In Meat We Trust

by Maureen Ogle

  [>] “simply enormous”: Ibid.

  [>] “right over the fence”: U.S. Senate, Senate Select Committee on Interstate Commerce, Report of the Senate Select Committee on Interstate Commerce, 49th Cong., 1st sess., 1886, p. 661.

  [>] “There is perhaps nothing”: “The Hog and Cow Question,” Milwaukee Sentinel, December 4, 1863, p. 1.

  [>] “not very elegant language”: Sanitary Condition of the City: Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizens’ Association of New York, 2d ed. (1866; reprint, Arno Press, 1970), 168.

  [>] “snorted and pranced”: “A Fumigation,” Milwaukee Sentinel, October 17, 1866, p. 1.

  [>] “often lost a meal”: “Board of Health,” New York Times, August 29, 1866, p. 5.

  [>] “old-fashioned, clumsy and wasteful”: All quotes from “Report on Slaughtering for Boston Market,” First Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Massachusetts (Wright & Potter, 1870), 20, 21, 22.

  [>] “cramped [slaughterhouses]”: “Facilities for Slaughter-houses,” San Francisco Bulletin, January 2, 1868, p. 2.

  [>] “great central slaughter-house[s]”: Quoted in City of Boston, Report on the Sale of Bad Meat in Boston ([1871]), 56.

  [>] “sticker”: All the quotes and the description are from “Opening of the New Abbattoirs [sic]—Great Celebration at Communipaw,” New York Times, October 18, 1866, p. 2.

  [>] “arbitrary, tyrannical and unjust”: Quoted in “Local Intelligence,” New York Times, June 20, 1866, p. 8.

  [>] “Long Island”: Quoted in ibid.

  [>] “oppressive, and create[d]”: “The City of Chicago v. Louis Rumpff. Same v. James Turner,” 45 Ill. 90 (1862), 97, 99.

  [>] “skimming the scum”: Quoted in “The State of Louisiana, ex re., S. Belden, Attorney General, v. Wm Fagan, et al.,” 22 La. Ann. 545 (1870), 552.

  [>] “the personal rights”: Quoted in Ronald M. Labbé and Jonathan Lurie, The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment (University Press of Kansas, 2003), 106.

  [>] “general police power”: “State of Louisiana, ex re.,” 555.

  [>] “Liberty”: Quoted in Labbé and Lurie, Slaughterhouse Cases, 133.

  [>] “compelled”: Quoted in ibid., 187, 208.

  [>] “outrage”: “The Slaughter-House Nuisance,” New York Times, May 3, 1875, p. 4.

  [>] “dangerous”: “The Fifty-ninth-Street Abattoir,” New York Times, April 10, 1875, p. 2.

  [>] “comparatively poor”: “The Abattoir Nuisance,” New York Times, April 14, 1875, p. 12.

  [>] “fear and apprehension”: “The Market Systems of the Country, Their Usages and Abuses,” Report of the Commissioner on Agriculture for the Year 1870 (Government Printing Office, 1871), 251. I also tracked public dissatisfaction with the use of railroad transport by reading annual reports issued by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded by Henry Bergh, as well as a transcript collection of his letters held by the society. Bergh hired “detectives” to investigate the condition of livestock in Chicago, at watering stops, and at abattoirs like Communipaw.

  [>] “chemical decomposition”: “Bringing Cattle to Market,” New York Evangelist, September 3, 1868, p. 7.

  [>] “endanger[ed] the health”: Quoted in City of Boston, Report on the Sale of Bad Meat, 11, 12.

  [>] “deep red blotches”: E. H. Dixon, “The Beef Market,” New-York Tribune, August 22, 1868, p. 2.

  [>] “right off the grass”: “Frozen Meat,” Prairie Farmer 42 (July 22, 1871): 228.

  [>] “excellent condition”: “Cheaper Beef for the East,” New York Times, December 8, 1873, p. 2.

  [>] “be regarded with”: Quoted in J. C. Hoadley, “On the Transportation of Live-Stock,” Sixth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Massachusetts (Wright & Potter, 1875), 93, 94.

  [>] “vision”: Louis F. Swift and Arthur Van Vlissingen Jr., The Yankee of the Yards: The Biography of Gustavus Franklin Swift (A. W. Shaw Company, 1927), 24, 29–30, 201, 208.

  [>] “New England Fresh Meat Express”: “Boston Enterprise,” Boston Journal, July 26, 1879, p. 3.

  [>] “coolers”: “The Western Refrigerator Beef,” Trenton State Gazette, October 23, 1882, p. 3.

