- [Narrator] Coming up. - It was just a
shock to the system. In your face. This is what
the world is gonna be like. - [Narrator] On
Chicago's South Side, a few powerful men
completely transformed the way Americans eat. - A small handful
of people reinvented the system of meat delivery. They streamlined it,
industrialized it, automated it. - [Narrator] But behind the
cheap meat were hidden costs. - The smell was like
being in the toilet 24/7. - This is the results of
different accidents that I have. - You have all of this
animal waste and blood running in this creek. - [Narrator] And in time, the American people
would fight back. - It was just constant lawsuits. There was just constant
investigations,
constant bad news. - The story of
meatpacking in Chicago is a story of
American capitalism. - [Narrator] The
Union Stockyards, next
on Chicago Stories. (bright upbeat music) ♪ Hot dogs ♪ ♪ Armour hot dogs ♪ ♪ Hot dogs ♪ ♪ Armour hot dogs ♪ ♪ Fat kids skinny kids ♪ ♪ Kids who climb on rocks ♪ - This clean, smooth hot
dog in this beautiful bun, and of course everybody
wants to eat that. - [Joshua] Especially if
we don't look too hard, or too closely. (man and children singing) (pigs grunting)
(cows mooing) - It covers up
such exploitation. It covers up the using up of human life. There's no connection
between the hot dog I eat and what that worker is paid and how they're living. - I'm sure that all the
kids chasing the hot dog, if they had any clue
about what it took and where it came from, they probably wouldn't have
been as running as fast. - [Narrator] The Armour Hot
Dog was one of the many meat creations of Chicago's
Union Stockyards, a square mile of pens
in slaughterhouses
on the South Side. (cows mooing) The stockyards
fundamentally changed the way food gets
from America's farms to people's dining room tables. - [Joshua] A world of
unimaginable scale, it shocked and
fascinated people. - One single big, huge place where you break the animal
down into its minutest parts to make something else. - They'll use everything
but the squeal, and if you could have
packed the squeal, you would have used that too. - It was truly a social transformation and technological
transformation. Everything from agriculture
to the natural environment, to public health, to the
economies, refrigeration. This is huge. (cows mooing) - [Narrator] One of
the architects of
this brave new world was the meat king of America,
Philip Danforth Armour. - Armour's idea was
that abundant beef
was the highest goal and it could justify
this whole world of industrial production. And I think the
average consumer, as long as they could trust that it wasn't
gonna poison them, they would buy
into his worldview. - [Narrator] Philip
Armour was no butcher. - [Philip] I would
like to say right here that I never had a
knife in my hand, and I am not a
butcher by profession. It may seem ridiculous, but if you showed
me a piece of meat, I could not tell you what part
of the bullock it came from. - [Dominic] He was a
salesman and a manager. He knows how to
manipulate things. He knows how to put
things together. (birds chirping) - [Maureen] Philip Armour was
born in the early 19th century in Upstate New York. (rooster crowing) He did what any smart young
man did in the 19th century. He went west all the
way to California because of the great Gold Rush. - [Narrator] Armour
crossed vast stretches of America's West, places where herds of bison
roamed, hunted by native people. He saw opportunities
here for making money. (people chattering) - [Philip] When I began my
tramp across the continent, we thought the only opening in
the world was in California. I saw openings
all the way there. If you got any really
good thing to sell, there are always enough
people to consume it. - He was by any measure,
a very smart guy, and realized panning gold was not where the money
was gonna be made. - [Narrator] Instead, he made a small fortune
supplying water to gold miners. Armour then moved to Milwaukee and invested his wealth in hogs. He predicted the price of
pork was going to plummet and sold contracts
for future deliveries. The move reportedly
made him a millionaire. - Market manipulation
is very important to a guy like Phil Armour. - Pretty soon realizes, if you
really wanna make some money, you got to go to Chicago. - [Narrator] In the years
before the stockyards opened, the Civil War was
already making Chicago a major meat producer. It was right at the center
of the nation's waterways and an ever expanding
web of railroads. - Phil Armour looked at
that and said, I want in. - [Narrator] Armour opened
a small provision company along the south branch
of the Chicago River. - [Joshua] People like Armour, they get these lucrative
contracts with the Union Army to supply them with
cattle, with grain. - [Narrator] But livestock
trading in Chicago was chaotic. Cows and pigs were herded
through the streets. So, in 1865, a group
of railroad bosses and businessmen
centralized the industry. They founded the Union Stock
Yard and Transit Company on an inhospitable
patch of land, four miles south of downtown. - [Dominic] It was
built on a swamp. They put a huge sewer
down Halsted Street and drained the area. - [Narrator] The stockyards
were outside the city limits, in the town of Lake, where they were free of
oversight by city officials. And the open land
offered railroads a
clear path in and out. - It opened on
Christmas Day, 1865. What better way to
celebrate Christ's birthday in the most capitalist
city in the world than to open a Union Stockyard
and create a vast industry? - [Narrator] Armour set up a
meatpacking plant next door in a complex that became
known as Packingtown. Chicago and Philip Armour were now in the middle
of a new nationwide meat distribution system. - The stockyard is essentially
a clearing house for animals. - [Dominic] Cattle can
come in from Colorado. Cattle can come in from Montana. Cattle can come in from Texas. - [Joshua] And they're
redistributed from Chicago to the northeast of
the United States. - [Dominic] They used to
call it a hotel for animals. Farmers had to pay to have
their animals there, fed, watered, and maintained. A sea of pens, it's almost
as far as the eye could see. - [Narrator]
Meatpackers like Armour hoping to turn these
animals into steaks and ham sent bidders to look
over the merchandise. - Are you crazy? How much
you want for them cattle? Come on.
