The Stock Pavilion at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, located next to an extensive array of livestock sheds and barns. Livestock breeders from both sides of the Atlantic met in this and similar venues.
Das Columbische Weltausstellungs-Album (Chicago: Rand, McNally and Co., 1893), np.
ANGLO-SAXONIST PIGS
In buying Berkshire pigs, U.S. farmers invested in far more than improved meat production; they also invested in a set of aesthetic and cultural values. Prize Berkshires derived their value not only from quantifiable attributes such as fattening ability and fertility, but also from looking well bred. The value placed on aesthetics can be seen in claims that the Berkshire’s eyes should be “bright and expressive,” their tails “slender and well set, with a handsome curl near the rump,” their bones “fine and of an ivory-like grain and hardness.”57 Although fat jowls were fleshier, Berkshire breeders preferred lean ones that “gave their stock a finer and higher bred look in the head.”58 Windsor Castle, a prize pig rhapsodized by the 1894 Year Book of the American Berkshire Association, exemplifies the value stemming from the right demeanor. It wasn’t anything so prosaic as his hams that caught the viewer’s fancy, it was that he “was the only one of this sort of stock he had ever looked upon which had any poetry in him.”59
With their handsome curls, ivory bones, aristocratic names, and poetic graces, Berkshire pigs were upper-crust pigs—so much so that some hog experts began to lament the passing of the hardier “pioneer hog.” One critic of pedigreed pigs denounced them for being “so fat that locomotion is uncomfortable,” so greedy and indolent as to be “weak, feverish and subject to cholera.”60 By the early twentieth century, the Berkshire had come under fire as the “gentleman’s hog,” “too fine” to fatten well. Defenders conceded “excessive refinement” in some Berkshire hogs but praised the Berkshire as “the handsomest type of swine ever developed,” a pig for idealists, due to its “charm of aspect” and “beauty of form.”61
Despite insinuations of upper-crust effeminacy, Berkshire mania persisted, and indeed, the breed’s cultural associations continued to enhance its value. In this respect, the Britishness of the Berkshire did more than convey its elite status, it also helped paper over its least attractive characteristic: its dark coloring. Refusing to accept an all-black or mostly black pig as an adequate standard, a Berkshire prize essay proclaimed that the pigs should have “white feet, face, tip of tail, and an occasional splash of white on the arm.”62 (Yes, the arm—this slip helps explain why attributes such as color mattered so much.) Other breeders worked to whiten the animal as a whole. According to the American Swine and Poultry Journal, “Some of our best breeders are now getting their best pigs with a nearly clear or white skin and black hair, which makes them very attractive, much more so than a dull black skin.”63 Since skin coloring had no intrinsic economic value in a dressed animal, Berkshire breeders’ efforts to whiten their animals can be attributed to their investments in white supremacy.
Although Berkshires remained stubbornly dark, their proper British breeding could be detected in their forms as well as in their well-documented ancestral trees. Writings on “the best breeds of swine” insisted that “ugly” heads indicated “impure breeding.” Low breeds were “too flat on the forehead.” Such statements came straight out of the phrenology books that deduced temperament and other attributes from the shape of the human head. The profiles of northern European men that illustrated these texts typically featured the attribute so valued in Berkshires: a bulging forehead, indicating “reason” and “perceptive intellect.” Significantly, phrenological depictions of mental defectives, criminals, and savages featured the kinds of backward-sloping foreheads associated with lesser pigs.64 The idea that flattened noses also indicated a lower state of human evolution helps explain the praise for snouts that curved upward.65 And racially inflected ideas about human hair added extra layers of meaning to denunciations of coarse bristles and the corresponding praise for “hair fine, soft and silky.”66
Assumptions about proper male and female attributes factored just as importantly in pig appraisements as those related to beliefs about human racial differences. Pig breeders cast their lot with male supremacy. This stemmed in part from the fact that a stud boar could produce more offspring than a sow. But the men who dominated the breeding industry also believed that boars exercised “prepotency,” meaning that their attributes carried more weight than those of their mates. Thoroughbred Berkshire boars supposedly transmitted the breed’s qualities to their progeny, even when crossed with different types.67 That made their selection all the more important. Much as refinement was to be valued among Berkshires, the boars ought to have a “strong masculine expression . . . even at the expense of a little coarseness.”68
To the extent that sows mattered, it was not for their inferior ability to determine type, but because they could pass on the attributes of prize boars through reaching fecundity early, producing large litters, suckling well, and mothering with care and affection.69 As the attention to masculine expression, feminine nurturance, racialized appearance, and upper-crust airs suggests, to buy Berkshires was to buy into a set of values that went deeper than mere meat-making and relationships that went beyond money.
