The Hamlet Fire

by Bryant Simon

  Like much of America, Atlanta boomed after World War II. It was a time when new ideas found new opportunities. In the early 1950s, Douglas Cagle took over the company and began to turn it into a consolidator, or a vertically integrated business in the world of poultry capitalism. Between 1953 and 1963, he bought a number of slaughterhouses and a feed mill. He merged his firm with other regional chicken producers. After that, Cagle’s—as the company started to be called—added a hatchery, a fleet of trucks, and several more processing facilities to its physical plant. By 1980, the company had amassed $139 million in assets as it captured, slaughtered, and dismembered 1.5 million chickens a week. It then sold plastic-wrapped packages of cut-up birds to supermarkets and boneless breasts and other products to further processors, the name the poultry industry gave to outfits like the Roes’ Hamlet operation that took already processed chicken parts and leftover scraps and changed their shape and form by adding ingredients like salt, fillers, and breading to them before cooking them.9

  Unlike the slaughterhouses and feed plants in its portfolio, Cagle’s didn’t own the land or the facilities where growers raised broilers (chicken bred to yield meat, instead of eggs, primarily) from chicks to full-size birds. Instead, beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, they searched the foothills of Georgia and the Sandhills of the Carolinas looking for partners. Company representatives drove up to small farmhouses. Surely, they stepped out of their cars with a bit of wariness and concern. They knew they were calling on people well known for their hair-trigger tempers, fierce independence, and willingness to protect what was theirs with fists, knives, and guns.10

  Making a living in these parts had never been easy for small farmers. For decades, they planted row after row of cotton and tobacco, unsure of the price they would get at the end of the season. Hoping to increase their yield, they used bag after bag of fertilizers until they leached the red clay and flinty soil of all nutrients. Some families had already weighed their economic prospects in the countryside and packed up their stuff and moved to the closest mill village. Others had invested in small trucks and drove each morning into town to lay track, bag groceries, or fix cars. The holdouts who didn’t want to leave their farms, no matter what, were ones who listened to Douglas Cagle and his associates. Cagle reminded the farmers of the unpredictability of crop prices and the sorry state of their land. He told them that they could make a steady living raising animals rather than crops while still anchoring their lives in the countryside.

  Cagle offered farm families a contract modeled along the lines of the “grow out” system first pioneered by fellow Georgian and poultry consolidator Jesse D. Jewell. “We furnish the baby chicks and the feed,” Jewell explained about the grow-out system. “[Farmers] furnish the house, the equipment, and the labor, heat, and we pay them according to the number of pounds of chicken they get out of the number of pounds of feed they use.” Not that different from sharecropping, Jewell’s system offered farmers a chance to grow someone else’s crop on borrowed capital. To get into the business, farmers had to revamp their operations and build coops for the chickens. Often, they needed to take out loans to do so. At first the banks didn’t ask many questions, especially when white landowners—who made up by far the majority of the chicken growers in the South—came in to borrow money. Sometimes a Cagle’s representative co-signed on the loans to make sure they went through smoothly.11

  To the farmers who signed these early contracts, the windowless wooden poultry houses, as they called the coops, represented hope—the hope of staying on the land and making it. But for many, that optimism quickly faded. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, competition in the poultry industry stiffened. In response, companies like Cagle’s, as well as Perdue and Tyson, pressed growers for more. They wanted bigger birds that were grown faster. They pushed the growers to take on more debt and modernize their poultry houses. They wanted them longer and wider and made from aluminum with huge exhaust fans at either end, complex feeding machines running down the middle, and intricate lighting systems above. In essence, the company demanded that they turn their farms into animal factories. By this point, farmers who had taken the leap into poultry capitalism and remained in the system couldn’t say no.

