Making Meat: Efficiency and Exploitation in Progressive Era Chicago

Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 24, No 1
January 2010

The OAH thanks the Merck Company Foundation for its generous support for this issue of the OAH Magazine of History

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Organization of American Historians

Teaching Strategy

Thomas G. Andrews

By the late nineteenth century, industrial capitalism reigned supreme in the United States. Industrialization depended on a series of sweeping technological and organizational innovations. But American economic growth also depended on unprecedented inputs of labor and natural resources. The rise of industrial big business turned the United States into an economic superpower, generating tremendous fortunes for some Americans and leading to substantial improvements in quality of life for many others. Yet these gains often came at the expense of working people, animals, and other parts of the natural world. Because industrialization posed fundamental challenges to hallowed national ideals such as democracy and equality of opportunity, it provoked deep misgivings and inspired far-reaching attempts to reconcile the travails of modern America with the ideologies and institutions passed down by the nation’s founders.

This lesson uses the meatpacking industry in Chicago between the Civil War and World War I to explore some of the fundamental transformations and tensions that convulsed industrializing America. By giving students a closer look at how business owners and workers together turned living animals into packages of meat, strips of leather, and bottles of glue, the lesson prompts students to evaluate and reflect on the positive and negative consequences of the productivity and efficiency so valued by Progressive Era managers and capitalists.

National History Standards

United States History Standards for Grades 5–12:

Era 6 (1870–1900)
Standard 1: How the rise of corporations, heavy industry, and mechanized farming transformed the American people.

Time Frame

The lesson below could be presented in two or three class periods.

Objectives

To become proficient in integrating a range of textual and visual sources into coherent interpretations of past events and processes.
To investigate the significant role animals and other natural resources have played in shaping American economic growth.
To examine how the activities of the meat industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century affected the natural world; to explore some of the responses different groups of Americans crafted as a result of those impacts; and to assess the strengths, limitations, and unintended consequences of those responses.
To develop an understanding of the complex historical interrelationship of businesses, the environment, and government institutions so that students can act as responsible citizens and conscientious consumers.
To train students to use history as a tool for probing the moral, cultural, political, and environmental questions raised by eating and other essential, everyday tasks. Note: the agenda here is not to indoctrinate students in any particular stance toward the consumption of meat, but rather to inspire them to inquire about and reflect on where their food--including meat--comes from and how it is produced. Students can then make more educated choices for themselves.

Background and Discussion Questions

Though students often arrive in high school classrooms believing that history concerns only famous people and illustrious events, the study of history can potentially encompass everything that happened in the past. Thinking harder about food gives students a concrete and compelling lesson in how the study of history can help us all better understand everyday practices that we usually take for granted. The promise of this sort of historical explanation is that it has the potential to inform not simply how students think about the past, but also how they act in the present and future.

This teaching strategy relies on six illustrations [link], five written primary documents, and two tables. Three of the illustrations also appear in this article—illustration 1 is on page 37, illustration 2 is on p. 38, and illustration 6 is on p. 39. The following questions, along with the background information, lay the foundation for a range of possible assignments:

Ask students what they ate for breakfast or lunch. Then inquire about what they know about where their food came from. In what places, what stretches of soil, were the fruits and vegetables now residing in their bellies grown? Where did the animals they ate live, and where did they die? What other stages—processing, transportation, marketing, cooking at home or at a restaurant--were necessary for their breakfast or lunch to have ended up in their bodies? What sort of people performed what sort of work to put food on their table?
Pose the central questions this set of lessons will explore: Where did the meat Americans ate in the late nineteenth century come from? Who or what “made” this meat? What were the consequences of this system of meat provision for packing-plant workers, as well as for various parts of the natural world—the farms and pastures where pigs and cows grazed, the lands and rivers in which their non-usable remains were discarded, and the animals themselves?

Chicago’s meatpacking industry developed in tandem with a series of sweeping historical upheavals. The Civil War helped Chicago displace Cincinnati as the largest meatpacking center in the United States. Due to a labor shortage on the home front, Texas ranchers had little choice but to let their herds roam unfettered. Texas longhorns reproduced rapidly, and, by war’s end, millions were roaming the central and western portions of the state, virtually free for the taking. The outbreak of war also shattered a decade-long congressional stalemate in which politicians from the North and South sabotaged any bill authorizing a transcontinental railroad that terminated in the rival section. Secession of eleven southern states enabled Republican congressmen to secure federal funding for a northern route that would stretch west across the plains from Omaha, Nebraska, which was essentially a satellite of Chicago-based economic interests. The subsequent extension of the Union Pacific Railway and its eventual connection in 1869 to the Central Pacific Railroad, which pushed eastward from San Francisco Bay across the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Great Basin, enabled Chicago’s meat industries to buy animals raised by farmers and ranchers throughout the Midwest and West.

