Authors: Maureen Ogle
Either way, the outcome was neither unusual nor surprising, nor was the case unique. Around the country, meat men, elected officials, and property owners squared off against city councils, state legislatures, judges, juries, and each other, each party arguing that his or her rights trumped those of others. Courts, legislatures, and city councils consistently demonstrated their approval of big slaughterhouses and the sophisticated technology that came with them: smoke filters, odor suppressors, and conveyor belts and steam engines that hastened the process of slaughtering so that animals were not left standing for hours. Still, the conflict between public good and private interest was real. The contests struck at the heart of a fundamental American dilemma: the need to balance individual rights, including the right to pursue profit, with the public’s welfare. Vanderbilt argued that he was entitled to use his property in any way he saw fit, even if doing so intruded on neighbors’ right to breathe fresh air. New York health officials had hoped to protect the public health by forcing Manhattan’s butchers to conduct their work across the river at Communipaw. Whose rights mattered more? The butchers’? Or the public’s? And how did monopolies like the one proposed in Chicago fit into a free-market economy? The debate over slaughterhouses and public welfare highlighted the nature of monopoly, an evil that Americans dreaded more than any other because it struck at the heart of the pursuit of happiness, freedom, and profit. On one hand, a person successful enough to monopolize, say, the manufacture of a good or the provision of a service had demonstrated his or her skill in the pursuit of profit, in capturing and reaping the bounty of America. But having done so, he or she effectively ended others’ pursuit of the same goals.
Many Americans favored an alternative route out of the morass of lawsuits and noisome mess: move livestock slaughter out west where the animals were many and the cities relatively few. Keep the cattle and hogs there, and ship the meat to the East. As a bonus, that would also resolve another quandary: by the 1870s, many Americans had concluded that whatever its other merits, the practice of shipping live animals by rail constituted its own threat to the public health. According to common theory, the constant motion and jostling of the two- or three-day journey from west to east provoked “fear and apprehension”
in the animals, inducing a “feverish” condition that sparked “chemical decomposition”
of muscle fibers and rendered the flesh unfit for consumption. Meat made from such animals, warned members of a commission appointed to investigate the matter, “endanger[ed] the health
of the people.” A New York physician agreed and explained to readers of the
New-York Tribune
that the “deep red blotches”
that decorated many pieces of beef were abscesses caused by blood flowing from “crushed blood vessels” into muscle tissue. The bruises provoked fever in the animal, and as a result the meat was “in a delightful pathological condition when served to your family,” as “wholesome” as “liquid scrofula.”
The only sure way to eliminate the problem was by shipping dressed beef, as it was called, rather than live stock. But as those who investigated the matter knew, there were other benefits to shipping carcasses rather than live animals. A fifteen-hundred-pound steer lost about two hundred pounds during a railroad trip from Chicago to the East Coast. Given the booming human population and the expense required to move livestock from west to east, Americans could ill afford to lose so much valuable protein. As important, only 50 to 60 percent of the animal was edible. The rest—the bone, hides, offal, and the like—ended up in rendering plants and tanneries to become buttons, leather, and lard. Why ship what could not be eaten?
The unease about urban slaughtering and fear of diseased meat explain why dressed beef had become common in New England even before Gus Swift moved to Chicago. Most of that cargo arrived courtesy of George Hammond, a Detroit butcher-turned-wholesaler, who began making cold-weather shipments of fresh meat from Detroit to the East in the late 1860s. By 1875, the year that Swift landed in Chicago, Hammond had moved to Indiana, and his real estate investments plus his slaughtering operations had blossomed into the busy town of Hammond where his employees processed beef for New England wholesalers. Nor was Hammond alone. In 1871, for example, the owners of the Western Refrigerator Car Company of Missouri slaughtered cattle “right off the grass”
from southwestern Texas and shipped it in cold cars to St. Louis. In 1873, the Texas and Atlantic Refrigerator-Car Company of Denison, Texas, shipped one hundred tons of fresh beef from its abattoir to the Erie rail yard in Jersey City, a journey that took eight days. A New York reporter who investigated the delivery described the cargo as being in “excellent condition.”
And in 1875, the owners of Nofsinger & Co., a Kansas City packinghouse, began shipping beef from Kansas City to the East.