- Like 30 and a quarter. - How about nine and a quarter? - [Narrator] It could
be dangerous work, especially for a city kid. - I worked in the hog house. There's a hog up above, and he turns and he
looks at me one way and he turns and looks
at me the other way. And before you know it,
he's between my legs and he knocks me down. And I look up and 200
hogs are coming at me and I turn around and I realize
I had not locked the gate. And they were all headed
to Halsted Street. 200 hogs, oh my God (laughs). So fortunately, the guys on
the dock heard me screaming and they came and
they slammed the gates and they closed the hogs off. (cows mooing) - [Narrator] The stockyards
radically changed the way Americans bought,
sold, and consumed their meat. (rooster crowing) Traditionally, cattle and hogs had
traveled a few short miles or feet from pasture to plate. - My ancestors used to
do it right on the farm. More of a whole day process
to butcher a beef probably, kind of a dirty,
messy, (chuckles) dirty, messy atmosphere. - When you went to a market, you would be staring
at a carcass, a large carcass and asking
for a specific cut of meat. Americans were aware of
where their food came from in a very visceral way that would likely turn
all of our stomachs now. - [Joshua] Meatpacking is a
business of cutting up an animal so you can make money
off selling its parts. And how exactly you do that, and what exactly
that looks like, it changed a lot
between 1865 and 1920. (cows mooing) - [Narrator] Now much of
the nation's livestock converged in a
single, smelly place. - Roses are red,
violets are blue, the stockyards
stink, and so do you. It was a children's rhyme we
used to say when we were kids, yeah. - The smell was like being in the toilet
24/7. It was terrible. - My mother's dress was
a green linen dress, and the odor in the stockyards
permeated this dress. - [Narrator] The Union
Stockyards opened at the height of the
Industrial Revolution. From London to Chicago, new factories were
mass producing
everything from textiles to tractors. Philip Armour used a system
that was similar to an assembly line, but this was a disassembly line where cattle, hogs, and
sheep were rapidly killed and taken apart. A process that was
painstakingly slow on the farm. - On a farm, it took about eight to 10
hours for a skilled butcher and his assistant
to dress a steer. At Armour, it took 34 minutes. Back on the farm, you grab a
hog, it takes about six hours. At Armour, it took 24 minutes. The hog wheel was
this huge wheel, sort of like a Ferris wheel. And the fellow named a shackler would grab the hind leg
of the hog and shackle it, and then the wheel would
lift the hog up into the air, down to the next man
who was the sticker. And the sticker would
slice its throat open. Cattle were more difficult,
cattle are big animals. - I went to see them
actually butcher a cow once. It's actually terrible to watch. - They were driven into the
pens that were very narrow pens. And then on a platform up above
was a man called a stunner, he carried a sledgehammer. He would take the
sledgehammer and rub its nose, and then it would look up, and as it looked up,
he would come down. - A sledgehammer on
the middle of the head. And when the guy missed, you
know, you'd see the eye hanging or anything like
that on the animal and until he hit him right. This is hell (chuckles). You know, for the first week I was not able to
sleep because of that. - [Dominic] The shackler would
grab the legs and shackle it. Then it would go up and the steam pulley would
take it all the way up. - Going along the line and
they got stabbed in the neck. (Marlene laughs) - And they take this great big
sharp knife, one guy does it, and he cuts that cow open
right down the middle. And then all of
the guts come out. I was like. - [Dominic] Then it would
go on to the next person, and next person and next person. - They would pick a few workers to work as what they
called pacesetters. Everyone had to
work at their speed. And so you could
pay just one person to ensure everyone
else went faster. - Efficiency means profit. - [Narrator] Philip Armour
was obsessed with efficiency. He maximized the money
made from each animal by using every last
unsavory piece of the pig. In a word, byproducts. - [Philip] In the
packing houses, every bit of the
animal is saved. Our profits come
out of the waste and it is from these profits that we can afford to sell
better and cheaper meat than the ordinary butcher. - [Narrator] Armour said
he packed everything but the last breath of a hog. - There's no way to overestimate the importance of byproducts in terms of subsidizing
the low cost of meat for Americans in the
late 19th century. - [Narrator] It was an
impressive list of products, some edible, many simply useful. - [Maureen] Turn it into gravy, turn it into canned
corned beef hash. - [Dominic] Put into
things like chili hot dogs. - And the intestines,
no that doesn't go away, that becomes chitterlings. - Faces of cows, you
know, they're removed, and they're turned
into dog chews. Hog guts were used for violin
strings, tennis strings. Hog hairs, you know,
they weren't discarded. Would snip these
little hairs out and they'd be used
for paintbrushes. They stuffed sofas and
cushions in the Model Ts, purses, belts, shoes, all that stuff is
made out of cowhides. - People had some
pretty nice shoes. - You're also gonna
get some blood which can be used for
a number of things. - [Dominic] Fertilizer, all kinds of chemicals,
including pharmaceuticals. Supposedly, you could buy
buttons made out of blood on Halsted Street
that were from animals that were slaughtered
that morning. And they would bake
buttons out of blood. - [Joshua] It's a
grizzly business, but it was a profitable one. - [Narrator] While Armour
enjoyed the profits, an army of laborers did
the backbreaking work. On Armour's vast
disassembly line, each was given one
repetitive task. - If you're Phil Armour, what you really want is
just an unskilled worker so you can pay them
as little as possible. - [Joshua] Chicago is a
city full of immigrants desperate for work. - [Robert] They're Polish,
they're Lithuanian, they are Bohemian, Italian. - [Joshua] They might not
have good command of English. - My English was very none. You can imagine that, (laughs) that you hear some guys
yelling in Spanish, and other ones in German or
in Lithuanian or in Italian, or whatever, you know (laughs). - [Dominic] Squeegee
men had mops to push the blood
into the gutters. You did this for 16 hours, getting 14 and a
half cents an hour. - I had to scoop the blood and
the manure from the floors. This was my job.
