To that end, most Stacker stories are freely available to 714 Words. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Its $1 billion in annual sales was more than the annual budget of the U.S. government. Its like a teacher waved a magic wand and did the work for me. This drove the government to pass the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which forced meatpackers to increase sanitation, and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which applied higher standards to the food and drug industry. All rights reserved. Along the way, the meat-processing industry served as a driving force in the rise of the railroad industry, the labor movement, trucking, and transportation. History of America's meat-processing industry, 1742: Boston emerges as Americas meatpacking hub, Universal History Archive // Getty Images, 1884: Arthur forms the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), 1890: Harrison signs first meat inspection law, Minnesota Historical Society // Getty Images, 1898: National Live Stock Growers Association, 1906: Upton Sinclair publishes 'The Jungle', 1920s: The mass production of chickens begins, Wisconsin Historical Society // Getty Images, H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock // Getty Images, 25 Black businesspeople who helped shape America, States with the cheapest in-state public colleges, 20 businesses that can be run by one person, States cutting back most on college funding, 100 best films of the 21st century, according to critics. On Aug. 11, 1919, two former high school football rivals named Earl Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun organized a football team of their own. Im going to read it in fullvery important book to understand American history and the struggle of workers and immigrant to assimilate. In fact, they turned the business of converting animals into food into a multi-billion-dollar industry. years, and even decades. The man would not trouble to lift out a rat. We publish articles grounded in peer-reviewed research and provide free access to that research for all of our readers. The rise of fast-food culture would forever change the way animals were raised, killed, and processed, giving rise to the modern factory farm. Then, in 1877, two men named Joel Tiffany and Andrew Chase secured patents that made the dream of a refrigerated railroad car a realitycattle could now be transported live to Chicago, slaughtered, and processed into meat, before being shipped to Eastern cities without spoiling at any time of year. The law also applied to imported products, which were treated under similarly rigorous foreign inspection standards. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste-barrels. They organized to demand higher pay, better working conditions, and job security. Required fields are marked *. The meatpacking industry has played a major role in Illinois history, from labor issues and employment opportunities to the growth of certain . In 1897, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America was chartered by the American Federation of Labor. Hair, Dirt, Dust, OH MY If you cant understand them, make them work harder! The moment positioned Boston as the new center of colonial Americas meat trade. In 1865, the Union Stock Yards opened in Chicago. The Big Four lost market share to smaller companies. By the mid-1800s, small family farms could no longer meet the demand. With hordes of Homesteaders and bloody range wars making traditional cattle drives more difficult, McCoy turned to the burgeoning railroad industry and built a town called Abilene in a strategically centralized spot in Kansasit was Americas first cowtown. Depending on the time of year, the streets were full of mud and excrement from overflowing cesspools. By the early 1960s, 95 percent of meatpacking workers outside the South were unionized, and wages were comparable to those in auto and steel production. It also mandated strict inspections for all imported meat. Making profits initially relied upon two major things cheap labor, and the absence of any type of regulation. A very savage and unhealthy way. Though Sinclair had hoped to excite interest in the difficult lives of the workers, the public was much more interested in the disgusting details about meat production. These so-called dis-assembly lines allowed for fast, consistent, and efficient processing. It was the meatpacking industry itself which pursued the government to bring about federal legislation and regulation to their business. Meatpacking brought in more than 23.5 million dollars to the city's economy that year, just 3.5 million dollars behind the iron industry. A young entrepreneur named Henry Ford was so inspired by the process when he visited a meat plant that he used the concept for the basis of his automobile assembly lines. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. It made sense, as Midwestern cities were located strategically between the vast grasslands of the Westwhere huge herds of cattle were raisedand the hungry cities in the East that generated an unquenchable demand for meat. Even the workers on the floors of the plants benefited. Omissions? Have a correction or comment about this article? Among the most important reforms was that the act made stockyards function as public utilities and forbade companies that owned stockyards from dealing in the animals they maintained. The law is noteworthy for reforming the meatpacking industry in the United States. It was convenient, and the great majority of the workers lived in this dismal, loud, and overcrowded area. He said goodbye to his wife and four small children. document.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); At the same time, new production techniques reduced the skill required of slaughterhouse workers. The 1919 FTC report led to the Packers and Stockyards Act, anti-trust legislation designed to regulate the industry and dilute the enormous power wielded by the Big Five. Create your account. In 1940, Jones perfected his design, Werner began building his trucks, and meat could now be reliably transported over the road for long distances any time of year. One such industry that industrialization revolutionized was the meatpacking industry, wherein farm animals are shipped, slaughtered, processed, packaged, and distributed. Refer to each styles convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. He died on November 25th 1968, st age 90. Box 515 ." Dangerous substances, injuries, poor pay, and abuse of workers were widespread. them left to be worth exhibiting,sometimes they would be overlooked for days, They had worn him out, with their speedin-up and their carelessness, and In the 1900s, the food and labor industry were far from perfect. It is difficult to say how many Europeans, as well as Americans, became sick, or died, because of the diseased meat. Immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Bohemia settled in large numbers in Chicago to work in this industry, helping create the neighboring town, Packingtown. In Chicago 