In Meat We Trust (8 page)

By 1882, Swift was ready to seek the holy grail: the nation’s biggest market, New York City, where he would confront the men who had siphoned off his profits with their overpriced sawdust and hay. He laid the groundwork for his assault by constructing the new warehouse at Washington Market. A newspaperman who visited the facility marveled at the efficient design, which included a “railway” track suspended from the ceiling, the track holding a collection of wheeled hooks from which hung dozens of beef carcasses. The warehouse manager explained that the company’s refrigerator cars were equipped with similar ceiling-mounted tracks. When a train arrived in New Jersey, a crew transferred the cars to a barge that floated them across the river to the warehouse. There, workers aligned the door of the train car with the door of the warehouse and slid the dangling carcasses off one track and onto the other. Thanks to such cost-cutting efficiencies, the reporter told readers, the “era of cheap beef”
had begun. “Everything with us
is systematized,” a company representative told another newspaperman. By using the telegraph, employees could respond almost instantly to local changes in demand and adjust prices accordingly, and do so faster than shippers who hauled live animals. “Everywhere we have located,” he said, “our success has exceeded our expectations.”

The project of shipping dressed beef long distances “has ceased to be
an experiment, and . . . has become a demonstrated fact,” commented another observer, who predicted that Swift & Co., whose unofficial motto was “quick sales and small profits,” would “break down local monopolies and high prices.” According to some reports, the opening of Swift’s Washington Market refrigerator provoked a “panicky feeling”
among local beef brokers and shippers as well as slaughterhouse owners in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City, who feared that Swift would undercut them on price. That, opined a Chicago reporter, was the least of their worries. A disruption or reduction of New York’s live cattle trade would likely destroy local byproduct processors; without cattle, there would be no hides, bones, hooves, and fat. The locals’ anxiety was justified and surely increased when, just days after Swift opened his New York doors, Philip Armour joined the fray.

Today Philip Armour’s name is associated primarily with meatpacking, but he was not a meat man and certainly no butcher. As he once said, “[I]f you showed me
a piece of meat I could not tell you what part of the bullock it came from.” Armour was only interested in meat for the same reason he was interested in wheat, corn, coal, or gold: it offered opportunities for manipulating supplies and therefore prices, and thus for earning huge profits.

Armour, who was born in 1832 and grew up in upstate New York, earned his first serious money during the California gold rush, not by panning for ore but by selling necessities to those who were. In the late 1850s, he landed in Milwaukee, a town boasting a robust and diverse economy, proximity to Chicago, and bountiful natural resources from the region’s farms and forests. There he and another man opened a commission house and worked as middlemen selling grain and other provisions. Sensing war on the horizon, the pair bought up a warehouse of whiskey, betting that if war came, Congress would raise taxes on liquor. War came; Congress did; the men profited.

But in the early 1860s, Armour entered into partnership with John Plankinton, a Milwaukee real estate powerhouse and owner of the city’s biggest pork-processing operation. Armour promptly impressed the older man with his acumen when the two earned a fortune by cornering the market in packed pork. Corners were Armour’s special delight, a fact he would demonstrate repeatedly during his life (to the dismay of his competitors). Plankinton and Armour signed “futures” contracts, agreeing to buy pork from other dealers on a specific date in the future. At the same time, the two men quietly purchased as much pork as they could lay their hands on. When the contracts came due, the saps who had contracted to deliver pork to Plankinton and Armour discovered that there was none to be had—except from Plankinton and Armour, who, having “cornered” the supply, could charge whatever price they wanted. The men holding the futures contracts had to buy from P & A—in order to sell to P & A. The partners reportedly earned somewhere between $1 and $2 million from the (legal) scheme, while many rivals collapsed under the weight of their costly mistake. The men used the windfall to expand their Milwaukee holdings and to fund a second pork-packing operation in Kansas City.

