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

Making Meat: Efficiency and Exploitation in Progressive Era Chicago

Thomas G. Andrews

This document is meant to accompany the Teaching Strategy, "Making Meat: Efficiency and Exploitation in Progressive Era Chicago" by Thomas G. Andrews, which appeared in the OAH Magazine of History 24 (January 2010).

Document Two

Julian Ralph, Harper’s Chicago and the World’s Fair (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1893), 78-79, quoted in William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), 250.

Everything--without particularizing too closely--every single thing that appertains to a slaughtered beef is sold and put to use. The horns become the horn of commerce; the straight lengths of leg bone go to the cutlery-makers and others; the entrails become sausage-casings; their contents make fertilizing material; the livers, hearts, tongues, and tails, and the stomachs, that become tripe, all are sold over the butchers’ counters of the nation; the knuckle-bones are ground up into bone-meal for various uses; the blood is dried and sold as a powder for commercial purposes; the bladders are dried and sold to druggists, tobacconists, and others; the fat goes into oleomargarine, and from the hoofs and feet and other parts come glue and oil and fertilizing ingredients.