America at the Fair

by Chaim M. Rosenberg

  Chicagoans were alarmed over the vast herds of hogs, sheep, and cattle being driven through the town center and decided to centralize the livestock industry at the southern limits of the city. Thus was born the Union Stock Yard of Chicago, occupying 500 acres and bounded by Exchange and Halsted Streets. The stockyards were built to hold 20,000 head of cattle, 120,000 hogs, and 15,000 sheep at one time. Hundreds of thousands of cattle, hogs, and sheep arrived on 20 railroad trunk lines at the stockyards each year, ready for slaughtering and processing. Dozens of entrepreneurs competed, but three—Gustavus Swift, Philip Armour, and Nelson Morris—dominated the livestock industry and at one time produced three-quarters of all the meat consumed in America. These companies slaughtered over one billion animals before the Chicago stockyards finally closed in the middle of the 20th century.

  Barbed wire demarcated land and kept animals on their owner’s property. American Steel & Wire was created by Elbert Henry Gary out of many small companies, with the aim of reducing competition, controlling production, and raising prices. The steel town of Gary, Indiana, is named for him.

  Swift & Company

  The life of Gustavus Franklin Swift is the tale of a New England Yankee who saw opportunities to do business in the Midwest and moved to Chicago to build a vast empire. One of 12 children, Gustavus was born in 1839 on his father’s farm in Sandwich, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. His father raised cattle and ran a butcher shop to serve the town’s main industry, the Keith & Ryder Wagon Company. The company was founded in 1826 and became a leading Massachusetts builder of horse-drawn stagecoaches, wagons, buggies, and ox carts. Soon after Gustavus was born the company switched to building freight cars. Now called the Keith Car Manufacturing Co., it became a major supplier of rolling stock for the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. At its peak the company employed 600 men making a thousand freight cars a year.

  Known to his friends as Stave, Gustavus Swift attended the local school but left at age 14 to work in his brother’s butcher shop, earning $3 a week. At that time “the golden goal of ambitious Cape Cod lads was Boston” where Gustavus hoped to build a career in the meat business (Swift 1927). His father objected and instead gave him $25 to start his business closer to home. With the money and a dash of ingenuity, Gustavus bought a heifer from a neighbor for $19, slaughtered the animal in the shed, dressed the beef, loaded it on his father’s wagon, and sold the meat door-to-door. He made a profit of $10 from the transaction and repeated the process until he had saved enough money to start his own meat business.

  With the addition of $400 borrowed from his Uncle Paul, Gustavus drove his father’s horse and cart over 60 miles of dirt roads to the Brighton stockyards, five miles west of Boston. Starting in 1818, the town of Brighton began to hold agricultural and livestock fairs. With the coming of the Boston & Worcester Railroad, Brighton became Greater Boston’s wholesale food center. Gustavus Swift bought 50 young pigs at the market stockyards and, with the help of a friend, drove the animals home to the town of Sandwich. The trip home took five days, but along the way Gustavus sold some of the piglets. After a few more trips, young Swift realized that it would be more efficient to slaughter the animals at the yards and load only the meat on the wagon. Now he returned to Brighton each Friday to buy and slaughter a steer, let the quarters hang over the weekend, and on Monday point his cart back to Cape Cod to sell his meat from his butcher shops in several Cape Cod towns. Now a successful businessman, Gustavus Swift married Annie Maria Higgins and began to raise a family.

  Slaughtering and dressing one or two steers at a time did not satisfy Gustavus. In 1869, having reached age 30, he entered the expanding wholesale meat business to supply the industrialized cities of Boston, Worcester, and Springfield. Gustavus Swift moved his business to Brighton, where herds of live cattle arrived by freight trains coming from the west. He formed a partnership with James A. Hathaway, who was shipping live cattle from Boston to markets in England. Hathaway & Swift set up a meat-cutting plant near the stockyards in Brighton to satisfy the growing demand for beef in Massachusetts.

  Ever resourceful, Gustavus decided he should be closer to the source of the live animals. He moved his family to Albany and later followed the railroad west to Buffalo. In 1875, the 36-year-old Swift moved once more, to the center of the livestock trade—Chicago. He set himself up as the purchasing agent for Hathaway and other Massachusetts meat wholesalers, buying large numbers of livestock for shipment by rail from Chicago to Brighton. By now an experienced beef man, Swift calculated that he could save a lot of money on freight charges by slaughtering his animals in Chicago and sending only the dressed meat to the New England markets.

