Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America by Joshua Specht (review)

Eating animals rests at the core of American selfhood in ways that historians are only beginning to consider, let alone critically examine. In Red Meat Republic, Joshua Specht explores the struggles of beef eaters and beef producers to both democratize and profit from meat-eating in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their efforts ensured beef's central place in America's economy as well as its importance in managing Americans' troubled notions of democracy.

In Specht's wide-ranging analysis—which spans the dispossession of the so-called "open range" of the Native American Great Plains, the markets and slaughterhouses of Chicago, the tables of Delmonico's Restaurant in New York City, and beyond—the modern United States emerged alongside the industrialization of beef production in the years following the Civil War. The creation of a national market for beef underpinned federal and corporate efforts to subordinate Native American land and labor through the circumscription of hunting and the confinement of the reservation system. The centralization of beef production in slaughterhouse cities shifted the balance of power from rural areas to urban centers in the agricultural economy. The commoditized ubiquity and homogeneity of industrially produced beef enabled its adoption into a wide variety of dishes and cuisines that suffused diverse American cultures. And, in moments when concerns over public health and the exploitation of labor threatened the industry's modes of profit, beef producers used Americans' unwavering taste for beef to navigate each political emergency.

Specht's book will be a valuable resource for readers in need of a clear introduction to the history and historiography of American beef production. Not only does Red Meat Republic provide some new glimpses of primary sources that help illuminate the business histories of the beef industry in the late-nineteenth century, it also provides a readable and reasonably up-to-date synthesis of much of the disciplinary literature written on the subject over the last few decades.

This is a book with subject matter that necessarily requires engagement with intellectual perspectives beyond the conventional historical discipline, however. Readers interested in environmental studies, animal studies, American Indian studies, and food studies will likely be frustrated with Specht's lack of engagement with the many contributions of scholars from these fields to the central concerns about meat and identity that Specht's book investigates. In an odd footnote, for instance, Specht suggests that he has a "slightly more rosy perspective on the historical relationship between humans and cattle" than does the sociologist David Nibert, but he does not elaborate further (263). Dozens of other critical voices in the massive literature on animals and domestication simply go uncited. Moreover, although one of the more original interpretations that Specht makes is the significance of ranchers like Joseph McCoy and others in becoming "participant-historians"—in writing their own romantic histories of cattle ranching in order to help dissociate beef from its emerging industrial trappings, as well as to help justify the rancher's role in dispossessing Native lands—Specht unwittingly deploys one of the key archetypes of the very colonial narratives he critiques by insisting himself that Native bison hunters were "nomads" without any sustained discussion of how scholars of Native studies and other fields have negotiated this fraught phrase (7). In short, Specht misses opportunities to bring his detailed historical study into broader conversations with these interdisciplinary fields.

Overall, however, Read Meat Republic offers a thoughtful and scholarly history of America's preoccupation with beef that describes the political and economic struggles that brought the United States near the top of global per capita meat consumption by the twentieth century. Readers interested in the histories of Texas and the Greater Southwest will especially appreciate Specht's attention to the regional significance of the Southern Plains in this larger narrative.