The heyday of the open-range cattle industry and the much-mythologized American cowboy ensued, lasting from the mid-1860s through the late 1880s. During the Civil War, Chicago packers secured large contracts to supply beef to Union troops, leveraging their geographic position (safely distant from the front lines, astride the most important railway junction west of the Appalachians) to overcome Cincinnati, St. Louis, and other rivals for the claim of America’s meatpacking capital. The consequences of Chicago’s rise rippled deep into the West; by 1870, states and territories west of the Mississippi boasted 15 million head of cattle, and by 1900, more than 35 million head grazed on western lands (1). Though cattle raising flourished in the West, a combination of factors--the fencing in of former cattle pastures by farmers; the continuing expansion of rail networks; the rise of enormous, corporate-owned cattle ranches; and climatic catastrophes such as the blizzards of 1886–1887--closed the range and eliminated the need for the so-called “long drives” in which cowboys had led herds of cattle hundreds of miles across the plains to booming, rollicking railheads such as Dodge City and Abilene, Kansas. As for the cowboy, his elevation in myth to an icon of rugged independence did little to check his marginalization into the ranks of oppressed wage-worker; indeed, during the 1880s, many southwestern cowboys took out union cards with the militant Knights of Labor.

3. Show students illustrations 1 through 3 [link], then discuss the following questions:

How did cattle get from the Western plains to the Chicago stockyards?
How many different rail lines are shown in the birds eye view of Chicago produced in 1877? In which directions do these lines seem to run?
How would you describe the conditions in which cattle were kept at the Chicago stockyards?

Chicago’s Union Stockyards, created in 1865, served as an important way station in the process of turning western cows into meat for eastern consumers. Decades before Henry Ford and other manufacturers pioneered the assembly line, meatpacking companies had developed disassembly lines that sped the transformation of living cattle into “dressed” beef ready for market. “The push for efficiency through technology was so successful,” writes historian Lindy Biggs, “that in 1888, Swift [together with Armour, the dominant firms in the industry] boasted that in its plants so much of the work was done by machinery that ‘a workman rarely has occasion to touch the parts intended for food purposes.’ In 1900, Armour claimed that ‘the modern packinghouse eminently exemplifies scientific, commercial methods,’ and ‘has logically displaced the smaller slaughterhouses by the application of economies only obtainable in extensive operations’” (2).

The perfection of the refrigerated railroad car in the 1870s made it possible for Chicago meat to travel unspoiled to markets throughout the continent. Chicago packers then began to wage fierce price wars against local slaughterhouses and butchers in markets from New York to San Francisco. While “home town” interests had the advantage of consumer preferences for fresh, locally-produced meat, the Chicago packers eventually prevailed over most of their rivals because of Chicago’s proximity to western cattle ranges, low freight costs (a consequence of the city’s location on multiple, competing rail lines, as well as the sweetheart deals packers secured from the railroad companies), greater economies of scale in production because their operations were so large, and a remarkable penchant for efficiency.

4. Show students illustrations 4 and 5 [link], then discuss these questions.

Prior to the nineteenth century, most Americans lived on farms and most meat was butchered locally. What tools, technologies, and types of labor do you see evidence of in these illustrations of Chicago meat-packing plants?
How might these innovations have changed how packing-plant workers related to livestock? How might these processes of slaughter, disassembly, and transportation have changed how people who consumed meat related to animals and meat?

Chicago’s packers became ruthless advocates of efficiency. Not only did they gain a reputation for turning “every part of the hog but the squeal” into merchantable goods, as an old folk saying went, but they also tried to harness as much energy and skill from their workers as they possibly could (3). Chicago’s packing plants became notoriously dangerous and difficult places in which to work.

5. Have students read Documents 1 [link] and 2 [link], and allow them to familiarize themselves with Table 1 [link].

What benefits did the English commentator, Richard Grantham, predict would accrue if packers could use dead animals more efficiently? Who did he think would gain in the process?
By 1893, how were the millions of cattle slaughtered every year in Chicago being used? What different businesses might have been involved in producing, distributing, and selling these goods? Who might have consumed these goods?
How much did it cost the Chicago packer who provided the statistics used in Table 1 [link] to process, transport, and sell the meat from one steer? How much could the packer receive for the “dressed beef” cut from the steer? How did the packer make up for this loss? How large was his overall profit from all this investment and activity?
The American economy in the late nineteenth century is often portrayed as wasteful. Does Ralph’s account prove this to be a falsehood in the case of cattle? Or are there other ways Ralph does not discuss in which the industry may have been wasteful?
Imagine that this Chicago packer is competing in the New York City market against locally-raised cattle. How much could the Chicago packer make off of by-products? What advantage did the Chicago packer’s ability to sell beef by-products provide over competitors who sold only dressed beef?
From the packers’ perspective, this table includes all the relevant costs and revenue. If we imagined a similar table that calculated the costs and benefits of this system of meatpacking not to an individual firm, but to society as a whole, what else should it include, and why?

