In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Barnetts worked not just for Chicago but for black America. Ferdinand or Ida or both were often to be found planning strategy or making speeches in churches, associations, and political backrooms. Ferdinand was tapped by President William McKinley to lead a campaign to reenergize black enthusiasm for the Republican Party. Ida helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to take up her anti-lynching campaign alongside issues of poverty, politics, and power.
Chicago’s black community moved slowly toward equality. But even as progress was made, new challenges loomed around every corner. As Ida Wells-Barnett cautioned, it was necessary to be as “alert as the watchman on the wall.”
FIVE
White Negroes
JUST WEST OF CHICAGO’S Black Belt sat the white immigrant communities known as Packingtown. The men and women who settled there had come to get away from oppression in their homeland. Irish and Germans arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, Poles and Lithuanians a few decades later.
They came with dreams of a better tomorrow. But for many, life did not turn out as they hoped. In 1919, while young Packingtown toughs roamed the South Side heckling blacks, their mothers and fathers toiled long hours in the nearby Union Stock Yard, earning the barest living by slaughtering and packaging hundreds of thousands of pigs, sheep, and cows each day. As one policeman put it, Packingtown was a “pretty tough hole.”
Packingtown had grown over the last half of the nineteenth century as part of a massive transformation in the way America’s meat was processed. Up until the mid-1800s, livestock was slaughtered on small farms and the meat was sold locally in towns that dotted the countryside. By the early 1900s, meatpacking had centralized: nearly 90 percent of all beef inspected east of the Rocky Mountains was processed by six big companies. These meatpacking giants were headquartered in Chicago.
The consolidation of the industry started with innovations in transportation: first canals, then railroads. Chicago, incorporated in 1837, was at the center of both, for one reason: location. In the 1830s and ’40s, the Illinois and Michigan Canal was built to connect a chain of waterways from the Mississippi River in the west to the Hudson River in the east, with Chicago sitting smack-dab in the middle.
By 1848, the year the canal was completed, the nation’s attention had turned to building railroads. Steam locomotives could go anywhere tracks could be laid: over mountains and through forests. They would keep chugging in winter, when canal traffic was immobilized by ice. They would blow past canal boats with unparalleled speed. In the space of ten years, new railroad lines were laid, track by track, four thousand miles, sprawling east, west, south, and north from the central terminus: Chicago.
Laboring men were needed to dig the canal and lay the tracks. Irish immigrants answered the call. The work was backbreaking: digging out boulders, chopping down trees, dynamiting tunnels, and hammering in railroad ties. Many men were crushed, drowned, blown up, or laid low by toxic water, to the point where there was said to be “an Irishman buried under every [railroad] tie.”
In the old country, they had toiled as tenant farmers under the oppressive control of their English landlords. The English Protestants thoroughly detested the Irish Catholics. One immigrant recalled, “Our immediate ancestors, fathers and grandfathers, felt the iron heel upon their necks in their early lives, and in our childhood we were fed with stories of eviction, landlord oppressions, and religious persecutions which sent us to bed night after night in fear and trembling lest before morning some Englishman should get into the house and snatch the children away in chains and slavery.”
The worst bore down upon the Irish in the 1840s, when the potato crop, their food of life, rotted in the ground for four years running, and landlords heartlessly threw their tenants into the streets. One million Irish Catholics died; another million and a half fled into the arms of America. As one woman declared, “There’s a curse on ould green Ireland and we’ll get out of it.”
Arriving in the United States, the Irish found that life in the new country was not much better. American white Protestants treated them like scum. The same Irishman who recalled oppression in the homeland observed, “We saw in it all, translated to this side of the Atlantic, the same spirit of persecution which drove our fathers from the land of their birth, and we have come to manhood carrying chips on our shoulders because of the things which men have done to us on account of our race and religion.”