  “Contracts,” as the investigative journalist Christopher Leonard noted in 2015, could be “canceled for nothing more than refusing to toe the company line.”12 If a farmer’s broilers did not get big enough fast enough, or as fast as a neighbor’s did, the family lost its contract. If they didn’t modernize their facilities, the company could break the contract. Each demand for capital improvements pushed farmers deeper and deeper in debt. If farmers resisted taking out another bank loan or tried to do things their own way, they got no chicks. If they had no chicks, they couldn’t raise broilers. If they couldn’t raise broilers, they couldn’t pay their loans. Then they lost their farms. The key to the system was that there was nowhere else to turn. In yet another hallmark of the world of cheap, despite worshipful talk of markets and freedom, the chicken consolidators sought monopolies over competition, and they found this power on the margins, in economically pressed rural hinterlands, in country crossroads even smaller than Hamlet, places far from cities where people had few options.

  As the contract system spread in the years after World War II and gathered more momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, the chicken industry’s center of gravity continued to move southward from New York and Delaware. By the time Emmett Roe bought the Buttercup plant in the early 1980s, the United States led the world in poultry production, and the South led the nation. Ten years after that, North Carolina emerged as the fourth largest poultry-producing state in the country behind Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas, and chicken overtook tobacco as the state’s number one agricultural commodity, generating over $1.5 billion in business each year.13 This transformation could not have taken place without the further intensification of the contract system and the mounting dependence of growers on consolidators like Cagle’s and, of course, the much bigger players like Perdue and Tyson. Locked in their own competitive battles, these companies demanded more investment from growers and oversaw the doubling and tripling in the size of both the southern poultry houses and the overall output of chicken in the region.14

  Over time, the modest chicken houses perched along tobacco roads mushroomed into concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). As long and as wide as a football field, these highly modern, highly productive animal factories churned out tens of millions of broilers in coops, applying the industrial logic of efficiency to the feeding and growing of chickens.15 They became every bit as productive as the colossal factories at River Rouge and Bethlehem Steel were in their day. Just like those famed industrial sites, the chicken factories of the Southland encouraged endless technical and scientific innovation. Yet while auto- and steelworkers generally shared some of the gains of their industries, the growers rarely got their piece of the pie. Over time, raising bigger broilers faster didn’t necessarily make the growers richer or more financially stable. Some still had to work a second job hauling timber or managing a McDonald’s outlet. Most stayed up late worrying about bills. Because of the strictures of the contract system, and because of the endless demand for more investment and debt, and because increased production by the chicken growers led to downward pressure on prices and usually to more production and another wave of price cuts, few farmers got rich or even gained a toehold into the middle class.

  “In reality,” writes a historian of the Maryland chicken industry, Solomon Iyobosa Omo-Osagie II, “a grower, did not really ‘own’ the business.” He or she was “operating the business” on behalf of Jesse Jewell or Cagle’s or Gold Kist.16 In many ways, the farmers had been turned, as one journalist described it, into “serfs with a mortgage.” Many who decided to get into poultry to hold on to their rural roots and independence instead found themselves trapped in an endless cycle of debt and near poverty, in a system not that different from the sharecropping regime that had exploited many of the
ir parents and grandparents for decades before. Consumers, though, benefited from the growers’ unseen pain as they paid less for chicken at Food Lion and Shoney’s.17

  Contract farmers and chicken consolidators weren’t the only forces pushing poultry prices down for consumers.

  In 1946, one of the nation’s first true supermarket chains, A&P, sponsored a “Chicken of Tomorrow” contest. The company awarded a prize to the person who bred the biggest bird with the biggest breasts. Noting the American preference for white meat over dark meat—not dissimilar from the nation’s choice of white bread over wheat bread—farmers and poultry breeders figured out how to engineer top-heavy chickens that looked more like a Barbie doll than like the skinny, scrappy barnyard chickens that had roamed the Cagle family yard and poultry houses in the years before World War II. A&P held more contests over the next decade, and each one delivered weightier, even more top-heavy designer chickens.18