It was the worst. - Beef luggers, beef luggers
had to be strong, young men who would lug the beef. The skilled workers who
they were dependent on, they're getting about
50 cents an hour. - Certainly better pay and opportunity than
they would have found in the countries in which
they were immigrating from. But that pay still
left them well below what a minimum quality of
life would have required. - In the packing houses,
there were no restrooms. You know what you do? You find a corner, you know. You've got steam coming
up from the blood, sometimes it's hard to
see through the steam. In the bone plants where they would chop
up bones for fertilizer, the little pieces of
bone would be in the air and they'd get in your nostrils, and they'd get into your lungs, and they would
cause lung disease. Guys who pulled hides, they had to use chemicals
and they didn't wear gloves so their fingers would get
all kinds of sores and cuts. - This is the results of
different accidents that I have. This one was, one
day as I was working, one of the pork loins
did squash my finger. This one over here, they just pick up the
other part of the finger throw it in the garbage, not on the hamburgers,
on the garbage. - Not only a meat killing, but a kinda human
consuming machine that was almost
impossible to escape from. - The prevailing belief was a businessman
like Phil Armour should be and is free to do
what he wants in his business. And if people don't
wanna work for him, there's always another schmuck
who just got off the boat, who will do the work. - [Narrator] Armour and Company
was the world's wealthiest meat-packer by the late 1870s, slaughtering a
million pigs a year. But a challenger was emerging who would completely
transform the business. Gustavus Swift began
his career as a butcher in Massachusetts. - Swift was a real butcher. I mean, he butchered
animals. He's a major rival. - He was fed up with having to
pay middlemen for his cattle on the East Coast, so he simply relocated
his family to Chicago with the intention of only
buying cattle and shipping them. - [Narrator] But Swift
soon discovered a problem. It was expensive to ship
live cattle out East. - [Dominic] Live
animals are heavier, and they charged by the pound. - Very quickly realized
that smart money said, slaughter the cattle here and only ship the
parts that you need. His big need right off the bat was for something
to move this meat in from Chicago to Boston
in two to three days, without it spoiling. Refrigeration is key to this. - [Joshua] And so Swift
starts to experiment with the refrigerated rail car. - [Narrator] Swift's new rail
cars featured ice chambers on either side. As warm air rose, it was
pulled into the chambers, where it was chilled
and recirculated. - Basically a train that could
keep food chilled with ice. That's not as easy as
it sounds. I don't know. It sounds like maybe you
just put some ice cubes in a train car. It actually is
quite complicated. - [Dominic] Swift began
to build these huge fleets of these cars. - [Narrator] Keeping
beef cool between Chicago and the East Coast
required an infrastructure. Swift set up icing stations
along the rail lines to serve as his fleet
of refrigerated cars. - You can never just make
a product and sell it. There has to be an entire
network of wholesalers who then had to organize
to deliver to retailers who then would finally
sell to the customers. Gus Swift was
building a new system, a new system of food logistics. - [Dominic] It was a tremendous
amount of white collar work. Accountants,
bookkeepers, lawyers. - My job at Armour and
Company was a stenographer for three district managers. Whatever I had to do, I did. The people working in the
offices were mostly white. - You have to build a system, and that is what Gus Swift did. It was the system that
Phil Armour let him build so that Gus Swift could
make all of the mistakes. It's almost like Gus Swift
wrote the dummies guide to building a
meatpacking company. - [Narrator] Armour
followed Swift's lead, building his own refrigerated
cars, dozens of sales offices, and cold storage spaces
across the country. - He became the biggest
meatpacker in the world. I think he did
need a competitor. I think competitors
made him strong. It certainly was a competition, and a competition that
eventually Armour won. - [Narrator] As Swift and
Armour set out to conquer the nation with their
refrigerated rail cars, the rivals faced a common
enemy, the railroads. - The railroads had
invested millions and millions of
dollars in this system. They had built watering stations and feeding stations
along the rails. They owned the
slaughterhouses in New York. They owned the
stockyards in New York. - Railroads, they don't wanna
use the refrigerated cars because they make
much more money on transporting live animals. They refused to carry
these refrigerated cars. - [Narrator] So Swift and
Armour shrewdly bypassed the American
railroads altogether and used the Canadian
Grand Trunk Railway. - They were more
than happy to help because they loathed
American railroad companies. And we're more than happy
to do anything they could to mess with their minds. - And once they had a route
to a place like New York or Boston, they were
doing so much business that the American railroads
became desperate for it. And so they had to cave and they had to agree to
ship Chicago dressed beef. - [Narrator] Armour and Swift
now flooded East Coast cities with a steady supply
of Chicago beef. They threatened to destroy
an entire industry. New York's butchers were
starting to feel the squeeze. - Meatpackers like
Armour, like Swift, they would show up in town, they would find all the
leading retail butchers, and they would say, basically, either you sign
up with us to sell our meat and distribute our meat,
or we'll bankrupt you. - [Maureen] What
are you gonna do? So what you do is
attack the meat. - All of these traditional,