On the job, slurs and slights were an everyday experience. One Irishman observed bitterly: “The colleens who found jobs in the kitchens of the wealthy were called ‘pot-wallopers,’ ‘biddies,’ and ‘kitchen canaries.’” The men hired as laborers were called “‘greenhorns,’ ‘clodhoppers,’ ‘Micks,’ or ‘Paddies.’” And those were the lucky ones. Many searching for work were turned away by postings stating “No Irish Need Apply.”
Much to the dismay of the Irish, sometimes white America lumped them together with blacks, referring to them as “white negroes” and to blacks as “smoked Irish.” A tongue-in-cheek story made the rounds, in which a black man complained, “My master is a great tyrant. He treats me as badly as if I was a common Irishman.”
Chicago was a hotbed of prejudice. Opening the local paper, it was not uncommon for an Irishman to find himself the subject of scathing commentary, such as one journalist’s characterization of the Irish as “the most depraved, debased, worthless and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community.”
The December 9, 1876, cover of the popular Harper’s Weekly caricatured blacks and Irish as equally buffoonish. In cartoons of this period, the image of a thick-lipped, grinning man was often used to depict blacks and an apelike man to depict the Irish.
In the face of hateful prejudice and grueling work, the Irish immigrants maintained hope for the future. By the 1850s, the canal and the railroads were drawing a throng of new businesses to Chicago. A Chicago newspaper gleefully predicted “untold riches.” Boats and trains brought vast amounts of lumber, grain, and livestock into the city to be stored and processed, then shipped out to customers across the country. Chicago was on the move, becoming biggest at just about everything: world’s biggest lumberyard, world’s busiest grain center, and, when the Union Stock Yard opened in 1865, the world’s biggest stockyard. As one man put it, Chicago “was alive to the tips of her fingers and the core of her heart and brain.”
The Irish wanted their share of the new wealth. But most Protestants still treated them as the lowest of the low. Sizing up the situation, the Irish determined to do for themselves. Turning the job discrimination they experienced on its head, Irish business owners lived by the rule “Only Irish Need Apply.” Others teamed up to open training centers, preparing their not-yet-married Irish sisters to become teachers and nurses and their Irish brothers to prosper as electricians, carpenters, and butchers.
Some enterprising young men saw a future in politics. Heading out under the banner of the Democratic Party, the party of the workingman, they elected representatives of their Canal-side community to sit on Chicago’s governing council, giving them a say about how the city’s money was spent and, more important, the keys to government jobs—mostly those of firemen and policemen—which they promptly handed out to their own.
Many Irish immigrants remained mired in poverty, relying on sporadic day labor to keep them afloat. They bent their backs to unload heavy crates from ships and trains, or to carry pallets of bricks to and from construction job sites; their daughters scoured pots and boiled laundry. But they belonged to a fiercely loyal Irish community that they could count on to stand together through thick and thin.
SIX
Waste Matters
IN THE EARLY 1880S, Irishman John T. Joyce was a thriving member of the Packingtown community. Young and bursting with cocky energy, Joyce worked as a cattle butcher. He could “dress” a cow from start to finish: skin it, split its bones, gut it, and cut the meat into pieces. The work took
tremendous strength and dexterity. Joyce bragged that the butchers “had a highly skilled trade and were high priced men.”
The butchers identified with one another as a brotherhood. Joyce commented: “It was wonderful to see the good fellowship existing between those cattle butchers. No matter where they came from, it was only necessary to be a cattle butcher.”
At the end of every day, the butchers lovingly cleaned and stored their knives and cleavers, the tools of their trade. At summer socials, their day of fun was capped off with the ultimate celebration of a butcher’s skill—the cattle-dressing contest. The best, who were fabled heroes, were able to cut up a steer in under five minutes. At the end of life, a fallen brother was honored by his fellow butchers with a last tribute: an elaborate funeral wreath in the shape of a broken cleaver.
John Joyce worked for Swift & Company, named after its founder, Gustavus Franklin Swift, a man who demanded and respected excellence. Like Joyce, Swift had learned the butchering process from start to finish, entering the trade as his brother’s apprentice in 1855 at the age of fourteen in a little town on Cape Cod. But Swift’s interests went far beyond the butchering process. As his son later said about him,“Gustavus Franklin Swift was never content simply to get on. Always he saw opportunities ahead.” He wanted to build something spectacular.