  Swift’s dressed meat business began to boom by using Chicago’s vast rail network to ship his meat to New England and to markets across the nation. The early shipments of dressed meat were made during the winter months, but in 1882, Swift was among the first to develop a year-round business using sealed freight cars with the meat packed in ice. Swift set up ice depots along the routes of his shipments to ensure that his meat remained frozen the whole journey. He later hired the Michigan Car Company of Detroit to build refrigerated cars to his specifications. Using refrigerated rail cars, the packers could deliver dressed meat to markets across the nation at all times of the year. The early resistance of butchers and the public to frozen meat was muffled by the 10–20 percent lower cost. Swift & Company used refrigerated ships to develop markets in England and Europe. To be close to the supply of livestock, the company established secondary slaughtering and meat-packing houses in Kansas City, Omaha, and St. Louis.9

  Gustavus Swift developed a vertically integrated company incorporating herds, stockyards, meat cutting, dressing, advertising, shipping, and sales. He made deals with the wholesale butchers along the rail routes from Chicago. Butchers in Toledo, Columbus, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Albany ceased cutting meat themselves and instead bought dressed meat sent by rail by Swift & Company. By 1890, Swift & Company was an international firm dealing in beef, lamb, and pork, as well as leather, glue, soap, fertilizer, combs, brushes, candles, and lard. Gustavus Swift claimed that he used every part of the animal but the squeal.

  The full range of Swift & Company products was on display at the Fair. The lead exhibit in the Agricultural Building was shaped like a refrigeration freight car filled with carcasses and surrounded by barrels of lard. This exhibit also displayed dressed beef, pork, mutton and veal, hams and bacon, dried beef, salted meats, sausage, barreled pork, pickled tongues, pickled pigs feet, pickled tripe, and beef extract. In the Shoe & Leather Building Swift & Company displayed their line of hides and skins, and in the Manufactures Building the company exhibited pepsin used in the making of cheeses. These products were made in Swift & Company’s vast packing houses adjoining the Union Stock Yards in Chicago.

  The autocratic Gustavus Swift had little patience with workers’ grievances. The first strikes came in the 1880s and he “proceeded to do everything he could to break them” (Swift 1927). Swift fired the union men and hired strikebreakers in their place. During the bitter Pullman strike of 1893, Swift placed his rail cars under the protection of the U.S. military to move his product out of Chicago. He fathered 11 children and died in 1903 at age 64. The University of Chicago and Northwestern University benefited from his wealth. He formed one of the world’s leading meat companies, which remains healthy into the 21st century.

  Swift’s Competitors

  Philip Danforth Armour (1832–1901) was born on a farm in Stockbridge, New York. At age 20, he headed west to make his fortune in the California gold fields. With his earnings he moved to Milwaukee to join his brother in the hog-packing business. Armour saw the future of meat products in Chicago and, in 1875, transferred his operation to that city. Much like Gustavus Swift, Armour developed a year-round business using mass-production methods and his fleet of 12,000 refrigerated freight cars to move his products across the nation. From the ports of New York and Boston, Armour exported beef, pork, a
nd grain to European markets. At the time of the Fair, Armour & Company was the nation’s largest meat packer. Armour built housing for his workers and schools for their children, but he did battle against the unions. He established the Armour Institute, which later became the Illinois Institute of Technology. At the time of his death in 1901, Philip Armour’s company employed 7,000 in Chicago and had a national workforce of 50,000. Armour & Company remained one of Chicago’s largest employers until the Great Depression.

  Nelson Morris & Company was established by the German-born Nelson Morris (1838–1907), who arrived in Chicago in 1854 and started as a meat packer. Later, he formed his own company and benefited from contracts to feed the Union Army. Morris & Company was one of the original meat packers at the Union Sock Yard, with its own cattle ranches and many branches across the nation. In 1902, the Swift, Armour, and Morris meat companies of Chicago agreed to merge into the National Packing Company. Known as the Beef Trust, the merger was opposed by the government and, after a long legal battle, National Packing was dissolved in 1912. In 1923, Armour absorbed Nelson Morris & Company. Armour & Company remained strong until World War II, and then began to decline.