wholesale, retail butchers, they'd have signs in their
window that said, you know, no Chicago beef sold here. - This meat is
unwholesome. It's not safe. Anything from Chicago
is probably poisonous. - Swift says, fine,
I'll open my own stores. Armour says, fine, we'll
open our own stores. - And what they would do is they would sell it
at fire sale prices. - You sell at 10 cents a pound, I'll sell at 7 cents a pound. You sell at 7 cents a pound,
I'll sell at 5 cents a pound. You sell at 5 cents a pound,
I'll give it away at 1 cent. And then I've got the market. So it's absolutely ruthless. - [Narrator] Slaughterhouses
shut down across the country. Butchers either started
selling Chicago meat or went out of business. The industry was now
controlled by Armour, Swift, and just a few other
Chicago companies. - The Chicago meatpackers are
the architects of a vision of our food that is industrial, divorced from the environments
in which cattle were raised. - You didn't need to think
anymore about the four legs that had once carried
all that meat upright. When you were sitting
down in your home, it was all relatively
tidy and clean. - Look, my kids as children, thought that, you know,
meat came straight from God in a plastic container
to Jewel or A&P, right? The meat is cheap and
we get hooked on meat. - To be a successful American was to be able to afford beef
in ever greater quantities. - [Narrator] To satisfy
Americans growing appetite for cheap, mass-produced meat, ranchers had to
raise more cattle. And that required
a lot of open land. The very land that
Armour had passed through two decades earlier on
his way to California. - The Far West was the answer
to a carnivore nation's dream. Anybody with a brain could
see this was the best place to raise meat for Americans. It was rich with grass. And that was the reason that
there were millions of bison and the Native Americans
relied on the bison. - Bison were seen as a wild
untamed animal, a kind of beast. That's not compatible with
industrial capitalism. Cattle were seen as
a domesticated animal and an animal you could
kind of make money off of. The way to defeat native peoples
is to kill off the bison, which are driven nearly
to extinction, right? So there are 30 million animals, by 1900, just a few hundred. Officials of the United
States governments referred to cattle ranching as, "The most efficient
instrumentality of solving the vexed
Indian question." - And it worked, it was cruel. It's one of the worst
episodes in American history. Part of the hidden
cost of cheap meat was the concerted organized
effort to eradicate bison in order to get rid
of indigenous people. The indigenous peoples
west of the Missouri River were in effect starved
out of existence. And we can trace the
explanation of that directly into the mouths
and stomachs of Americans who were insisting that
meat be available to them. There's no way to get around it. (cows mooing) - [Narrator] Back in Chicago, Philip Armour
reaped the rewards. He lived near the lake
on Prairie Avenue, a street known as
Millionaires Row. And he worked downtown in
a home insurance building, the city's first skyscraper. - [Philip] All my life, I
have been up with the sun. I have my breakfast by
half-past five or six. I walk downtown to my office
and I'm there by seven. And I know what is
going on in the world without having to wait for
others to come and tell me. - Armour essentially says, you
know, he doesn't love money. He loves making money. For Armour this is
obviously a business, but it's also about
remaking the world in terms of his vision,
which is abundance, low cost. And low cost is justifying
anything he wants to do. - And it gave him power. It gave him power
in the public realm because people like beef. - [Narrator] Armour worked
long hours by choice, but four miles south
of his downtown office, it was a different story. - [Dominic] There were
no eight-hour shifts. If packing house workers
showed up a minute late, they'd get docked an hour's pay. - And we were not
permanent workers. Sometimes we work eight,
sometimes nine or 10 hours. Sometimes we double up
and we work 16 hours depending upon the
demand of the work. And we work all
that they give us because we know that
the following day might not be any work. - They have so many men
waiting, looking for jobs, some days, they just walking
like between cattle and pick the best looking
man or maybe the-- - Strongest looking one. - You come. Well, he come. He got a job. How long? I don't know. - And sometimes you
might have to wait. If the cattle
hadn't arrived yet, they still wanted you on
hand unpaid for hours. - And the industrial
power of the United States is just human bodies. - They were part of the
great packing machine. - [Narrator] Early
attempts to unionize were quickly crushed. Philip Armour made it clear, he would sooner move his
operations out of Chicago. - [Philip] We shall
employ what men we choose. And when we can't, why,
we'll nail up our doors. That's all. This sort of thing is
the beginning of the end of Chicago's supremacy
as a packing center. - Chicago could go to hell. He was always
threatening to leave. - Armour had an ideological
opposition to labor unions. He was a believer in
the right to contract. That anyone who would
agree to something should be able to agree to
it, no matter how poorly paid, no matter how dangerous. - [Narrator] Tensions between
workers and company owners came to a head in 1886, and not just in the stockyards. on May 1st, workers in factories
across America walked out, demanding an eight-hour day. At first, the strike
seemed like a success. Armour and other meatpackers
agreed to their workers' demands, but then came an event
that shook the world. On May 4th, Chicago Police
marched on a labor demonstration near Haymarket Square. - A bomb goes off. (bomb booming) Panic ensues, police officers
shoot wildly, blindly. Police officers are killed.