At sixteen, Gustavus, who went by the name G.F., set his sights on the big city of Boston. But the Swift family had deep roots in Cape Cod going back 250 years, and G.F.’s father did not want him to leave the family home. To entice him to stay, G.F.’s father offered him twenty-five dollars to set up his own business right there on Cape Cod, a challenge and an opportunity that G.F. agreed to take on.
He bought his first cow for nineteen dollars, sold her meat for twenty-nine dollars, bought more cows, sold more meat, increasing his profits cow by cow, until he had enough money to open his own shop, buy more cows, sell more meat, open a second and then a third shop. He worked sixteen-hour days with a tireless energy. His thoughts on this subject were abundantly clear: “When a clerk says he must leave the office because it is five o’clock, you’ll never see his name over a front door.”
Cape Cod was an adequate place for Swift to start. But it was too small for him to stay in. He moved his business to larger towns, first in Massachusetts, then in New York State, always looking for the best market. Swift knew that Chicago’s Union Stock Yard, opened in 1865, was the largest in the world. He realized that if he was to build something extraordinary, he must make Chicago his home.
Gustavus Franklin Swift.
Swift arrived in Chicago in 1875 and set up shop. At that time, the Union Stock Yard was dominated by two other meat men: Philip Armour, who specialized in pork; and Nelson Morris, who dealt principally in beef. Swift quickly established himself as a third power in the Stock Yard. Together Armour, Morris, and Swift became known as the “Big Three.”
Swift’s guiding principle for success was simple and constant: eliminate waste to increase profits. As his son later observed, “To my father any waste was too much!”
First problem: how to preserve fresh meat dressed in Chicago so that it could be shipped without spoilage to customers in faraway cities and towns. Solution: the development of a refrigerated railcar. Before Swift’s investment in this groundbreaking innovation, there was no way to keep meat fresh long enough to transport it long distances. Most livestock was shipped live to be butchered in branch houses located near the households where the meat would be cooked and eaten. Chicago companies slaughtered and packaged only enough meat to satisfy the needs of local residents. With the development of the refrigerated car in the late 1870s, meat dressed in Chicago could be shipped to the many people living in New York, Boston, and other East Coast cities. The number of cows slaughtered in Chicago grew from a quarter million in 1875 to two and a quarter million in 1890.
Next problem: finding uses for all the animal parts that were ending up on the scrap heap. Solution: turning bones into knife handles, blood into fertilizer, beef fat into margarine. By 1903, fully 25 percent of the “Big Three” meatpacking companies’ profit on beef came from their ingenious ways of using what had formerly been thrown away. Gustavus Swift boasted about the clever use of animal byproducts: “Now we use all of the hog except his grunt.”
Third problem: how to increase speed on the job. Solution: investment in machinery that moved slaughtered livestock from one place to the next, eliminating slowdowns. Before the use of hoists and conveyors, cows were moved through the various stages of slaughter by hand. For example, stunned cows, each weighing nearly a ton, would simply fall to the floor and have to be dragged by three or four men to be hung up for slicing open and skinning. Machines eliminated this waste of time and manpower.
Swift had one more problem: his butcher workmen. Swift admired the talents of his butchers, some of whom were more skilled than Swift himself. He made a point of remembering at promotion time “a man worth keeping an eye on.” But as Swift saw it, high pay was waste, a problem to be solved. He thought things through. Many parts of the butchering process did not require the skill of Johnny Joyce and the other butcher aristocrats. Maybe, Swift thought, he could separate out the gut-grabbing, the kidney-pulling, and the tail-ripping and give these tasks to unskilled men at dirt-cheap, unskilled wages.
Swift knew there were blacks wandering the streets and docks looking for work. Even those employed as waiters and janitors might be enticed to leave personal service for the higher wages of the stockyards. But Swift was interested in a different solution. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, he saw a massive new wave of men flooding into Chicago, fleeing oppression in eastern Europe—from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania.