Historian Sylvia Hood Washington writes, “By 1900, meat packing was Chicago’s largest industrial employer, paying 10 percent of all Chicagoan wages and producing one-third of the manufactured goods” (4). Following the Civil War, many northern and western European immigrants as well as native-born Americans labored in the Chicago neighborhood known as Packingtown, but by the late 1800s, Eastern Europeans dominated the labor force. Novelist Upton Sinclair created a national furor with the publication of his 1906 novel, The Jungle, which presented a fictionalized but heavily-researched account of the struggles faced by a Lithuanian immigrant, his family, and their neighbors and co-workers in Packingtown.

6. Have students read document 3 [link] aloud. Then ask them to list the most important similarities and differences between Sinclair’s account and Table 1. Again, from the packers’ perspective, Table 1 includes all the relevant costs and revenue. Now, taking into account Document 3 [link], if we were to imagine a similar table calculating the costs and benefits of this system of meatpacking not to an individual firm, but to society as a whole, what else should it include, and why? Discuss their responses. In so doing, it may be helpful to draw students’ attention back to questions 5a and 5f. Ask also why consumers might have tolerated such practices.

7. Have students familiarize themselves with Table 2 [link] and Document 4 [link]. What impacts did the speeding up of operations in the packing plants have on workers, according to Sinclair? Whom did the growing efficiency of packing benefit, and whom did it hurt? What do these sources reveal about the experiences of the pigs and cattle on which the meat industry relied?

8. Show students illustration 6; with the picture of Bubbly Creek in view, ask a volunteer to read Document 5 [link] . What does Sinclair’s description tell us about the meatpacking industry’s impact on land and water in Packingtown? Draw students’ attention to when these two documents were produced; Sinclair, writing in 1906, suggests that packers successfully turned the fat and hair they formerly dumped in Bubbly Creek into lard and other products. But what does the photograph of Bubbly Creek from 1911 suggest about the ongoing effects of meatpacking on neighboring ecosystems?

Assignments

Students could draw a picture, map, or diagram illustrating the journey of an animal from a western pasture to an eastern dinner table, paying attention at every stage to the roles of nature, labor, technology, and business, as well as to the potential social and environmental consequences of transportation, slaughter, disassembly, marketing, and consumption.

On a less conventional plane, students might free write about the system of meat provision that evolved between the Civil War and the early twentieth century from the perspective of a cow, a railroad president, a rancher, a slaughterhouse or packing-plant worker, a packing tycoon, a butcher, or consumers occupying different social positions (for example, a middle-class woman concerned about the safety of her children’s food or a male working-class immigrant simultaneously concerned about the exploitation of men like himself and the price of food).

Finally, the lessons presented here provide the context required for students to research independently such topics as muckraking and the impact of Sinclair’s The Jungle; the union movement in packing plants; opposition by farmers, ranchers, and consumers to the so-called “beef trust”; efforts by Jane Addams and other progressives to ameliorate pollution and improve the quality of workers’ living environments in Packingtown; subsequent initiatives by the federal government to regulate the meat industry; the decentralization of the meatpacking industry over the course of the twentieth century as Swift, Armour, and other companies built new facilities in smaller towns and cities of the Midwest and beyond; the emergence of fast food; and the history of campaigns advocating humane treatment for livestock. The lessons and research projects they generate can also offer a springboard for examining such contemporary issues as meat safety, the continuing significance of immigrant workers in the meat industry, the impact of meat production on the American and global environment, and the development of organic, free-range, humanely-slaughtered, and other “alternative” businesses in the meat industry.

Further Resources

A concise overview of meatpacking in Chicago by Louise Carroll Wade can be found in the Chicago Museum of History, Encyclopedia of Chicago History: <http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/ pages/804.html>.

For more background on the environmental and economic dimensions of the cattle and meat industries during this era, the best source is chapter five of William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1992). For lessons and resources on cowboys and the cattle industry, see the teaching page at Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West, online at <http://exploringthewest.stanford.edu/units/cowboys.html>. On labor in the packing plants, see James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). For a wonderful article on the meat market, see Roger Horowitz, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, and Sydney Watts, “Meat for the Multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City, and Mexico City over the Long Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1055-83. On Sinclair and The Jungle, see James R. Barrett, “Remembering The Jungle (1906),” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 3 (2006): 712. On the relationships between meat, consumerism, labor, and the environment in recent decades, see Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2001) and Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006).

Endnotes

1. Figures from Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 191. The most engaging history of these transformations is William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1992).

2. Lindy Biggs, The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America’s Age of Mass Production (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 29.

3. The derivation of the phrase seems to be unknown. One source suggests it might be English; Robert W. Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig: A History (London: Hambledon and London, 2001), 109.

4. Sylvia Hood Washington, Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865-1954 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005), 76.

Thomas G. Andrews, associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver, is the author of Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Harvard University Press, 2008), an environmental history of the Colorado coalfield war of 1913–1914, winner of the Bancroft Prize, the George Perkins Marsh Prize for the Best Book in Environmental History, the Colorado Book Award for History, the Clark Spence Award from the Mining History Association, and the Vincent DeSantis Prize from the Society for the History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. A specialist in environmental, western American, Native American, and labor history, Andrews has worked extensively with teachers and teacher candidates.