Tied to the Great Packing Machine: The Midwest and Meatpacking

CHAPTER 1 The Industrial Center of the Country

“THEY WERE TIED to the great packing machine, and tied to it for life,” wrote Upton Sinclair in The Jungle,referring to packing workers in early twentieth-century Chicago. The line could easily have described virtually all Americans, particularly midwesterners. Since the establishment of meatpacking in and around Cincinnati during the antebellum period, the industry has contributed centrally to the growth and development—both good and bad—of the region.Toward the end of The Jungle, Sinclair describes Chicago as the “industrial center of the country,” referencing its budding socialist movement. But Chicago was the center of the meatpacking industry for only part of its history. This book explores the industry’s evolution and impacts on the Midwest far beyond Chicago over the past century and a half.1 Meatpacking’s importance to the Midwest’s economy is longstanding.It has long been among the region’s top industries in terms of output, value added by manufacturing ,and number of production workers.During the twentieth century in Iowa, the center of beef and pork production in the Midwest over much of this period, the percentage of total value added to the state’s manufacturing from meatpacking , according to U.S. Census Bureau figures, ranged from 6.7 percent in 1909 to a peak of 16.1 percent in 1939 and to 6.5 percent in 2002. It ranked as the third-mostimportant industry in this category in the state in 1909, held top place from 1919 to 1958, then dropped to second in 2002. Meatpacking workers made up 6.5 percent of all industrial workers in the state in 1899. This percentage climbed steadily before it peaked in 1947 at 20 percent, then gradually declined to 9.3 percent by 1992. But by 2002, 15.1 percent of Iowa’s manufacturing employees worked in meatpacking . Since 1939, the industry has ranked either first or second in this category. Meatpacking has been similarly important in several other midwestern states during the same period. Of course, meatpacking has been important outside the Midwest CHAPTER 1 The Industrial Center of the Country The Midwest and Meatpacking as well. Even before the poultry industry’s growth in the South, large terminal markets (stockyards) and/or meatpacking plants existed in cities such as New York City, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Buffalo, Fort Worth, and Denver. Nevertheless, since before the Civil War, the industry has been most significant in the Midwest. Meatpacking has shaped much of the urban and rural Midwest’s cultural and environmental development. The industry has been a magnet for immigrant groups and has prompted considerable rural-to-urban native-born migration.Workers’wages and relative power within meatpacking plants significantly impacted communities’ standards and quality of living. Women often found work in the industry and then had to struggle to meet the challenges of a traditionally male-dominated work environment . Feminist activism in the industry merged with other feminist movements after World War II. Concerns about the ethics of animal slaughter have long reverberated throughout the nation, and meat-consumption patterns tell us much about U.S. diet and culture. Efforts to combat the industry’s site-point pollution have made all midwesterners more environmentally conscious. At an even deeper environmental level, meatpacking’s backward linkages to livestock raising and forward linkages to the creation of a multitude of animal by-products have contributed to the ongoing restructuring of the region’s agro-industrial development. The industry’s historians have usually focused on work inside the factories and workers’ efforts to improve their situations there. Although insights into the nature of work and workplace roles and cultures inform parts of this study,this book’s main focus is the industry’s impacts on the Midwest and the rest of the nation. Part 1, chapters 2 and 3, charts the industry’s economic development through its structural evolution and its impact on the region, especially the communities in which meatpacking plants have been located. Until the Civil War, wholesale merchants included meatpacking as one of many of their entrepreneurial activities. Before mechanical refrigeration, only during the fall and winter was meatpacking practical. Operations relied on seasonal labor and tended to be relatively small in scale. However, as early as the 1850s, some of the important technical innovations in packing pork—the primary meat that was cured and shipped at that time—were developed in and around Cincinnati. Meatpacking also brought significant economic development to Cincinnati and several Ohio Valley cities until the...