Swift knew that these men would be hungry for unskilled jobs in the Yard. With that in mind, he divided the butcher’s job into close to a hundred different parts, and handed out those parts to more than a hundred different men.
Men inspect hanging cattle carcasses.
In 1901, Anatanas Kaztauskis came to Chicago from Lithuania, eager to take on the unskilled work that Swift had created. His aunt had sent word ahead from Lithuania to friends who agreed to provide Kaztauskis with lodging. As he made his way across Chicago’s Packingtown to the boarding house where he was to stay, he passed people in the street talking in many different languages: English spoken in Irish brogue, German, Polish, Czech, Italian. But as he drew nearer to the address he had been given, the other languages fell away and the familiar lilt of the Lithuanian tongue enveloped him. Finally arrived, he was shown to the basement of a small boarding house, where he was to share sleeping space on the floor with three other boarders.
The next night, the men in the house took Kaztauskis out to see the city. He was amazed: “We walked all around a store that filled one whole block and had walls of glass. . . . We saw shiny carriages and automobiles. I saw men with dress suits, I saw women with such clothes that I could not think at all.” The glamour reminded Kaztauskis of how little he had: “I felt poor and my shoes got very bad.” As the men walked back home, Kaztauskis looked down at the river. “It was so full of grease and dirt and sticks and boxes,” he thought, “that it looked like a big, wide, dirty street, except in some places, where it boiled up. It made me sick to look at it.” That night, he could not fall asleep for a long time.
He was up at five o’clock the next morning, closing the boarding house door behind him, joining thousands of immigrant men and women making their way through the streets toward the Union Stock Yard. Ahead of him towered the Yard’s great gate, a wide center arch flanked on either side by ornately carved turrets and two smaller gates. A carved stone bull’s head sat high above the center arch, gazing down at the stream of humanity that passed below it.
The Great Gate of the Union Stock Yard.
Inside the Yard, the apparatus of the world’s largest meatpacking facility sprawled over three hundred acres: animal pens large enough to hold 75,000 cattle, 300,000 hogs and 105,000 sheep;
a horse exchange amphitheater; a sales pavilion; four hundred business offices; the National Live Stock Bank; and the three-hundred-room Transit House hotel. Each of the Big Three meatpacking company owners claimed a large corner of the Yard for his company’s facilities. Smaller packinghouses were scattered throughout the premises.
That first day, Kaztauskis walked to the entrance of one of the meatpacking plants, joining a crowd of about two hundred hungry-looking men standing outside for the morning “shape-up.” A man in uniform opened the slaughterhouse door and stepped out, looked the men over, then pointed his finger—you, you, you. Twenty-three men in all followed him into the packinghouse. The rest remained outside, watching the door close on any chance at work for the day. Kaztauskis later remembered, “One boy sat down and cried, just next to me, on a pile of boards. Some policemen waved their clubs and we all walked on.”
Men were now trudging away from the shapeups at the other slaughterhouses, looking dejected and hopeless. Kaztauskis met up with other Lithuanians who said they had come to the shapeup every morning for three weeks. Walking away from the Yard, he felt “bad and tired and hungry.” That night, a man let Kaztauskis in on a little secret to success. Before the next shapeup, Kaztauskis slipped five dollars to the uniformed man, and this time, as he stood with the others hoping to be chosen, the uniformed man pointed at him.
Now Anatanas joined more than a hundred and fifty men working on the cattle-killing floor. Overhead conveyors carried livestock down a “disassembly” line. First the knocker dealt each cow a blow to the head. Then the shackler cuffed its hind foot and the animal was machine-lifted to the sticker, who ended the animal’s life with a cut to the throat. The cow then moved down a long row of workmen—the skinner, the backer, the rumper, and so on—each doing his own small part to turn cows into steaks and roasts and prepare them for shipping to dinner tables across the country. Several decades later, borrowing from this technology, Henry Ford credited the meatpackers for the idea that led to the invention of the automobile assembly line.
A Few Red Drops Page 3