1900 the Chicago meatpacking industry, along with other industries, began to expand and grow. Meatpacking workers carrying their product to unrefrigerated and most likely rat infested storage areas. . The law was substantially amended by the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967. One passage read, In a word, we saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts, in all of which processes it was in the way of gathering dirt, splinters, floor filth, and the expectoration of tuberculosis, and other diseased workers., You may also like: 12 original companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (and what happened to them). In the days before health inspections, notwithstanding any regulations related to the quality control of both animals and the processing of meat, a number of different bacterias infected the meat. . the economics of the industry only encourage faster line speeds. In 1884, President Chester Arthur signed a law that created the BAI. In the three decades between 1980 and 2010, the number of hog farms dropped from 660,000 to 71,000 for an incredible decline of 89%cattle ranches decreased by 40%. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Meat-Inspection-Act, National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Introduction and Historical review of meat inspection. What happened to the workers? 17, No. Roosevelt, who served in Cuba as a colonel, testified in 1899 that he would have eaten his old hat as soon as eat what he called embalmed beef.. Kingdoms are the main divisions into which scientists classify all living things on Earth. Inside the factories packing, chopping, inspecting and people actions didn't mix. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Linen yarn is spun from the long fibers found just behind the bark in the multi-layer stem of the flax plant (Linum usitatissimum)., IBP Avenue Detail 4 Cheap Equipment To save money, the companies would often buy old and rusty machinery that would often break down. The 1939 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act finally gave teeth to those reforms by giving the FDA the authority to regulate, monitor, and enforce safety and quality standards for food and drugs produced, sold, and consumed in the U.S. You may also like: Where America sends its planes and 25 other manufacturing exports. There was no market for beef in the decimated Southern economy, but demand was rampant in the North, where ranchers could get 10 times more for a head of cattle than they could in the Southif only they could get their longhorns to the Yankee markets. All Rights Reserved. It also determined that at least one quarter of meatpackers suffered serious injury or illness in their careers. document.getElementById( "ak_js_3" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); JSTOR Daily provides context for current events using scholarship found in JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, books, and other material. They needed to literally clean up their processing facilities, set standards for their workers, and enlist field inspectors for the animals. When one of its union locals at a Hormel plant in Minnesota went on strike in 1985 to preserve its workers high wages, the national organization declined to support it. Instead, they staffed factories with new immigrants from Europe. However, in the decades since, the power of unions has whittled away in the United States. Meatpacking industrialists, seeing that skilled butchers had leverage, developed assembly lines of work that required little skill. Since they first opened nearly a century earlier in 1865, the 475 acres of land known as the Chicago stockyards helped give birth to one of Americas great cities and positioned Chicago as the meat-processing capital of the world. President Benjamin Harrison signed a bill that mandated a final inspection of all meat products before they left for markets on foreign shores. The houses in Packingtown were built terribly, and a lot of them were falling apart like the family's. By early 1906 both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act had long been stalled in Congress, but, when the Neill-Reynolds report had fully confirmed Sinclairs charges, Roosevelt used the threat of disclosing its contents to speed along the passage of both acts, which became law on the same day. But, as union researcher Daniel Calamuci wrote in 2008, it wasnt always like this. In 1980, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was formed and quickly grew into the countrys premier animal rights organization. Men who hauled 100-pound hunks of meat crippled their backs" (Constitutional Rights Foundation). During that time, the portion of supermarket prices that ranchers and farmers received was cut in halfin 1980, a hog farmer took a 50% cut from pork sold at market but by 2010, the same farmer received just 25%. Today, the USDA recognizes eight grades of meat, with the three most common and highest quality being U.S. Prime, U.S. Where craft unions like Amalgamated gained power partly by limiting who could get a joboften along racial linesthe UPWA tried to reduce the companys ability to divide workers by race. Muckraking articles and novels helped to call the publics attention to the industrys horrific practices; Upton Sinclairs novel The Jungle (1906) was particularly pivotal. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. In a 1999 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, meatpacking was determined to be the most dangerous occupation in America. Roosevelt, an avowed trustbuster, was sent an advance copy of The Jungle. 8 chapters | in History and Political Science from the same university and wrote his senior thesis on the history of radical right-wing movements in the United States. "The Jungle shows the effects of economic hardship on an immigrant family in the early 1900 's. That is all . Working at meatpacking houses was dangerous because of accidents, as well as potential worker diseases. The problem was, that they still had not penetrated the European market. After you look at these images of meat-packing facilities from early last century, you'll understand why social reformer Upton Sinclair wrote his great 1906 novel The Jungle about workers'. Meat wasn't properly refrigerated, inspected or tested, and consumers often got sick or died as a result of the bacteria-infested food. Largest of all was the meat-packing industry in Chicago. Later that day, John was killed at work when he got caught in the belting of a large meat machine. [emailprotected]. It was much cheaper and more efficient to slaughter cattle in Chicago and then ship their carcasses East instead of transporting the animals while they were still alive, but that could only be done in the winter months. American history and the great majority of the Jungle an avowed trustbuster, was sent an advance copy of U.S.! In this dismal, loud, and the great majority of the U.S. government multi-billion-dollar industry role... 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