  [>] “era of cheap beef”: “Cheaper Beef,” Harper’s Weekly 26 (October 21, 1882): 663.

  [>] “Everything with us”: Quoted in “The Western Refrigerator Beef,” p. 3.

  [>] “has ceased to be”: Ibid.

  [>] “panicky feeling”: See the dispatch from the Chicago Tribune published as “Chicago Dressed Beef” in New York Times, October 15, 1882, p. 3.

  [>] “[I]f you showed me”: U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Transportation and Sale of Meat Products, Investigation of Transportation and Sale of Meat Products with Testimony, S. Rpt. 829, 51st Cong., 1st sess., 432; hereafter Investigation of Transportation and Sale. The document is often referred to as the Vest Report after committee chair George G. Vest. As is true of Swift, there are no substantive biographies of Armour. The best way to understand the man is by reading the newspaper coverage of his exploits as well as the many obituaries published at the time of his death in January 1901 (although as with any of the “robber barons,” those must be approached with care). A marvelously fictional biography is Armour and His Times, by Harper Leech and John Charles Carroll (D. Appleton-Century Company, 1938). Also see Cora Lillian Davenport, “The Rise of the Armours, an American Industrial Family” (master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1930), as well as a string of biographical essays prompted by the early-twentieth-century “trust-busting” movement. I pieced together Armour’s early career primarily from Milwaukee newspapers. Like most things economic, cogent explanations of futures trading, corners, and the like are hard to come by. An excellent description and analysis written for the non-economist can be found in Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis.

  [>] “did not understand”: U.S. Senate, Investigation of Transportation and Sale, 432.

  [>] “refrigerator”: “The Pressed Beef Business,” Springfield (MA) Republican, February 16, 1883, p. 2; reprinted from the Philadelphia Press.

  [>] “no waste at all”: Quoted in ibid.

  [>] “There can be only”: “Dressed Beef,” Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1882, p. 5.

  [>] “only stupid and sluggish minds”: “The Dressed Beef Innovation,” Wheeling Register, March 27, 1883, p. 2.

  [>] “fat and comfortable”: “Dressed Beef,” New York Times, November 15, 1882, p. 4.

  [>] “[A]ll of this is nothing more”: “Steady Growth of the Dressed Beef Trade,” American Farmer 9th ser. 1, no. 21 (November 1, 1882): 305; this article first appeared in Drovers’ Journal. The shipment numbers are in Norman J. Colman, “Dressed-Meat Traffic,” Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Animal Industry for the Year 1886 (Government Printing Office, 1887), 278. A lower estimate was made in Treasury Department, Report on the Internal Commerce of the United States, H. Rpt. 7, 48th Cong., 2d sess., 264; that document is typically referred to as the Nimmo Report for its author, Joseph Nimmo Jr.

  [>] “bright and sweet”: “City Article,” Boston Journal, September 8, 1883, p. 3.

  [>] Families satisfied: The butcher’s comments are in “Bulging Beef,” Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, May 16, 1882, unpaginated.

  [>] “Even a laborer”: U.S. Senate, Investigation of Transportation and Sale, 407.

  [>] “Do you suppose”: Quoted in W. O. Atwater, “Pecuniary Economy of Food: The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition V.,” Century 35, no. 3 (January 1888): 443.

  [>] In 1894: The prediction is in Warren Belasco, Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (University of California Press, 2006), 27. It’s impossible to read nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers without encountering discussions of the relationships among nation-building, national power, and food. Two good surveys are in Belasco, Meals to Come; and Mark R. Finlay, “Early Marketing of the Theory of Nutrition: The Science and Culture of Liebig’s
Extract of Meat,” in The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840–1940, ed. Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham (Rodopi, 1995), 48–74. Finlay’s essay is especially good for the European view.

  [>] “rice-eating”: “The Non-Beef-Eating Nations,” Saturday Evening Post, November 13, 1869, p. 8.

  [>] The cultural and nutritional significance: On this point, see especially Vincent J. Knapp, “The Democratization of Meat and Protein in Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Europe,” The Historian 59, no. 3 (March 1997): 541–51.

  [>] “makes an enormous return”: Quoted in Kleeb, “The Atlantic West,” 57.

  [>] “good business management”: James S. Brisbin, The Beef Bonanza; or, How to Get Rich on the Plains (1881; reprint, University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 36.

  [>] “riding through plains”: Quoted in Richard Graham, “The Investment Boom in British-Texan Cattle Companies, 1880–1885,” Business History Review 34, no. 4 (Winter 1960): 423, 424.