Lots of workers are shot. - There was a tremendous
reaction against labor unions. - [Narrator] Armour and
the other meatpackers announced that employees
would go back to working 10-hour days at their old wages. Thousands walked off the job. - (Joshua) For Armour,
this was an outrage. And what Armour does
is he basically says, okay, well, you're all fired. And the Chicago
meatpackers, on trains, they bring in
strikebreakers, replacements. - [Narrator] Armour
brought African-Americans up from the South
on cattle cars. - And they bring in
African-Americans, and they are coming
into these spaces where they're not
supposed to be. And you have violence. - [Robert] They're not
told that we have a strike that's unfolding. They don't know that
until they get here. - [Sylvia] You're talking
about competing forces of marginalized people for jobs. - [Narrator] To
keep the upper hand, the bosses brought
in the Pinkertons. - [Dominic] Pinkerton is a
detective agency, supposedly, but it was also the armed
goons of industrial America. - The mall cop (chuckles)
only with deadly weapons. - Mr. Pinkerton was originally the guy who protected
Lincoln, right? Obviously, not well. - [Narrator] Armour
invited Union leaders to his downtown office to talk the situation
over face-to-face. - The workers complained
about the Pinkertons. Armour of course says, I
didn't hire them, you know, but of course he did. Armour actually
tells his workers that he's in favor of
the eight-hour day. You know, "Oh, I love my
workers. I love everybody. But you know, I'm competing
with packing houses in St. Louis that are run to 10, 12-hour day. We're competing with the
packing houses in Kansas City and Sioux City, how can you
compete with these people? If I have to pay you,
I'll go out of business." - And it's an
effective argument, unless you know what's
really going on here. His brothers are
running those facilities that are using the 10-hour day. - [Narrator] In the end, Union leaders told their
members to halt the strike. And Armour's workers
returned to 10-hour days. - Workers are rounded up.
Union officers are padlocked. Union printing presses
are destroyed (laughs). And the labor movement
goes into a deep freeze. - Armour says,
"Unionization is gonna mean you aren't gonna be
able to afford the meat you've become accustomed to." He's essentially ensuring the American public
will side with him against any attempts
to unionize. By 1890, Armour is
undoubtedly the richest of the Chicago meatpackers. He's also one of the richest, if not the richest
person in Chicago. - [Narrator] But
Armour's ascendancy was attracting unwanted
attention from Washington D.C. Congress had been
fielding angry complaints from some influential
constituents: ranchers, butchers, the railroads. Their businesses
were all suffering under the utter
dominance of Armour. - There was a great cattle
bust in the Far West and prices for cattle
just collapsed, ranches went broke,
people lost money. That's what prompted
these hearings, because the belief
was very strong that somehow Swift, Armour, that they were organizing,
colluding to set prices for cattle and for the meat. - And so they convened a
committee to investigate both the transportation
and sale of meat products. And it was led by a
guy named George Vest. Vest was a senator
from Missouri. He had actually
been a Confederate during the American Civil War, but he had
rehabilitated himself. And he kind of had
built a reputation as someone who wanted to
investigate American business. - [Narrator] Senator Vest
subpoenaed Philip Armour to appear before his
committee at the US Capitol. - [Maureen] They're
all just convinced that Phil Armour is to blame. - [Joshua] In this very
dramatic scene, he shows up. He has a prepared statement. - [Philip] Mr. Chairman and
gentlemen of the committee, I respectfully ask leave
to submit a statement which gives my
opinion of the causes that have brought
about the depreciation of the price of cattle. (overlapping dialog) value of hides,
tallow, oleomargarine
oil, fresh meat cuts, and canned-- - Armour is
performatively indignant. If you remember any of the times that CEOs are called
before Congress. - [Philip] Many foreign
countries following
the precedent-- - [Maureen] He spent
all of his time talking about the global market, people in Europe wanted this,
and people in China want that. - [Philip] Beef from
Australia, New Zealand, and South America and European countries.