Above all, to buy into Berkshires was to buy into empire. Not only had some of their genetic material arrived on the ships of empire from the far pigpens of the East, but having been perfected on English farms, the improved breed had been sent forth to conquer the world as a junior partner to the English emigrant. “They have,” as one enthusiast put it, “followed in the wake of Anglo Saxon colonization the world over.”70
Never mind that the pioneers’ pigs had been semiferal animals, not pedigreed pen dwellers, Berkshire enthusiasts cast the Berkshire as a particularly effective tool of American empire, as a “faithful companion to man in the subjugation of the great west.”71 In such anachronistic renderings, the Berkshire pig had helped white settlers colonize the continent. More than the savage woods hogs that had scrounged around the earliest white settlements, the Berkshire represented civilized advancement.
The Berkshire appeared to be a particularly apt agent of empire because of its supposedly superlative ability to thrive in any clime and to fatten on any food. The eastern farmer could feed them the “skim milk of the dairy, the whey from the factory and products of farm and kitchen that would otherwise go to waste”; the western farmer would appreciate their ability to turn grain into meat. In contrast to other breeds with only regional or national potential, the Berkshire met “the requirements of all.”72 Their hardiness was another mark in their favor, for their great muscular power and vitality supposedly rendered them “less liable to accident and disease” than other pigs.73 Like the British sailors and soldiers deployed across the globe, they had spread across the map, so far so that the 1896 Berkshire Year Book described their distribution as “world wide.”74 In contrast to more local breeds with only regional or national potential, the Berkshire was a more universal animal, capable of global domination.
POSTCOLONIAL PIGGERIES
It was not only its capacity for universality that made the Berkshire an exemplary imperial animal but also its capacity for uplifting more benighted pigs. Writing in the Berkshire Year Book, Professor Thomas Shaw of the University of Minnesota claimed that the main mission of the Berkshire was not “the production of a fine quality of meat at a minimum of cost,” but the mission of racial uplift, “the engrafting of its own splendid qualities upon the common races of swine in Anglo Saxon speaking countries.” These countries included the United States. According to Shaw, the Berkshire had “overspread the whole country,” filling the land with its descendants, whether purebred or mixed.
The image of Anglo-Saxonist pigs marching out from Britain to overspread the United States seems at odds with Williams’s account of U.S. farms as the wellsprings of American empire, for it conjures images of the United States as more c
olonized than colonizing. Yet Shaw did not see the Berkshire’s ascendance as a mark of ongoing dependence. The breed might be imperial, but it was also “cosmopolitan to a greater extent than any other breed of swine.” Having “gained free access to many a sty in Continental Europe, in Asia, in Australia, in New Zealand and in South America,” Berkshires had established themselves as world-class animals. Their presence in the barnyard signified inclusion among the advanced nations and white outposts of the world.75 British breeders drove that point home in their claims that the estimation for Berkshires across the “civilized World” provided “evidence sufficient as to their value.”76 To invest in the breed may have meant investing in British superiority, but that investment also brought membership in the larger club of civilization.