  [>] “The cost of both”: Brisbin, Beef Bonanza, 74.

  [>] “a young Wall Street”: Quoted in Ernest Staples Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman (1929; reprint, University of Chicago Press, 1966), 96.

  [>] “clever bait”: Quoted in ibid., 103.

  [>] “ranch to table”: “A Marquis under Arrest,” New York Times, May 20, 1887, p. 1. For more on the marquis, see Donald Dresden, The Marquis de Morès: Emperor of the Bad Lands (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970); and D. Jerome Tweton, The Marquis de Morès: Dakota Capitalist, French Nationalist (North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1972).

  [>] “We propose”: Quoted in D. Jerome Tweton, “The Marquis De Mores [sic] and His Dakota Venture: A Study in Failure,” Journal of the West 6, no. 4 (October 1967): 529.

  [>] “distinguished scholar, gentleman”: “De Mores [sic],” Brooklyn Eagle, October 5, 1885, p. 2.

  [>] “an agreeable cross”: “In the Bad Lands,” Bismarck Tribune, January 20, 1885, p. 6.

  [>] “I have tried everybody”: Quoted in Kleeb, “The Atlantic West,” 189, 190.

  [>] “contain the enormous car-loads”: Quoted in ibid., 220.

  [>] “men who did not know”: U.S. Senate, Investigation of Transportation and Sale, 4.

  [>] “I do not think”: Ibid., 5.

  [>] “monopoly”: Quoted in “Opposed to the Chicago Men,” New York Times, February 28, 1886, p. 2.

  [>] “dressed beef syndicate”: Quoted in “Views of a Ranchman,” New York Times, November 26, 1886, p. 6.

  [>] “I want part”: U.S. Senate, Investigation of Transportation and Sale, 360–61.

  [>] “at the mercy”: “Butchers to Protect Themselves,” New York Times, March 9, 1886, p. 3.

  [>] “an age of organizations”: Quoted in ibid.

  [>] Most of them unloaded: The Iowan’s comments are in U.S. Senate, Investigation of Transportation and Sale, 255.

  [>] “entirely unfamiliar”: Quoted in ibid., 82, 83.

  [>] Phil Armour begged: All of Armour’s comments and statistics are in ibid., 425, 472, 480.

  [>] “artificial and abnormal”: Ibid., 33.

  3. The (High) Price of Success

  [>] “BEEF TRUST SQUEEZES”: “Beef Trust Squeezes Poor for $100,000,000,” New York Herald, March 28, 1902, p. 3. The “Beef Trust” label stuck despite the fact that packers sold as much pork as beef; nor did the packers ever organize a formal, legal trust.

  [>] “secretly”: “Beef Trust Now Seeks Corner in Egg Supply,” New York Herald, April 18, 1902, p. 3.

  [>] “grip”: Ibid.

  [>] “Cattle and meat”: “Prosperity Causes High Meat Prices,” Duluth News Tribune, March 30, 1902, p. 5.

  [>] “Corn is the corner-stone”: George Buchanan Fife, “The So-Called Beef Trust,” Century 65 (November 1902): 150.

  [>] “wholly unfit”: “Unwholesome Meats,” Worcester (MA) Daily Spy, April 30, 1884, p. 6.

  [>] “It is made to look”: Quoted in James Harvey Young, “‘This Greasy Counterfeit’: Butter Versus Oleomargarine in the United States Congress, 1886,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 53, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 398.

  [>] “oleomargarine sacred?”: Quoted in James Harvey Young, Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (Princeton University Press, 1989), 89.

  [>] “how long will it be”: From debate during the 57th Congress, quoted in Young, Pure Food, 161–62.

  [>] “a pestilential lot”: Quoted in ibid., 162.

  [>] “We are no longer”: Mary Hinman Abel, “Safe Foods and How to Get Them,” Delineator 66 (September 1905): 394, 396.

  [>] “for the purpose”: Fife, “The So-Called Beef Trust,” 155, 156.

  [>] “If we have done anything”: Quoted in Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (Oxford University Press, 2003), 156, 157.

  [>] “the wheels of modern progress”: Quoted in Hans B. Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy: Origination of an American Tradition (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), 414. More than a half-century after publication, Thorelli’s study remains one of the most useful histories, and certainly the most thorough one, of antitrust policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  [>] “combination”: Quoted in Mary Yeager, Competition and Regulation: The Development of Oligopoly in the Meat Packing Industry (JAI Press, 1981), 184.