  By this point, food scientists, not rural tinkerers, had taken over the process of managing and manipulating biology. Like their agricultural school colleagues working on corn and soybeans, during the 1950s and 1960s researchers in poultry science departments at North Carolina State University, the University of Georgia, and Cornell University developed endless ways to “accelerate the biological productivity” of broiler chickens. (Again, hens generally laid eggs, while broilers were raised for their meat.) Using new building materials and lighting, they outlined more efficient models for CAFOs, figuring out how to confine chickens longer, feed them more carbohydrate-rich foods faster, and use vitamins and chemicals to curtail the spread of disease as best they could in swelling coops. Following the lead of the Chicken of Tomorrow contestants, other scientists focused on genetics and breeding. They engineered chickens that grew to full weight faster, eating less along the way. Essentially they turned broilers, explains the historian William Boyd, into “highly efficient machines for converting feed grain into cheap animal flesh protein.”19

  In 1928, it took 112 days to raise a 2.8-pound chicken that ate roughly 12.5 pounds of food as it grew to maturity. Forty years later, it took half that time for the grow-out, the industry term for the amount of time it takes for a chick to reach its full weight as a broiler. Ten years after that, broilers raised on animal farms were 25 percent bigger than their predecessors were and ate only half as much feed. In 1995, the average industrial chicken hit the scales at six-plus pounds. It took forty-seven days for the animals to get that big, and, along the way, they consumed only ten pounds of feed. If, as the trade journal Poultry Science marveled, a newborn six-and-a-half-pound baby grew at the pace of these chickens of tomorrow, it would tip the scales at six hundred pounds by its second month alive.20

  The new miracle breeds of broilers, with names like Vantress and Cyprus C, that Imperial bought from Cagle’s to make its tenders, fillets, and nuggets got bigger, faster, while consuming less feed. When these puffed-up creatures tried to walk, they could barely go more than a step or two without wobbling and toppling over. To get them to this size, the growers turned the overhead fluorescent lights in the chicken houses on for twenty to twenty-two hours a day because they wanted their chickens to eat like pigs, and they knew that these birds were biologically hardwired not to eat in the dark. So the animals lived in artificial light and ate almost around the clock, even if it made them sick.21 Many became so agitated in these bright, closed quarters that they attacked the birds next to them and sometimes tried to peck themselves to death. Protecting their investments and pushed by the contractors, growers would de-beak the broilers, sometimes with an instrument that resembled a blowtorch and usually without administering any anesthesia. The system wouldn’t allow for any unnecessary expenses. The growers did, though, turn to a pharmacy of other drugs for other reasons—all economic. Anxious birds didn’t eat. When they didn’t eat, they didn’t grow to their full weight in a flash of time. Jumpy birds also tended to yield tougher meat. By the 1980s, in response, some growers started to lace their chicken feed with Benadryl to settle the nerves of the cooped-up birds and keep them on the fast-growing track. Others dropped traces of caffeine into the feeding machines so the birds would stay awake and keep eating. Perdue apparently added xanthophyll to its feed mix, a dye found in alfalfa and marigold petals that turned the skin of broilers an artificial shade of golden yellow. Birds living so close together easily passed germs and diseases to one another, so farmers put penicillin, tetracycline, chlortetracycline, and oxytetracycline in their foods. Over time, as a result, broilers inevitably became resistant to some of these antibiotics, starting another round of chemical solutions and producing a range of possibly dangerous food-borne illnesses for chicken eaters.22

  In 1986, a group of radical activists calling themselves London Greenpeace—they had no formal relationship with the more famous and well-known global environmental organization, Greenpeace—began passing out a six-sided leaflet along the city’s high streets entitled “What’s Wrong with McDonald’s?: Everything You Don’t Want to Know.” The rather plain-looking black-and-white broadsheet accused the fast food giant of economic imperialism, false advertising, environmental destruction, the systematic exploitation of workers, and the “torture and murder” of millions of animals each year. The American-based company responded to the charges by secretly infiltrating the group and later by suing it for libel. The British press dubbed the ensuing trial, which began in 1994, “the McLibel Case.”23