  Among the lesser players was the Cudahy Packing Company, the George H. Hammond Company, Schwarzchild & Sulzberger, Wilson & Company, and the Kansas City Packing House. The railroads, livestock, and the slaughtering houses created work for thousands of immigrants. The American writer Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was still in his 20s when he published his novel The Jungle, which tells the story of Jurgis Rudkus and his family, recent immigrants from Lithuania, who found work in the slaughterhouses of Chicago’s South Side. Coming with sparkling eyes reflecting the American Dream, they found instead hard work, exploitation, and poverty. Working in the stink and filth of diseased animals, these workers were soon deeply in debt to the company for their rent and food. Ill health and injury quickly put the newcomers out on the street, begging for shelter and food. They were eventually replaced by still newer immigrants desperate for jobs. Published in 1906, The Jungle exposed the dark side of the meatpacking business. President Theodore Roosevelt was moved by the book and ordered a special investigation into the industry. The result was the Meat Inspection Act of June 1906, which authorized the secretary of agriculture to condemn meat products judged by the meat inspectors to be unfit for human consumption. The act also regulated the sanitary conditions of the slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants. The Pure Food and Drug Act, which regulated food shipments over state lines, was signed into law on the same day.

  Pabst Brewing Company of Milwaukee recommended its standard beer for the “working man” and its Blue Ribbon beer to please the “four hundred” top people. Pabst’s Best Tonic beer aided the sick, its Bavarian beer was for “luxury on the high seas,” and its Bohemian beer aimed to satisfy the adventurous.

  Beer

  During Colonial times, rum was the preferred alcoholic beverage in British North America. This began to change when German immigrants to the Midwest brought their brewing skills with them. Joseph Schlitz left his native Germany for Milwaukee in 1850 and took over a brewery once owned by August Krug. He married Krug’s widow and the business was renamed the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, producing “The beer that made Milwaukee famous.” The Pabst Brewing Company, also of Milwaukee, began in 1844 as a small vinegar factory. By the 1890s Pabst was selling 40 million bottles and over one million barrels of its beer annually. In 1892, the company added a blue silk ribbon to the label, indicating the high quality of its beer. Adolphus Busch left Germany for America in 1857 and settled in St. Louis, where he married Lilly Anheuser, the daughter of a brewer. He joined his father-in-law in the business, which became the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company. Christian Moerlein settled in Cincinnati and made a beer that carried his name. These companies exhibited their beers in the gallery level of the Agricultural Building. Another beer exhibit at the Fair was sponsored by the New Orleans Brewing Association, with an annual capacity of 1,500,000 barrels. The association was formed by several small New Orleans brewers and made lager and pilsner beers “warranted to keep in any climate.” American beers were sold to the fast-growing domestic market as well as to markets abroad.

  You Are What You Eat

  The passions of the 19th century—abolition, temperance, and industrialization—found expression in religion and in the choice of foods and beverages. Sylvester Graham argued that ill health came from a poor diet. Born in 1795 in Suffield, Connecticut, Graham was a vegetarian and a leader in the temperance movement. He campaigned vigorously against alcohol, cider, tea, and coffee, as well as sexual gratification. He had many devoted followers, known as Grahamites, who followed his teachings and ate only natural foods such as his whole-grain Graham crackers.

  Ellen G. Harmon was born in the village of Gorham, Maine, in 1827. Early in her life, she showed remarkable intellectual gifts combined with religious zeal. She was attracted to the Seventh-Day Adventists and became one of that church’s leaders, writing widely on religion, social relations, evangelism, and nutrition, and claiming visions of God directing her thoughts. She married fellow Adventist John White, and was known as Ellen G. White. In 1855 she and her family moved to the Adventist community in Battle Creek, Michigan, where she claimed to have had a vision ordering her to preach the doctrine of clean air, exercise, pure water, and natural foods combined with abstinence from stimulants such as alcohol, coffee, and tea. Despite their beliefs and diet, members of the sect still became ill and the Seventh-Day Adventists built their famous sanitarium in Battle Creek to cure their stricken members. In the sanitarium, Ellen White’s health teachings formed an essential part of the healing process. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1855–1943) was the superintendent of the hospital. His younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg (1860–1951), known as W. K., who did not advance beyond the sixth grade, rose to become a bookkeeper and then manager of the sanitarium. True to the mission of the institution, Dr. John Kellogg, with the help of W. K., offered a vegetarian diet to their patients, but tried various ways to make the bland food more palatable. One day in 1894 W.K. accidentally left a pot of boiled wheat standing too long. When the contents were rolled the grains of wheat came out as thin and crunchy flakes. The patients loved it and asked for more. In 1898 W. K. left his job at the sanitarium to sell his Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