- Chicago maybe is base, but the business is global. - When asked if he colludes, he famously says that
sometimes they cooperate, the meatpackers, but it's
in the consumer's interest. - [Narrator] Armour
admitted setting prices, but claimed he was doing
Americans a service. After all, didn't
they want cheap meat? - [Senator Vest]
You fix the price, both as to cut meats and as to
can meats with other dealers? - [Philip] Yes, sir. - [Senator Vest] Now, I ask
you who those dealers are. - [Philip] I will
state who is not in it. - [Senator Vest] I do not care about knowing who is not in it. - [Philip] I ask to be excused until I can consult my attorney. - They ask him, has he been
bankrupting these butchers? And he says, of course not. And then they produce evidence. They produce a telegram
from the Armour headquarters to their local agents saying, either get this guy on
board or make him bankrupt. - [Philip] I would not
know what one of my clerks out of so many did. As I explained, I do not know
the details of the business. - Competition is a great
thing to talk about, and say is a great
American ideal. But in reality, if you can
cut down on the competition, you can make a bigger profit. And that's exactly what
Armour and all of them did. (indistinct chattering) - [Narrator] In 1893, millions came to Chicago
from across the globe for the World's
Colombian Exposition. Many made a stop at Packingtown. The slaughterhouses
had become a must-see for tourists who wanted
to witness modern industry in action. - First tours actually, were
run by kids from Canaryville. You pay them a
nickel or a quarter, they would take
you into the yards and show you around
and tell you stories. The turn of the century, 500,000 people a year came to tour the stockyards and
the packing houses adjacent. Russian princes came here. Japanese businessmen came here. Sarah Bernhardt, the
actress, came here 'cause she had to
see the stockyards. It was just a shock
to the system. There's a wonderful
Japanese word Buddhists use, satori, slap in the
face. It means epiphany. Well, this was a satori,
it was a slap in the face. This was a modern in your face. This is what the world
is gonna be like. - [Narrator] Chicago had
annexed the stockyards in 1889. Now one of every four Chicagoans
depended on the industry for their employment. Many lived in a vast slum
known as Back of the Yards. - [Dominic] Back of the Yards
was just off on the Prairie, just west of the packinghouses. - It was an area of immigrants. It was an area of waste. It was an area that
was used for disposal. - [Dominic] It was very
much a highly industrialized neighborhood, a pall of smoke and smell
hanging over it constantly. - It's hideous and horrifying because you have all
this animal waste and blood running right
behind them in this creek. - [Dominic] Bubbly Creek
had crossed Ashland Avenue right at 41st Street. That was the northern
boundary of the neighborhood. The western boundary were the
garbage dumps, west of Damen. - Wherever you had
a poor neighborhood, that's where the
dumps were placed. You're not gonna
put that dump site in a Rockefeller's neighborhood. - [Dominic] The death
rate for children was three to five times
higher in this neighborhood than it was in Hyde Park, which is only about 20
minutes away by a street car. - [Sylvia] It was just
a toxic situation, literally and figuratively. - [Narrator] Philip
Armour was eager to show he was doing his part
to help his workers. He created The Armour Mission, a Sunday school for
South Side children. He insisted that it
be nondenominational. - [Philip] I don't care whether
the converts are baptized in the soup bowl, a dish
pan, or the Chicago River. I'm just a butcher
trying to go to heaven. - [Narrator] He
donated $1 million to start the Armour Institute, where young people could
get the skills they needed in an increasingly
high-tech world. It later became the Illinois
Institute of Technology. - [Philip] We wanna
make some fine Americans out of rough material. Here are some young foreigners, they are learning our language, they're studying
American history. They're having it
impressed on their minds, what this country means and
how it differs from others. - There's lots of buildings that have the names of
industrialists on them, who did absolutely terrible
things to human beings. And then used the
wealth that they created from that exploitation to
alter the public perception. - [Narrator] The job
of improving the lives of Armour's workers
would fall to a woman known as the "Angel
of the Stockyards." Mary McDowell was a former
Sunday school teacher who chose to live
in Back of the Yards despite her social pedigree. - When Mary McDowell came here, she said it was like
going to the Wild West. She was from Evanston, right? And she was a little more civilized. - She is a progressive and she feels a need to help the immigrants
in the Back of the Yards. - [Narrator] Inspired by
her friend Jane Addams, McDowell opened a
settlement house and started offering
kindergarten, day nurseries, and classes in music,
drama, and English. - Housewives could come there
to have some vegetables grow, to learn some knitting, to have their children
come together to play. - [Narrator] She
also began crusading for environmental justice. - Mary McDowell saw
that the stockyard waste was not being created
by the immigrant, but they were the ones
suffering from it. There is a mindset of
people being responsible for themselves. You know, pull yourself
up by your bootstraps even if you're sinking
in 12 feet of feces. - [Narrator] McDowell
waged a relentless campaign to clean up Bubbly Creek. She fought to build parks for
the neighborhood children. And she engaged in
a year's long battle to close the local garbage dump. - Mary McDowell's like, children are
continuing to get ill 'cause you got these dumps. Your children are
continuing to get ill because you got this methane gas and this is what that means. - [Narrator] McDowell's social
class gave her an advantage. She had the power to hold
the likes of Philip Armour accountable. - You understand your father
is that person of power, your uncle, your brother
