High End Beef Processors in Chicago

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Meatpacking

Meatpacking

The training of beef and pork for man consumption has always been closely tied to livestock raising, technological change, government regulation, and urban marketplace demand. From the Civil State of war until the 1920s Chicago was the country'south largest meatpacking centre and the best-selling headquarters of the manufacture.

Cattle Pens, Spousal relationship Stock Yard, c.1920s

Europeans brought cattle and hogs to Northward America, permit them forage in the woods, and slaughtered them just as meat was needed. Commercial butchering began when population increased in the towns. Since beefiness was difficult to preserve, cattle were killed year circular and the meat sold and consumed while still fresh. Hogs were killed just in common cold weather. Their fat was rendered into lard and their flesh carved into hams, shoulders, and sides, which were covered with common salt and packed in wooden barrels. Packers utilized hides, simply claret, bones, and entrails usually went into the nearest body of running water. City government, understandably, tried to confine these operations to the outskirts of boondocks.

Americans took their cattle and hogs over the Appalachians after the Revolutionary War, and the volume of livestock in the Ohio River Valley increased rapidly. Cincinnati packers took advantage of this development and shipped barreled pork and lard throughout the valley and downward the Mississippi River. They devised amend methods to cure pork and used lard components to make soap and candles. By 1840 Cincinnati led all other cities in pork processing and proclaimed itself Porkopolis.

Chicago won that title during the Civil War. It was able to practice so because about Midwestern farmers too raised livestock, and railroads tied Chicago to its Midwestern hinterland and to the big urban markets on the East Coast. In addition, Union army contracts for processed pork and alive cattle supported packinghouses on the branches of the Chicago River and the railroad stockyards which shipped cattle. To alleviate the problem of driving cattle and hogs through city streets, the leading packers and railroads incorporated the Matrimony Stock Yard and Transit Company in 1865 and built an innovative facility s of the city limits. Accessible to all railroads serving Chicago, the huge stockyard received 3 1000000 cattle and hogs in 1870 and 12 meg simply xx years afterward.

Stock Thousand Canning Room, c.1890

Betwixt the opening of the Wedlock Stock Yard in 1865 and the end of the century, Chicago meatpackers transformed the industry. Pork packers such as Philip Armour built large plants west of the stockyards, adult ice-cooled rooms so they could pack twelvemonth round, and introduced steam hoists to elevate carcasses and an overhead assembly line to move them. Gustavus Swift, who came to Chicago to ship cattle, developed a fashion to send fresh-chilled beef in ice-cooled railroad cars all the way to the East Declension. By 1900 this dressed beef merchandise was as important as pork packing, and mechanical refrigeration increased the efficiency of both pork and beef operations. Moreover, Chicago packers were preserving meat in tin cans, manufacturing an cheap butter substitute called oleomargarine, and, with the help of chemists, turning previously discarded parts of the animals into mucilage, fertilizer, glycerin, ammonia, and gelatin.

The extension of railroads and livestock raising to the Groovy Plains prompted the largest Chicago packing companies to build branch plants in Kansas Metropolis, Omaha, Sioux City, Wichita, Denver, Fort Worth, and elsewhere. To promote their dressed beef in eastern cities, they built co-operative sales offices and common cold storage warehouses. When railroads aghast at investing in refrigerator cars, they purchased their own and leased them to the railroads. Thus, Chicago's Big Iii packers—Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Nelson Morris—were in a position to influence livestock prices at one end of this complex industrial chain and the price of meat products at the other end. In 1900 the Chicago packinghouses employed 25,000 of the country's 68,000 packinghouse employees. The metropolis's pb was narrower at the end of World State of war I, merely Chicago was still, in Carl Sandburg's words, "Sus scrofa Butcher for the World."

"Chicago" by Carl Sandburg, 1916

Government surveillance and regulation kept pace with the growth of the meatpacking industry. Even earlier Chicago annexed the Union Stock Yard and packinghouse district (Packingtown), metropolis authorities tried to control smoke, odors, and waste disposal. Livestock raisers prevailed on land and federal authorities to investigate prices paid past the packers for cattle. At the behest of foreign governments, the U.South. Section of Agriculture started inspecting pork exports in the early 1890s. Upton Sinclair's sensational novel The Jungle (1906) led to the Meat Inspection Human action, which put federal inspectors in all packinghouses whose products entered interstate or foreign commerce. Government inspectors began grading beef and pork in the 1920s; in 1967 Congress required states to perform the same inspection and grading duties in plants selling inside land boundaries.

When the Armour, Swift, and Morris companies cooperated in a new National Packing Company and purchased some nutrient-related firms, Charles Edward Russell warned virtually the existence of a "beef trust." His book The Greatest Trust in the World (1905) caused the federal government to start antitrust proceedings. Although the courts failed to indict, the National Packing Company voluntarily dissolved in 1912. In the Packer Consent Prescript of 1920, the Big Three agreed to sell their holdings in stockyards, nutrient-related companies, common cold-storage facilities, and the retail meat business.

The packers faced challenges from their employees. First organized past the Knights of Labor, packinghouse workers in Chicago struck for the eight-hour day in 1886, but public reaction to violence in Haymarket Square ended that strike. The Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor, fabricated impressive gains in all the packing centers at the turn of the century. In the summertime of 1904 this wedlock led a long, bitter contest for wage increases. Some l,000 packinghouse workers walked off their jobs. Simply in the end, only Jane Addams'south intervention with J. Ogden Armour saved the strikers from total defeat. In response to renewed organizing during World State of war I and a demand for commonage bargaining, President Woodrow Wilson established a federal mediation procedure, and workers won temporary wage increases and the eight-hour solar day. When packers cut wages at the end of 1921, the Amalgamated called a strike which it soon rescinded. Thanks to the New Deal'south pro-labor policies, Amalgamated membership revived in the 1930s and the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched a new packinghouse union. At the finish of the decade, the large packing companies finally signed their starting time labor contracts. Postwar changes in the manufacture, all the same, minimized the bear upon of this victory.

Railroads centralized meatpacking in the latter one-half of the nineteenth century; trucks and highways decentralized it during the last one-half of the twentieth. Instead of selling mature animals to urban stockyards, livestock raisers sold young animals to commercial feedlots, and new packing plants arose in the vicinity. Different the compact, multistory buildings in Chicago, Kansas City, or Omaha, these new plants were sprawling one-story structures with ability saws, mechanical knives, and the chapters to quick-freeze meat packaged in vacuum bags. Big refrigerator trucks carried the products over interstate highways to supermarkets. Many of the new plants were in states with right-to-work laws that hampered unionization. Business concern in the older railroad stockyards and city packinghouses declined sharply in the 1960s. Chicago's Union Stock K closed in 1970, the aforementioned year the Greyhound Corporation purchased Armour & Co.

At the end of the twentieth century, the meatpacking manufacture was widely dispersed but nevertheless under government regulation. Irresolute consumption patterns posed new challenges, as poultry and fish began to replace beefiness and pork in American diets.

Bibliography

Barrett, James R. Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922. 1987.

Skaggs, Jimmy K. Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United states of america, 1607–1983. 1986.

Wade, Louise C. Chicago's Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Surroundings in the 19th Century. 1987.

The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago © 2005 Chicago Historical Society.
The Encyclopedia of Chicago © 2004 The Newberry Library. All Rights Reserved. Portions are copyrighted by other institutions and individuals. Additional information on copyright and permissions.

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Source: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/804.html

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