  As it wound through the courts, the McLibel case became the longest-running civil trial in British history. In his initial 1997 decision, a technical victory for McDonald’s that would be appealed and argued over for almost a decade afterward, the judge, who had pored through mountains of documents detailing the company’s business practices, wrote a detailed section about the treatment of the industrially produced animals the firm used for its nuggets. “Broiler chickens,” he had learned, “spend the last few days of their lives with very little room to move. The severe restrictions of movement of those last few days is cruel.”24 As the chickens exploded in size, he explained, their living spaces shrank. They could hardly turn to the right or left or spread their wings. Their naturally skinny legs were often snapped in half by the weight of their not-so-natural oversized, genetically engineered breasts. Crippled from hip and leg deformities, these chickens couldn’t drag themselves to water or food, so many died of dehydration and starvation. Others collapsed because their lungs and hearts couldn’t keep pace with their swelling upper bodies. Veterinarians knew that barnyard chickens didn’t naturally die of heart failure, but factory birds, they told the McLibel judge, perished this way all the time from what poultry companies rather innocuously called “flip over syndrome.”25

  Like the poultry consolidators used by McDonald’s in England and around the world, Cagle’s dropped baby chicks off at the farms it had under contract at regular intervals. Forty-two to forty-seven days later, a crew returned to pick up the broilers. A chicken catcher, as he was called, waded into the pens and grabbed the now six-plus-pound animals by their feet and shoved them into crates, often with such force that as many as 30 percent of them arrived at the slaughterhouse, their next stop in the process, with broken bones. Cagle’s employees stacked the crates of captured chickens, one on top of the other, on trucks headed to plants in Macon and Pine Mountain, Georgia, and Collinsville, Alabama. During the ride, urine and feces soaked the animals from top to bottom. Once they were unloaded, the broilers, many now lame, were hung up by their feet and dragged through an electrified saltwater bath so that they wouldn’t flap their wings when workers slit their throats. When the process ran the way it was designed to run, the charged water rendered the chickens unconscious so that they felt next to nothing through the rest of the killing process. But because Cagle’s executives, like others in the poultry business, feared that too much of an electrical jolt would taint the meat with a slightly burnt taste, animals often remained fully conscious when their throats got cut.26

 
; Terrified and disoriented, many birds defecated on themselves as they were being killed. Covered in feces, the now dead or nearly dead broilers were then dragged through a chemical-filled and scalding hot bath to help ease the removal of their feathers in the next stage of the disassembly process. But all of the excrement on the birds went into the water and seeped inside them through the bedsores many had developed from sitting too long in the animal factories because their spindly legs couldn’t support their bloated bodies. After that, machines ripped the intestinal tracts out of the bodies of the dead birds. As they did, fecal matter sprayed onto the machines, the tables, and workers’ hands and then it came into contact with the bird’s muscles, tissue, and organs, providing multiple opportunities for contamination.27

  Cheap government added to the toxic mix stirring in the chicken slaughterhouses of the United States. In 1978, the Carter administration’s Department of Agriculture, eager to jump-start one section of the nation’s stagnant economy, approved a measure that allowed for the washing of broilers in chemical baths instead of the more labor-intensive process of cutting and cleaning fecal matter and other disease-carrying materials off the birds one at a time. The eviscerated carcasses would now sit for an hour or so in a tub of chlorinated ice water, almost marinating in germs, bacteria, and diseases that could make consumers down the line sick to their stomachs. This stage of production, as one health writer explained a number of years after the fire, “is where the main contamination with feces takes place. Feces left on the meat from the disemboweling process mixes with the water in the tank, contaminating all the other birds with possible harmful bacteria and bird pooh. That’s why it’s called the fecal soup.” The Carter administration’s ruling not only cooked up this awful mess, it also permitted processors to ratchet up their assembly lines, going from around seventy birds per minute to as many as one hundred birds per minute. More chickens going through plants, and through the fecal soups in them, translated into cheaper chickens both in the supermarket and in fast food outlets. But it also meant more chances for consumers to get sick. And finally, the new speed of production also meant that more of the cruelties practiced on animals would be inflicted on workers.28