But none of those projects succeeded in breaking the grip of the railroad-stockyard cabal. One reason was that the dressed-beef pioneers encountered the usual bugs and kinks that can derail any new project. They had a hard time finding an adequate supply of cold cars, and railroad employees sometimes failed to add ice along the way. Often trouble developed at the delivery point: refrigerated warehouses could not be secured and the meat spoiled before it reached consumers’ hands. According to some reports, those pioneer shippers too often skimped on the raw materials. In 1875, the Massachusetts Board of Health warned that dressed beef arriving in Boston should “be regarded with
extreme suspicion” bordering on “aversion”: it came from emaciated Texas cattle that had arrived in Chicago reduced to “bone-frame and skin,” their meat worth about as much as “a squeezed lemon” and in such bad shape that no one was willing to ship them live.
One other obvious explanation for those early failures is that the railroad-stockyard complex, having invested millions in the business of moving live animals, had no incentive to transport dressed beef. But if that was so, why did Gus Swift succeed when others failed? Because Hammond and other dressed-beef pioneers did not understand the need to create an infrastructure to replace the one built by the railroads, or that beef carcasses were but one factor of a complex equation. Swift, in contrast, saw the beef for what it was: a small part of a vast system that included (among other things) railroad freight charges and rendering facilities; cold cars and warehouses; livestock producers, commission agents, herders, drovers, and stockyard managers; the line workers who “disassembled” the livestock; accountants and the engineers who designed the packing plants; wholesalers, retailers, and salesmen; and the bankers and brokers who controlled the money that financed all of it. In that respect, Swift resembled Thomas Edison and the era’s other “system” builders. Consider a decidedly non-meat example: Edison’s incandescent light bulb. By itself, it had no worth, other than as a curiosity. The bulb gained value only after Edison and his investors devised an integrated system that included the bulb, a source of electricity, and a means of transmitting that to individual bulbs in a shop, factory, or home. The system also included poles, wire, generators, transformers, and the like; financing packages and contracts; managerial and engineering skill; the willingness of urban residents to grant permission for the construction of the system’s physical components; and the political acumen necessary to persuade them to do so. Only then did Edison’s light bulb become valuable. The same was true of Swift’s plan to ship dressed beef. It succeeded because he envisioned all of the system’s parts: an integrated slaughterhouse and rendering plant where animals could be transformed into meat and byproducts; a transportation system to move the meat to a network of refrigerated warehouses and depots; and a network of wholesalers and retailers who were prepared to dispose of the product as soon as they received it.
Swift’s first step was to control the refrigeration. This was key to his endeavor because the railroads exerted an unholy control over shipments of perishable goods. Suppose Swift slaughtered livestock on Tuesday and promised delivery to a wholesaler in Massachusetts by Friday. He could not assume that express dispatch services would have refrigerated cars available on Tuesday, and when it came to perishable goods, timing was everything. The only way for him to guarantee the arrival of his shipments was by owning his own cold cars. But Swift did not invent the refrigerated railcar. By the time he needed that technology, Americans had accumulated several decades of experience using ice-filled railcars to haul fish, eggs, produce, and beer from one section of the United States to another. The technology was relatively simple and rested on a basic principle: as air chills, it becomes humid and heavy and drifts downward (warm air rises; cold air sinks). Unless that air circulated, the humidity saturated the car’s contents and caused them to deteriorate. So an efficient, functional cold car included not just ice and salt packed along its sides and top but a ventilation system, too. The rest was detail: the contraption had to be simple enough to allow inexperienced hands to add ice quickly during stops en route, and the cargo had to be arranged so that it did not lie directly on the ice.
There were dozens of patented refrigerator cars on the market, and Swift had to decide which one to use. In late 1875, he contracted with George Hammond to slaughter and ship beef on his behalf, not because he was ready to launch his business but because he wanted to test the viability of Hammond’s cars without investing his own then-meager funds. He was not impressed and kept looking. A year or so later, he acquired rights to several cold-car patents and arranged for a Michigan company to build cars for him. (Hammond promptly sued him for patent infringement, a common conflict at a time when patent law was relatively unstable. The court ruled in Swift’s favor.)