is that person of power. She understood their mindset and she knew how
to work the system. - [Narrator] In time, McDowell forced the city
not only to close the dump, but to create a modern
citywide garbage system. Thanks to her protests, a park did open in
Back of the Yards. And though it took three
decades of complaints, the city finally filled in
the most polluted section of Bubbly Creek. - She's the mother of
environmental justice, because it was complete
injustice for them to live there and suffer from that,
become ill and die from it. (air whooshing)
(footsteps plodding) - [Narrator] On a cold,
snowy day in 1901, Philip Armour got
into a snowball fight with his grandchildren and soon, he fell
ill with pneumonia. - [Philip] I know I am very sick and I'm ready for
death when it comes. - [Narrator] Philip Armour
died at his Prairie Avenue home at the age of 68. National headlines mourned
the loss of a self-made man who had become a
millionaire packer and noted philanthropist. Two years later, Gustavus Swift followed
Armour to the grave. With the founding fathers
of Packingtown gone, their sons inherited businesses that looked
increasingly vulnerable. - When they took over, it was their job to try to
keep the companies alive and protect them from
the force of the law. And it was just
constant lawsuits, there was just constant
investigations,
constant bad news. (cows mooing) - [Narrator] In
the fall of 1904, a reporter from a
socialist newspaper made his way
through Packingtown. He took particular
interest in sanitation in the slaughterhouses, and the horrors of
workers' day-to-day lives. His name was Upton Sinclair. - [Maureen] He was
a wannabe socialist. His father was a
drunk and he died and he left the
family impoverished. And Upton Sinclair
never got over that, and he embraced socialism. - He wanted to write a book
that would inspire people to overthrow this entire
system of industrial beef and industrial food and
perhaps American capitalism. - [Narrator]
Sinclair set up shop at Mary McDowell's
settlement house. - He talked to a lot
of people in taverns. - [Giedrius] With
workers, with policemen, with saloon owners, with
doctors, with priests. - Sinclair visited
the packing houses, I think actually three times. - So he had this pail like a
simple worker, with his lunch. He was observing and
then he describe. His idea was to show
the brutality of life and to force people feel
compassionate for these workers. - [Narrator] Sinclair turned
his reporting into a novel. He called it The Jungle. - [Joshua] He tells us the
story of a family of Lithuanian immigrants, trying to make it in America,
working in the stockyards. - Terrible things happen
to the entire family, death and rape and
people injured. - Final resolution of
it, it's the strike. And the final words of course
is, "Chicago will be ours." It means for socialists. - [Narrator] Philip Armour's
son tried to kill the book. - The thing that Armour wanted to not let it be
printed in Europe. Doubleday and Page
gave rights to everyone who wants to translate the book. There were 17 translations
published around the globe. - [Narrator] The Jungle
was an instant best seller when it hit bookstore
shelves in 1906. - Largely because of
the gore and the guts. - [Movie Narrator] It told
of conditions of filth and carelessness in
the handling of meat, which were exposing the
people of the United States to all manner of deadly disease. - It's an outrage. - A man isn't safe even
at his own dinner table. - There's stories in The Jungle of rat feces getting
into sausage. There's stories of
workers being injured and falling into things
while meat is cooking, contaminating with their
blood or their sweat, or their body parts, a
finger goes into the sausage. - People start thinking of this, oh my goodness, I
will be vegetarian. - Teddy Roosevelt
latched on to this, he came into the White House determined to bust
all of the trusts. He didn't wanna
destroy corporations, but what he thought was
there needed to be some rules for the corporate capitalists. This might be the way to break
the meatpackers kneecaps. And it worked better than
anything else he had done. - [Narrator] Roosevelt
invited Upton Sinclair to the White House. - [Dominic] He's a socialist invited by Teddy Roosevelt
to the White House. - Oh, it's nice. I'm a writer of 27, the
president invites me for lunch, I would go of course. And Roosevelt said, I have one question for
you, is The Jungle true? - Teddy Roosevelt says, okay,
we need to investigate this. It leads to the passage of
the Pure Food and Drug Act, as well as the Federal
Meat Inspection Act. Both measures intended to
restore the public's faith in the safety and the sanitary
qualities of their meat and their food. But what's telling about that
is he doesn't do anything to address the conditions
of the American worker or what's happening
to cattle ranchers or what's happening to
traditional wholesale butchers. - Sinclair famously says, "I wrote this book and I was aiming for
the hearts of Americans, but I missed (chuckles),
I hit their stomach." - [Narrator] But the
meatpackers' reputation had suffered a blow that
left them open to attack. The federal government launched
yet another investigation during World War I. Meat prices had suddenly spiked spurring riots in New York City, Boston and Philadelphia. - Why are these prices
going up so high? What's going on here? - And what they find is not just that the Chicago
meatpackers have their finger in a lot of pies, they pretty much have their
finger in all the pies. They start to have
interest in stockyards around the country. They control the
distribution of fresh fruits and vegetables. They find that they're heavily
invested in grain futures. - [ Maureen] The attorney
general of the US said that he was going to
take them to court yet again. Rather than face
another lawsuit, the packers decided to
sign this consent decree. - The Packers and
Stockyards Act, which says essentially that
the Chicago meatpackers and these packing companies, they have to focus only on
the meat processing side of their business. - They were never ever again