  [>] “simply a dead multi-millionaire”: “Object to Half-Mast Flag,” New York Times, April 1, 1903, p. 2.

  [>] “Daylight”: Quoted in Thorelli, Federal Antitrust Policy, 430.

  [>] “the great corporations”: Quoted in Arthur M. Johnson, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Bureau of Corporations,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45, no. 4 (March 1959): 578.

  [>] “young ladies”: “The Public and the Beef Business,” New York Sun, April 29, 1905, p. 6.

  [>] “exceptionally poor”: Report of the Commissioner of Corporations on the Beef Industry, H. Doc. 382, 58th Cong., 3d sess., xxvii.

  [>] “tedious and voluminous reports”: “The Public and the Beef Business,” 6.

  [>] “popular demands”: Quoted in Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 81.

  [>] “the greatest trust in the world”: Charles Edward Russell, The Greatest Trust in the World (Ridgway-Thayer Co., 1905), 89. Russell’s work originally appeared in Everybody’s Magazine from February to September 1905. For background and a biography, see Robert Miraldi, The Pen Is Mightier: The Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

  [>] “The experiences”: Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. V, The Big Stick, 1905–1907 (Harvard University Press, 1952), 176.

  [>] “One feels”: Quoted in Suk Bong Suh, Upton Sinclair and “The Jungle”: A Study of American Literature, Society, and Culture (Seoul National University, 1997), 89.

  [>] “I am going to do my share”: Quoted in ibid., 74. A useful recent biography of Sinclair is Anthony Arthur, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair (Random House, 2006).

  [>] “blood and guts”: Quoted in Suh, Upton Sinclair, 87.

  [>] “seriously embarrassed”: Arthur, Radical Innocent, 70. According to Arthur, Sinclair’s book got a boost when, a few weeks after publication, an attorney for Armour descended upon the Doubleday offices and invited Frank Doubleday to lunch, ostensibly to discuss the possibility of buying advertising in World’s Work. The rule about free lunches never proved so true. In exchange for advertising dollars, the attorney explained, Armour wanted Doubleday and Page to curb their support and publicity for the novel. Frank Doubleday was infuriated by the “unbounded cheek” of the suggestion. “Of all the moral degenerates that I ever saw, he was the worst,” fumed the publisher. Doubleday had not been particularly interested in The Jungle and certainly not in Upton Sinclair (a “wild man,” according to Doubleday), but the bribery offer turned indifference into a desire to fight Arm
our. See Arthur, Radical Innocent, 71.

  [>] “I have such awful times”: Morison, ed., Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. V, 140.

  [>] “Personally”: Ibid., 179.

  [>] “charitable view”: Ibid., 190.

  [>] “merely perfunctory investigation”: Ibid., 176. Roosevelt wrote the letter after he’d requested Wilson to investigate; the investigators arrived in Chicago on March 10.

  [>] “My dear Mr. Sinclair”: Ibid., 208, 209.

  [>] “the apostles of sensationalism”: Quoted in Young, Pure Food, 239.

  [>] “not if Little Willie”: Quoted in John Braeman, “The Square Deal in Action: A Case Study in the Growth of the ‘National Police Power,’” in Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America, ed. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and Everett Walters (Ohio State University Press, 1964), 61.

  [>] In 1908, Americans consumed: Statistics are in U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Government Printing Office, 1975), 1:329–30. Also published as H. Doc. 93–78-pt.1, 93d Cong., 1st sess.

  [>] “We make great outcry”: Emerson Hough, “Owners of America VIII: The Swifts,” Cosmopolitan 46 (March 1909): 406–7.

  [>] “a hundred and one million”: Quoted in “Armour Official’s Statement Before House Committee,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 9, 1916, p. 11.

  [>] “We shall have”: Quoted in David B. Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Iowa State University Press, 1979), 102.

  [>] “sedition and criminal anarchy”: Quoted in Linda J. Bradley and Barbara D. Merino, “Stuart Chase: A Radical CPA and the Meat Packing Investigation, 1917–1918,” Business and Economic History 23, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 197. For the socialist leanings of FTC staff members, see the memorandum reprinted as Appendix II in David Gordon, “The Beef Trust: Antitrust Policy and the Meat Packing Industry, 1902–1922” (Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1983), 339–40.

  [>] Armour’s post-decree fortunes: The best summary of Armour & Company’s post-founder history is in N.S.B. Gras and Henrietta M. Larson, Casebook in American Business History (F. S. Crofts & Co., 1939), 623–44.