in 1870 and 12 1000000 just 20 years afterward.

Stock Yard Canning Room, c.1890

Between the opening of the Marriage Stock Yard in 1865 and the end of the century, Chicago meatpackers transformed the industry. Pork packers such every bit Philip Armour built big plants west of the stockyards, adult ice-cooled rooms and so they could pack twelvemonth round, and introduced steam hoists to elevate carcasses and an overhead assembly line to move them. Gustavus Swift, who came to Chicago to ship cattle, developed a way to send fresh-chilled beef in ice-cooled railroad cars all the way to the E Coast. By 1900 this dressed beef trade was every bit of import equally pork packing, and mechanical refrigeration increased the efficiency of both pork and beefiness operations. Moreover, Chicago packers were preserving meat in tin cans, manufacturing an inexpensive butter substitute called oleomargarine, and, with the help of chemists, turning previously discarded parts of the animals into glue, fertilizer, glycerin, ammonia, and gelatin.

The extension of railroads and livestock raising to the Great Plains prompted the largest Chicago packing companies to build branch plants in Kansas City, Omaha, Sioux Metropolis, Wichita, Denver, Fort Worth, and elsewhere. To promote their dressed beef in eastern cities, they congenital branch sales offices and cold storage warehouses. When railroads balked at investing in refrigerator cars, they purchased their own and leased them to the railroads. Thus, Chicago's Big Three packers—Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Nelson Morris—were in a position to influence livestock prices at i terminate of this circuitous industrial concatenation and the price of meat products at the other terminate. In 1900 the Chicago packinghouses employed 25,000 of the country's 68,000 packinghouse employees. The city's lead was narrower at the end of Earth War I, only Chicago was all the same, in Carl Sandburg's words, "Hog Butcher for the World."

"Chicago" by Carl Sandburg, 1916

Government surveillance and regulation kept pace with the growth of the meatpacking industry. Even before Chicago annexed the Marriage Stock Yard and packinghouse commune (Packingtown), city regime tried to control fume, odors, and waste disposal. Livestock raisers prevailed on state and federal government to investigate prices paid by the packers for cattle. At the bidding of foreign governments, the U.Southward. Department of Agriculture started inspecting pork exports in the early 1890s. Upton Sinclair's sensational novel The Jungle (1906) led to the Meat Inspection Act, which put federal inspectors in all packinghouses whose products entered interstate or foreign commerce. Government inspectors began grading beef and pork in the 1920s; in 1967 Congress required states to perform the same inspection and grading duties in plants selling within land boundaries.

When the Armour, Swift, and Morris companies cooperated in a new National Packing Company and purchased some nutrient-related firms, Charles Edward Russell warned about the existence of a "beef trust." His volume The Greatest Trust in the World (1905) acquired the federal government to commencement antitrust proceedings. Although the courts failed to indict, the National Packing Company voluntarily dissolved in 1912. In the Packer Consent Prescript of 1920, the Big Three agreed to sell their holdings in stockyards, nutrient-related companies, cold-storage facilities, and the retail meat business.

The packers faced challenges from their employees. First organized by the Knights of Labor, packinghouse workers in Chicago struck for the viii-hour day in 1886, simply public reaction to violence in Haymarket Square concluded that strike. The Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor, made impressive gains in all the packing centers at the turn of the century. In the summer of 1904 this union led a long, biting contest for wage increases. Some 50,000 packinghouse workers walked off their jobs. But in the end, only Jane Addams's intervention with J. Ogden Armour saved the strikers from full defeat. In response to renewed organizing during World War I and a demand for collective bargaining, President Woodrow Wilson established a federal arbitration procedure, and workers won temporary wage increases and the eight-hr day. When packers cut wages at the end of 1921, the Confederate called a strike which it before long rescinded. Thanks to the New Deal's pro-labor policies, Amalgamated membership revived in the 1930s and the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched a new packinghouse union. At the end of the decade, the large packing companies finally signed their first labor contracts. Postwar changes in the industry, however, minimized the touch on of this victory.

Railroads centralized meatpacking in the latter one-half of the nineteenth century; trucks and highways decentralized it during the terminal one-half of the twentieth. Instead of selling mature animals to urban stockyards, livestock raisers sold immature animals to commercial feedlots, and new packing plants arose in the vicinity. Different the compact, multistory buildings in Chicago, Kansas City, or Omaha, these new plants were sprawling ane-story structures with power saws, mechanical knives, and the capacity to quick-freeze meat packaged in vacuum bags. Large fridge trucks carried the products over interstate highways to supermarkets. Many of the new plants were in states with right-to-piece of work laws that hampered unionization. Business in the older railroad stockyards and urban center packinghouses declined sharply in the 1960s. Chicago's Marriage Stock Yard closed in 1970, the same year the Greyhound Corporation purchased Armour & Co.

At the end of the twentieth century, the meatpacking industry was widely dispersed but even so under government regulation. Irresolute consumption patterns posed new challenges, every bit poultry and fish began to replace beef and pork in American diets.

Bibliography

Barrett, James R. Work and Customs in the Jungle: Chicago'due south Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922. 1987.

Skaggs, Jimmy 1000. Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 1607–1983. 1986.

Wade, Louise C. Chicago'southward Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the 19th Century. 1987.

The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago © 2005 Chicago Historical Society.
The Encyclopedia of Chicago © 2004 The Newberry Library. All Rights Reserved. Portions are copyrighted by other institutions and individuals. Additional information on copyright and permissions.

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Source: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/804.html

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