But Milwaukee could not satisfy Armour’s ambitions, and a few years later he parted ways with Plankinton (theirs was an amicable separation) and headed to Chicago. There he built a pork-processing plant, annoyed his new rivals by orchestrating corners, and waded into the beef industry by opening a beef-canning facility. Sometime around 1880, he began investigating the possibilities of shipping dressed beef, but he later admitted that his initial effort failed because he and his employees “did not understand
the methods of refrigeration and did not get [the] beef to the seaboard in proper condition.” But Armour was a quick study, and in October 1882, he pronounced himself sufficiently “confident” to “go into the business on a large scale.” The timing was intentional: When Gus Swift marched into the New York market, George Hammond had tagged along. Armour had to make his move or run the risk that the other two would run away with the nation’s biggest meat market. A company representative explained that, unlike Swift, who targeted the wholesale market, Armour planned to deal directly with retailers and to sell “refrigerator”
boxes of “small cuts”—tenderloins, sirloin, and so forth—rather than whole carcasses. The cost advantage played out at Armour’s Chicago packing plant, where employees transformed the rest of the carcass bits into sausage and canned and corned beef and used byproducts on the spot. The company had “no waste at all,”
explained an Armour executive. “The blood, the bones, the offal, the hoofs, and the horns are all utilized and made profitable here.” The equation was clear: Sell direct to retailers. Ship only what they want. Earn top dollar for the rest of the carcass back in Chicago.

The arrival of Swift in Manhattan had been alarming enough. The entry of Armour, whose reputation as a cutthroat corner maker had long since outgrown Chicago, heightened the danger ahead. “There can be only
one thing left for all the men who have capital invested here in this business,” said one New York meat wholesaler, and that was to “go away.” Or, as a less charitable observer put it, “only stupid and sluggish minds”
would fail to “heed the signs of the times.” Railroad magnates had become “fat and comfortable”
on the “toll” exacted from the nation’s meat eaters, mused a newspaper editor. But thanks to Armour, Swift, and dressed beef, he told readers, “Mr.
VANDERBILT
sees in his dreams long lines of his stock cars rotting on disused sidings.” “There is really no reason on earth,” he added, “why the beef-eaters of New-York should be taxed for bringing hides and horns over Mr.
VANDERBILT
’s roads all the way from Chicago.” And should Vanderbilt and other tycoons complain, well, too bad. “[A]ll of this is nothing more
than has happened in every trade revolution that has taken place in the country,” wrote another observer. “From our standpoint in all this matter, we are only looking at and dealing with the inevitable.” Statistics document the speed with which the dressed-beef revolution unfolded: In 1880, Chicago trains carried 416,000 head of live cattle and 31,000 tons of dressed beef to eastern markets. Five years later, the number of live cattle had dropped to 281,000 and dressed-beef tonnage had risen to 232,000. A journalist who covered commodities markets for the
Boston Journal
reported in 1883 that three-fourths of the dressed beef sold in that city came directly from Chicago, sixty train cars a week delivering nearly 1.8 million pounds of “bright and sweet”
beef. Those shipments, he reported, had “materially curtailed” slaughtering operations at the Brighton market.

By any measure, the packers’ rapid conquest of the American beef market was extraordinary; in less than a decade they upended a long-standing system of distributing meat and beat the powerful railroads at their own game. Part of the reason, it’s clear, is that the dressed-beef men offered a superior alternative. But in the 1880s, the newcomers also benefited from rising demand for beef, not just in the United States but around the world, and from a cattle bonanza in the Far West that glutted stockyards and drove down the prices the packers paid for their raw material.

In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, Americans benefited from an expanding economy and a proliferation of clerical and managerial jobs as well as factory work that often paid high wages. The rising standard of living shaped shoppers’ demands, and people in every economic class developed an insatiable appetite for fresh beef. But not just any cuts. Families satisfied
with tongue or cheek twenty years earlier now demanded finer cuts, a Wisconsin butcher explained to a newspaper reporter in 1882. His customers snapped up porterhouse, sirloin, and rib roast, but the rest of the carcass, he grumbled, landed in his account books as a loss. “Even a laborer
on the street or a negro will come in and ask for a porter-house steak,” groused another butcher. “[N]obody wants anything else.” A Boston meat seller confirmed that observation. Among his regular customers was a young seamstress who purchased only tenderloin. He explained to her that she could save money by buying round steak instead. The woman took offense. “Do you suppose
because I don’t come here in my carriage I don’t want just as good meat as rich folks have?” she demanded. From the butchers’ perspective then, Swift and Armour offered relief, Swift because he delivered carcasses to wholesalers who sold butchers only the pieces they wanted, and Armour because he offered boxes of choice cuts.

