Chicago was famously dubbed “Hog Butcher for the World” by Carl Sandburg in his iconic poem “Chicago.” The city was the center of America’s meatpacking industry for roughly a century, transforming the way livestock were sold, processed,
transported, and eaten. Industrialist tycoons such as Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift created and then dominated an industry that changed Americans’ relationship to meat – and squeezed out massive profits at the same time. A century and a
half after they first began processing “everything but the squeal” in Chicago, many of their abuses – an indifference to workers, health, the environment, or smaller business – are once again a part of the industry.
A Dangerous Industry
Some of the earliest outbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic were concentrated in meatpacking plants throughout the country. Workplace safety complaints from meatpackers to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) skyrocketed in the first four months of the pandemic, and by September 8, 2021, at least 298 meatpackers had died of COVID.
Meatpackers were deemed “essential workers,” and President Donald Trump issued an executive order to keep the facilities open in late April 2020. But their pay was low – one worker at a Mountaire poultry plant in Delaware told The New Yorker that she was paid about $13 an hour before the pandemic and given a hazard-pay increase of a dollar an hour only through June, 2020 – 44 percent less than the national average for manufacturing jobs. Roughly one in five meatpacking workers are food stamp recipients, according to The Guardian’s parsing of U.S. census microdata.
The dangers of working in the meatpacking industry – and the larger abuses wrapped up in the industry – long predate the pandemic. They stretch back all the way to the creation of industrial meatpacking in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Chicago was the center of the industry and tycoons such as Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift squeezed massive profits out of processing meat.
Philip Armour’s Meat Industry
The meatpacking industry “is a greater power than in the history of men has been exercised by king, emperor, or irresponsible oligarchy,” wrote the muckraker Charles Edward Russell in 1905.
Armour, Swift, and other Chicago businessmen refined industrial meatpacking into a mercilessly efficient, devastatingly brutal machine indifferent to workers, health, environmental concerns, or competition. “It was truly a social transformation and technological transformation,” the environmental historian Sylvia Washington told Chicago Stories. “Everything from the agriculture to the natural environment to public health to economies.”
“The story of meatpacking in Chicago is a story of American capitalism,” historian Dominic Pacyga told Chicago Stories. Technological innovations were made, monopolies were created, labor clashed with tycoons, economies were transformed, environments destroyed, and the American consumer’s relationship to food was forever changed. And Chicago was its capital.
New Inventions, Mass Production, and Cheaper Meat
Due to its central location, position as a railroad hub, and proximity to Midwestern farms, Chicago was ideally situated to become America’s meatpacking capital, especially during the Civil War, when the Union Army needed food, and blockades disrupted old trade routes.
One of the people who helped Chicago dominate meatpacking was Philip Armour. He had amassed a fortune by investing money earned selling supplies to Western gold miners into pork futures in Milwaukee.
“Market manipulation is very important to a guy like Phil Armour,” author Maureen…
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