Swift’s next step was to contract with a railroad to haul his cars. Swift’s hagiographers later claimed that the major railroads refused to deal with him because they regarded dressed beef as a threat. Swift, being his heroic self, fought back and the rest, as they say, was history. But as with much of the Swift mythology, that version contains more fiction than fact. It’s true that the roads and their stockyard partners were committed to shipping livestock rather than beef. But it’s also true that in the late 1870s, they had no reason to see Swift as a threat. After all, others had tried to ship dressed beef and failed. Moreover, in 1877 and 1878, when Swift was ready to move, the railroad industry was suffering more than its usual chaos thanks to a series of violent strikes that stopped traffic for weeks. Then there were the ongoing demands of maintaining tracks, engines, and cars; the burden of managing the largest workforce in the world; and the thousand other problems that plagued the small group of people wrestling with the first grand corporate venture of the modern age. Swift’s failure to arrange shipping contracts with the railroads was probably less a nefarious plot (although the railroaders were capable of those) than it was his inability to capture the attention of people as distracted as any multitasker tweeting, texting, and blogging in the digital age. But the Swift mythology also ignores the most crucial fact: the railroad men who allegedly thwarted him were irrelevant to his plans. The nation’s three largest shippers, the New York Central, Erie, and Pennsylvania railroads and their affiliated stockyards and abattoirs, served the New York–Philadelphia metropolitan area. But Gus Swift planned to launch his empire on his home turf, New England, where he could take advantage of his wide network of business contacts.
That explains why he approached the managers of Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway. The Grand Trunk ran along the southern border of Canada and included spur lines that connected it to Chicago. At its eastern end, the route sliced through Vermont, providing easy access to New England towns and cities. As a bonus, the Grand’s tracks coursed through terrain whose temperatures ranged from cool to frigid for much of the year, which would increase the efficiency of his cars. Best of all, the GT’s managers delighted in functioning as a boil in the sides of American railroad magnates and enjoyed nothing so much as a splendid little rate war. They agreed to haul Swift’s refrigerated cars from Chicago to New England.
Railroad and refrigerator cars in hand, Swift turned to the most crucial component of his system: distribution. Because the meat was perishable, it was imperative that it be unloaded from cold cars into refrigerated warehouses or be transferred to retailers for immediate sale. Only then could Swift guarantee that his meat would be fresh and appealing to its final buyers, the men and women who would put it on their tables. Over the previous twenty years, Swift had cultivated a host of relationships with New England cattle dealers, butchers, packers, and wholesalers, and he parlayed those contacts into a network of outlets.
All of it required cash, of which there was never enough. That did not bother Swift. According to his son Louis Swift, who co-wrote a fawning biography of his father, the elder man’s “vision”
typically “ran far ahead of the money” on hand. The son described his father as a “born expansionist” who operated by the principle of borrowing money whenever possible. Using his “persuasive enthusiasm,” he “hustled” for loans and “wheedled” funds from anyone who would listen. Louis Swift’s description of his father’s money-grubbing sounds a bit like a Ponzi scheme: Gus routinely borrowed from one source to pay off another. One fact is clear: in those early years, Swift raced from Chicago to Boston to Brighton, from Maine to Massachusetts to Rhode Island, wooing wholesalers, tinkering with refrigerator cars, and persuading people to part with their money. It was, said his son, in what is perhaps the only accurate assessment in a book otherwise devoted to hero worship, akin to juggling a “fish-bowl, a cannon ball, and a live rabbit.”
The juggling paid off. In January 1878, Swift and his brother launched Swift & Co. A year later, their “New England Fresh Meat Express”
was delivering hundreds of tons of dressed beef to warehouses in Boston, Lowell, Fall River, and other Massachusetts towns. In addition, the Swifts sold meat straight off the railcars to wholesalers in dozens of other locations, buyers who then distributed it to another three hundred other towns and cities from Maine to Connecticut. By 1881, the meat magnate was shipping three thousand carcasses a week from Chicago (about a thousand of which, it’s worth noting, landed at the port in Liverpool, England). The company’s infrastructure included five hundred refrigerated railcars; forty-eight “coolers”
scattered from New England to Washington, DC; and an assortment of warehouses, depots, and ice “farms” that stretched from Chicago to New England. He claimed that his Chicago facility was the largest cattle-slaughtering house in the world. That was likely a bit of promotional hyperbole, but the plant employed five hundred hands and two steam engines and boasted a “refrigerator” that could hold six thousand carcasses.