the cultural and economic powerhouses that they
had been before 1921. That way of making meat
was over and done with. (cows mooing) - [Narrator] With the
bosses up against the ropes, workers saw an opening. In the 1930s, the Congress of
Industrial Organizations successfully unionized
thousands of workers in Armour's and Swift's
Chicago meatpacking plants. - They start to transform
the nature of work in a slaughterhouse in Chicago. It doesn't become any easier, but it becomes a route to some
kind of middle-class life. It becomes better paid. - Every year, when new cars
came out, everybody had it. Everybody had the newest
Impala (chuckles) or Chevy. - We owe our well-being
into the union and the union people
that negotiated those
benefits for us. I was able then to move up
in the ranks of the union. I'm proud to say, when the kids see me, they are able to, to yell to me, hey papa (speaks in foreign language) which means, "Yes, we can." - [Narrator] It had
been technologies like refrigerated train cars that ensured the dominance
of Chicago's meatpackers. And now new technologies would
prove to be the final nail in their coffins. - [Dominic] When
refrigerated trucks came in, you could bring meat
anywhere quickly. - [Joshua] And once
you have highways, you can move where
you process meat. It doesn't need to be
in a place like Chicago, you can move it to the rural
places where cattle are raised. - World War II kept the old
packers going because of demand. But just a few years
after World War II, what was left of Swift and
Armour quickly got gobbled up by other big corporations. - [Narrator] Armour and
Swift both shut down their Chicago meatpacking
operations by the early 1960s. The Union Stockyards
days were numbered. - There simply were not
enough livestock coming in to justify the maintenance
of large processing facilities. - [Dominic] The last year
the stockyards opened, I think there's three quarters
of a million herd of cattle. That's all. We don't do
hogs or sheep at that point. Suddenly, the land becomes
more valuable to sell off to other industries than to maintain a
livestock market in Chicago. - [Narrator] 105
Years after it opened, Chicago's Union
Stockyards closed for good on July 30th, 1971. - That eliminate a lot
of companies around here, a lot of jobs in
the Chicago area. - Many families where
probably kids grew up thinking they would go to
work in the packing plant, there would have to be
other ways to get a living. - [Dominic] And there
still are some buildings that are standing. There's the old Swift
building on Packers Avenue. There's various Armour buildings
closer to Ashland Avenue. There's quite a few, actually
small meatpacking plants left but not slaughterhouses. There's only one
slaughterhouse left. (vehicles moving) - [Narrator] And yet the world
that Philip Armour imagined is still very much
alive and well. (cows mooing) - The big thing in the
new wave of packing plants was that they were launched
by people who hated unions and built the
plants intentionally to avoid the need for unions. - And they go back
to the same tactics that people like Armour used. Armour employed vulnerable
recent immigrants. - This migrant and
immigrant population that doesn't have
the political power and the protections
that they need. - [Dominic] Vietnamese and
Hmong and Indian, Pakistani. - This story is never gonna end. - The industrial
system really supplies extremely cheap meat products for the average
American consumer. I can't compete with the
big guys, the big packers. - [Maureen] There is a very
high cost to cheap food, a very high cost. - When people raised criticisms
of how Armour produced beef he said, "If you want me to
change my business practices, the common laborer won't be
able to afford their beef steak." Today, the meatpackers say, "If you want us to change
your business practices, you're not gonna be able
to afford your hamburger." (meat sizzling) Armour's world is back with
us and remains with us today. (cows mooing) - [Philip] We shall see
other fortunes made, like mine has been, out of
the things we now waste. The boys who get out all
there is in that last breath will have a bigger
business than mine. (cows mooing) We're at the beginning of
things, not at the ending. (cows mooing) (blade cutting) (bright upbeat music)
Chicago Stories are a series of Documentaries produced by PBS station WTTW in Chicago.
They conform to the current PBS format for an hour time slot and look/feel.
my cousin worked in a Cargill meat packing plant a couple of years ago as a knocker (the person with the pneumatic air-driven bolt like the one from No Country for Old Men), his job was to hit the cows square in the brain with the bolt to knock them out to be processed.
He knocked thousands of cows per day, but knocking the cows wasn't the worst part of his job. He said the worst part of his job was 'fixing' when things went wrong. When the cow moved it's head and he missed the brain, cows with birth defects (like three eyes), cows that were obviously too young that got slipped in early, and cows that fell off the conveyer belt and were still alive. He could only stomach a couple of months of it, and after the shitty supervisors, getting extremely ill from a cattle born disease (that the company didn't pay for because he couldn't 'prove' he got it form work), and some other things, he got out of there.
I used to work at The Millrose in Barrington. The patio is made from a bunch of bricks from the Union Stockyards and several are stamped with it. I believe there is even a plaque telling the story.
"the union stockyard Chicago is"
Lyrics from: My Kind of Town - Frank Sinatra
“The Jungle” by Sinclair Lewis speaks to the Chicago meat yards. Worth a read.
"A long and noble meat tradition" :-)
The smell....the smell was not good.
And you can still smell it when there's the lightest gust of wind....
Those stockyards we're a fucking very dangerous place in the 90's into the early 2000's. As a truck driver I dreaded going there. It's absolutely unrecognizable today. It looked like a warzone 20 years ago now it's gentrified