To invest in Berkshires meant to invest in the racial purity so valued by British and other European breeders. The Breeder’s Gazette cast the matter as a “Battle for Live Stock Improvement.” It called hog farmers to arms by characterizing the United States as a nation at war against its own mongrelism. To rally these troops to victory over mixed-blooded “scrubs,” it urged the enlistment of purebred Berkshire sires from “the Mother Country”—assumed to be Britain, not any of the other places that had helped populate the United States.
Though victory was in sight, it was not in hand. As the Breeder’s Gazette put it: “Understand that it takes time to stamp out the virile taint of mongrel blood; its perpetuating prepotency gives it stubborn antagonism to gentler blood which would neutralize it.”77 Such claims might suggest that the Berkshire’s mix of English and Asian ancestors had contributed to its preeminent prepotency, enabling it to bring both virility and gentility to the race wars of the porcine world. Yet the Breeder’s Gazette quashed any celebration of race mixing by depicting the Berkshire as thoroughly British. Having faced the same challenges as mongrel America, the Berkshire had emerged in triumph as a pure-blooded sire of the mother country.
All the attention to the Berkshire’s Britishness suggests that farmers who invested in Berkshires invested in more than just pigs. Berkshire investments were postcolonial investments in British superiority. Yet even as the Berkshire perpetuated attachments to the British Empire, its eugenic capacities promised to someday raise the United States to the same lofty imperial position as Britain itself, if not a tad higher still. These expectations were not disappointed. By the early twentieth century, the agricultural experiment station in the newly acquired U.S. colony of Puerto Rico was breeding Berkshire pigs for distribution on the island. (Although the cost of corn was prohibitive, U.S. colonial officials reported that the pigs fattened well on kitchen waste, forage crops, and palm seeds, thereby seeming to lend credence to claims of universality.)78 Government agents also purchased Berkshire boars to head their herd in the Panama Canal Zone.79 And long after American hog breeders began to trumpet their own varieties as the best in the world, the Berkshire’s genetic inheritance carried forward in these new, ostensibly American strains.80
It might seem that The Roots of the Modern American Empire misses these affiliative impulses because it focuses on the search for export markets. Yet Britain figured largely in market pursuits, too, and not just because it governed some of the Caribbean islands that had long imported American agricultural staples to feed their enslaved workers.81 Although midwestern pork producers sought South American markets, they understood these much in the way that they saw markets in Caribbean sugar islands: as lower end, less profitable per pound of product. What they particularly wanted in the late nineteenth century was greater access to the more lucrative markets of Europe, those of Britain chief among them. The Berkshire struck them as a promising means to that end.
When it came to pigs, all the attention to racialized and gendered aesthetics played out in relation to another set of tastes: those produced by different types of meat. Prior to the infusion of pedigreed blood, U.S. pork had a reputation for being desirable only for its low price. British housekeeping magazines spread the conviction that American pork “emits a peculiar flavor.”82 Even less choosy buyers spoke ill of it. A Jamaican planter who considered U.S. pork suitable only for menial workers described the pigs from whence it came as “just one Mass of ill-digested Fat.” He characterized their meat as disgusting, “more like the Flavour of Train Oil than of fine Irish Pork.” When asked “Is there not very good Pork from America?” he replied: “I have never seen any of it.”83
In addition to being fatty and foul flavored, American pork had the reputation of boiling down to very little meat. There was supposedly so little “proof” in American bacon that it came out of the pot much smaller than English pieces that had gone in at a comparable size.84 British sailors joined the chorus of those who complained that American pork “will not stand the test of boiling,” that it “has not the solidity which our meat has,” being so fatty that it dwindled in the pot.85 Although some British accounts described American pork as “of fine quality, fit for any table,” these accounts argued against the general perception of American pork as cheap food for the poor.86 Prior to the arrival of Berkshire studs, Illinois pork exports fed people who could not afford to be discriminating: plantation laborers, prisoners, and poorhouse inmates among them.