But the demand for beef stemmed from more than a desire to emulate “rich folks.” In the late nineteenth century, widely accepted theories linked food to national power and racial superiority. According to this set of ideas, a nation’s diet predicted whether it would dominate or be dominated. That goes far toward explaining the era’s obsessive exploration of the science of nutrition and of agricultural production: if diet and national might were linked, it was crucial to understand which foods delivered strength and health and, as important, how to wring every last ounce of nutriment from every last inch of soil or, if need be, the laboratory. (In 1894,
one chemist predicted that by 2000, fields of corn and wheat would be a thing of the past because humans would manufacture flour and other foodstuffs in laboratories.) More than for any other food, however, access to meat both denoted and endowed power, and of the meats, beef reigned supreme. Meat-rich diets had made Europeans and Americans masters of the planet. In contrast, the “rice-eating”
Japanese, Chinese, and “Hindoos,” as one typical essay phrased it, were an “inoffensive” collection of people from whom not much could be expected. The cultural and nutritional significance
of flesh-based protein explains why Europeans invested heavily in public slaughterhouses and eliminated tariffs that hindered the importation of cheap (and mostly American) meats. Doing so ensured that citizens—many of whom, after all, would likely become soldiers—would have meat on their tables.

In the 1870s and 1880s, however, a series of epidemics ravaged cattle herds in Europe and Great Britain. The resulting meat shortages prompted government officials and private investors to look to Americans for supplies. Britain’s Parliament, for example, sent two men to investigate the livestock situation in the Far West; the pair returned to London intoxicated with not just the numbers of cattle they found there, but the potential for wealth. A western livestock producer “makes an enormous return”
on his investment, they reported, reaping an “average profit” of “fully 33 per cent.” Another promoter claimed that, assuming “good business management,”
a herd of western cattle returned 25 percent a year. A correspondent for the London
Times
told readers that ranching consisted primarily of “riding through plains,
parks, and valleys,” pleasant jaunts interspersed with livestock roundups conducted by “masters and men, well mounted.” “The cost of both
summering and wintering [livestock] is simply the cost of herding,” claimed one Wyoming rancher, “as no feed nor shelter is required.” Or, in the western vernacular popular at the time: Graze ’em, round ’em up, ship ’em out, pocket the proceeds.

These hyperbolic promises of easy wealth spurred a race to capture both beef and profits. Hundreds of English, Scottish, German, French, and American investors dived in, scooping up land and livestock. Cowtowns swarmed with men on the make. The editor of the
Laramie Boomerang
described that burg’s cattle district as “a young Wall Street”
where buyers, sellers, and madmen talked of “millions” as if they were “nickels.” Corporate ranching ventures laid claim to cattle lands from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande. Some were legitimate and well managed. Others existed only on paper and served as “clever bait,”
observed a reporter with a Denver newspaper, with which to separate “suckers” from their money.

One of the loonier ventures was a Dakota Territory slaughtering operation launched by Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, known to all as the Marquis de Morès. Born in France into a lush background suitable to his highfalutin name, he married a wealthy New York woman in 1882. He worked briefly for her banker father, but then decided he needed a stake of his own. He set out for the Dakota Territory, surveyed its possibilities, and hatched a “ranch to table”
scheme, as he called it. “We propose,”
he explained to a reporter, to eliminate “the middleman and send meats direct from the producer to the consumer.” How he planned to slaughter enough livestock to compete with Swift and Armour, find buyers for the mounds of byproducts, ship from Dakota to New York City, and still earn a profit was not clear. (It’s unlikely he wasted much time pondering such trivia.) He dumped his and his wife’s inheritances as well as funds from a collection of gullible investors into an abattoir, a byproducts-processing facility, and a town, which he christened Medora, after his wife. Morès proved to be a brilliant publicist, and newspapers around the country regaled readers with updates on the Frenchman (“distinguished scholar, gentleman,
millionaire and cowboy”): his conflicts with ranchers who tried to scare him away (one of whom he reportedly killed in a shootout; self-defense, decided the jury that acquitted him); his home on the range—“an agreeable cross
between a Newport cottage and a hunting lodge”; and, of course, his efforts to bring industrial capitalism to the range. When the end came, the Marquis was dodging creditors (and was eventually arrested for fraud).