  One of the patients at the Battle Creek Sanitarium was Charles William “C. W.” Post (1854–1914) from Springfield, Illinois. He suffered a series of mental breakdowns and the failure of his first marriage. At age 38, Post entered the sanitarium and benefited from its regime of fresh air, exercise, a vegetarian diet based on grains and peanut butter, and the absence of alcohol, cigarettes, and coffee. Post became convinced of the curative powers of the hospital diet. With his depression temporarily lifted, he decided to remain in Battle Creek and start a company making foodstuffs similar to what he had eaten in the sanitarium. During a period of emotional overdrive, Post developed a grain-based coffee substitute, which he called Postum, and the ready-to-eat cereals Grape-Nuts and Post Toasties (originally called Elijah’s Manna). The Postum Cereal Company became one of the largest American grain companies and made Charles Post a wealthy man. In yet another expansive mood, he bought 225,000 acres in Texas with the aim of developing dry-land farming. He spent thousands of dollars on schemes to induce rain and when they failed, Post became depressed again and in 1914 took his own life. Much of the Post money was passed on to his daughter Marjorie Merriweather Post, who added to her fortune by marrying the financier E. F. Hutton.

  In 1877, Henry D. Seymour and William Heston of Ravenna, Ohio, founded the Quaker Oats Company. In 1888 Quaker Oats combined with other Midwest oat companies to form The American Cereal Company. The pavilion of The American Cereal Company was located in the Agricultural Building. The company commissioned the artist Hugh Bolton Jones, working with his brother Francis Coates Jones, to complete a series of paintings showing the processing of Quaker Oats from the field to the fac
tory. Several paintings showed “The Good Old Days” of the family farm, and others displayed corporate farming, including the use of machinery and railroads. Twelve of these paintings were reprinted as lithographic trade cards by Armstrong & Company of Boston. Each card was sold at the Fair for 25¢ and a complete set could be redeemed for products made by Quaker Oats.

  Thomas Bramwell Welch, born in England in 1825, emigrated to the town of Vineyard, New Jersey. Reverend Welch combined his ministry with the practice of dentistry and medicine. As a strict prohibitionist, Dr. Welch forbade the use of wine even in the communion service. He set about to create a non-alcoholic substitute by placing bottles of Concord grape juice into boiling water to kill off the yeast and thereby stop fermentation and the formation of alcohol. He was a passionate advocate for his Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine in the battle against alcoholism. His son Charles Welch, also a dentist, saw wider commercial opportunities. He changed the name to Welch Grape Juice and handed out free samples to thousands at the Fair. The tactic worked, and Charles Welch gave up dentistry to concentrate on the growth of the Welch Grape Juice Company.

  Many small entrepreneurs in Chicago hoped to make their fortune from the 1893 Fair. Among the fortunate ones were the German immigrants Frederick Rueckheim and his brother Louis, who made a confection of popcorn and peanuts covered in molasses. People loved the taste but complained that the peanuts and popcorn stuck together. The brothers changed the formula and one man sampled the new, loose mix and pronounced it “crackerjack.” In 1908, the Cracker Jack Company bought the rights to Jack Norworth’s popular song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and the enduring connection between Cracker Jack and the game of baseball was made. Another product promoted at the Fair was Aunt Jemima’s pancake flour, marketed by the R. T. Davis Milling Company. Each package showed the smiling face of “Aunt Jemima,” which belonged to 56-year-old Nancy Green, born a slave in Montgomery County, Kentucky. Nancy Green herself demonstrated the pancake mix at the Fair and successfully launched the product. She remained the spokesperson for the pancake mix until her death in 1923. The breakfast cereals Cream of Wheat and Shredded Wheat, along with Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum, were also introduced at the 1893 Fair.