Critics attributed much of the fattiness, repulsive taste, and insubstantiality of American pork to the maize-based diet of American pigs. Although some English farmers slandered American hogs as fattening on rattlesnakes and manure, more reasoned commentators recognized that U.S. farmers fattened their pigs mainly on maize.87 An article in the Illinois Agriculturist characterized the American hog as “a logical deduction from Indian corn—a sort of an automatic machine for reducing the bulk in corn and enhancing its value; a machine that feeds itself, converting ten bushels of corn into one hundred pounds of pork.”88 The president of the Illinois Swine Breeders’ Association preferred the metaphor of a mint, saying of the hog: “The yellow corn of our common country is the bullion which he transmutes into golden coin.”89
But not all hogs were equally adept in turning bullion into coin. The Berkshire won favor as a veritable “corn condensing and pork-making machine” that somehow managed to make palatable meat.90 In contrast to “the heavy hog, loaded with the carbonaceous burden of the oleaginous corn,” corn-fed Berkshires produced bacon that was “pinguid” but not “plethoric.”91 Berkshires were worth the investment because they produced hams that tasted like the ones that had been gaining favor in Europe—tender, juicy, and well marbled—regardless of their diet.92 Their proponents might argue that Berkshires would fatten on anything, but they took off in the Midwest because they fattened well on corn, turning a grain developed over the millennia by indigenous North American people (many of them the women tasked with corn cultivation) into a product that appealed to Europeans.93
A Berkshire piglet, waxing on corn, with its equally chunky sibling and aristocratic mum.
“Hoosier Lady,” The American Swine & Poultry Journal 3 (Aug. 1875), 25.
As Berkshire production caught on in the United States, even those who complained about the poor quality of U.S. pork conceded that the Berkshires made a relatively leaner meat, preferable to that of rival breeds.94 The Berkshire’s supposedly superior hams and bacons offered midwestern farmers the means to expand beyond the low-end markets of the plantation South, whether in the United States or the Caribbean. Especially after Britain reduced tariff barriers in the 1840s, Berkshire boosters used their investments in British breeding to produce pork products with the capacity to sell well in Britain.
TO MARKET, TO MARKET
The problem was how to get the pork to market. Before the coming of the railroad, it took from six weeks to three months to travel from Illinois to the East Coast.95 Since hogs were not as easy to drive as cattle, the hog producers of central Illinois preferred to drive them to nearby packing plants. After slaughtering and packing the animals, the workers in these plants loaded the salted meat onto f
latboats to be floated downstream to New Orleans.96 Those who wanted to sell their bacon in the infant city of Chicago had to brave unpaved prairie roads by day and keep vigilant watch by their fires at night.97
Given these difficulties in getting their products to distant markets, downstate Illinois farmers clamored for a railroad line. Congress responded to their pleas in 1850 by giving Illinois the right-of-way through public lands stretching from Chicago to the southern tip of the state. The Illinois legislature chartered the Illinois Central Railroad Company the following year. By granting the corporation the 2.5 million acres of public land ceded by Congress, it made the Illinois Central the first land-grant railroad in the country. Though rich in land, the Illinois Central still lacked the cash necessary to lay tracks, build stations, and purchase engines and cars.98 It needed money up front, not just mortgage payments down the road, in a time when the United States could be labeled a developing nation and investment capital was hard to come by.
Unable to raise enough money from New York investors, the ICR did what other transportation companies—whether turnpike, canal, or railroad—were doing: it sent agents to London.99 The agents quickly raised a million pounds sterling through bond sales at 6 percent interest—a percentage less than they had offered in New York. By the following year, they had raised another $4 million in London from bonds at the more costly (for the ICR) New York rate. They also sold stock to British investors, who were allowed to purchase five shares for every $1,000 bond. Before going home, they placed orders with rail manufacturers, some of whom accepted bonds instead of cash for their rails.100 Thanks to British capitalization and British-made rails, the Illinois Central began construction in 1852. It reached Champaign County in 1854 and continued south from there.101
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