The Heartland

by Kristin L. Hoganson

  The Roots soon became a classic, and deservedly so, not just because of its efforts to trace American empire to its literal roots, but also because of its insistence that there was something that could be called an American empire outside of 1898. Yet even as Williams braved the patriotic gales of the Cold War to speak of the United States in such terms, he joined Turner in fencing the United States off from the larger global history of empire. Williams’s study of agrarian politics made American empire seem exceptionally American, sprung from the soil, as it were. The “farmer businessmen” who people the pages of The Roots are far more colonizing than postcolonial. They are the originators of American empire, not the inheritors. Useful though The Roots continues to be in explaining midwestern farmers’ interests in overseas empire building, it does not fully account for their entanglements with the global imperial system of their day. That would take a different species of imperial story, one more along the lines of the rise and fall of the Berkshire hog.

  IMPERIAL STOCK

  The Berkshire hog was a creature of empire. As the name suggests, some of its ancestry was English, traceable back to animals “strong in tusks . . . high backed, long-legged, and villainously carnivorous.”10 Over the centuries, the breeders of Berkshire, England, worked to eradicate these uncouth characteristics, in the process creating a fixed line of buff, sandy, or whitish-brown animals spotted with brown and black.11 Improved though they were over their ancient forebears, these pigs were known for being “unthrifty,” for “consuming more food than was repaid in the flesh.”12 This problem extended far beyond Berkshire hogs to European pigs in general, which ate scraps for most of the year but fattened each fall on mast (the acorns and beechnuts that had fallen to the forest floor). Mast-fed pigs had to be hardy enough to range widely through the forest in search of food and agile enough to avoid whatever predators they encountered there. As a result, they resembled the wild boars with which they often interbred—big framed, long legged, and lean bellied. Although deforestation and human population pressures had led to continual confinement in stys and more purposeful breeding efforts by the seventeenth century, European pigs of the era were not that far removed from the forest. Berkshire breeders, like other farmers, eagerly sought crosses that would make pigs worth raising in the absence of mast. They eventually got these crosses from the ships of the British Empire, particularly those that sailed to China.13

  In contrast to European pigs, Chinese pigs had been trough-fed and selectively bred for thousands of years. The resulting short-legged, potbellied animals fattened more readily than European pigs. Even better, they seemed to fatten on just about anything. Nineteenth-century writings tended not to dwell on the remarkable length of their intestines, which enhanced nutrient absorption. Instead of highlighting biology, these writings advanced social theories maintaining that Chinese pigs, like Chinese people, lived in an economy of scarcity. To survive in such a setting, pigs and people alike had to prosper on foods that more fastidious eaters would have spurned. To survive, the Chinese had to “devour almost everything that grows on the earth, or in it, or in the sea. Their main characteristic is that of a foul-feeding race; consequently the food of the pig in such a country, must be confined to the very few things the human natives do not eat.”14

  In later debates over Chinese exclusion, the supposed omnivoraciousness of Chinese people helped make them seem alien and threatening to the white working class. Exclusionists roused their audiences with the specter of having to compete against rat eaters. But a century earlier, claims of omnivoraciousness had added to the appeal of Chinese pigs. Though stigmatized for their color—so dark that they came to be known as the “black breed”—and for their soft and oily flesh, their meat-making ability redeemed them.15 Seeing the ability to fatten on whatever they were fed as a saving strength, English breeders welcomed Chinese animals into their pens.16 By crossing the small but meaty Chinese pigs with large but lean domestic lines, Berkshire breeders created one of the heaviest breeds of England, weighing from seven hundred to one thousand pounds when grown.

  This depiction of the history and evolution of the Berkshire pig shows how crossing the old English pig with a Chinese line resulted in a veritable sausage of a pig that far surpassed its ancestors.

  C. Fred Boshart, “History and Evolution of Our Common Pig,” Berkshire Yearbook, 1896 (Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Register Book Publishing House, 1896), plate after 20.

  Enthusiasts described Berkshires as unsurpassed meat makers. They matured so early that they could be made to weigh three hundred pounds in ten months. No breed could compete with them when it came to the amount of food required for each pound of growth, but their attractions went beyond sheer poundage. Packers reportedly favored them because their meat was not oily but marbled, their hams choice and heavy, and their bacon of “unexcelled quality.”17 Long-distance shippers praised their meat as less prone to shrinkage than that of fattier breeds.18 Were this not enough, their offal was light in comparison to carcass weight, meaning ounce for ounce, they outcompeted—or outmeated—other pigs.19

  The improved Berkshire hog may have had some common ancestry with the swine that sustained the pioneers, but Chinese genetic material had altered British lines to such an extent that an Englishman who traveled through Illinois in the 1840s expressed horror at the hogs he saw there. “The breed of hogs in this part of the country is very bad,” he wrote. “They are long-nosed, thin creatures, with legs like greyhounds, and, like the greyhound among dogs, seem to be the kind formed for speed and agility among swine, as they think nothing of galloping a mile at a heat, or of clearing fences which a more civilized hog would never attempt.” The traveler admitted that such animals might be “the best fitted for the backwoods,” given their ability to fend for themselves, but he had only contempt for their savage nature.20

  As frontier conditions gave way to more commercialized farming, Illinois farmers came to agree. Hardy though they were, woods hogs rarely weighed more than two hundred pounds at three years of age, one hundred pounds less than a prize Berkshire at ten months.21 Comparing the numbers, farmers ambitious of profit had to admit that domestication and controlled breeding offered advantages over the “reckless matings” of “mongrel” animals.22

  As in the case of the cattle industry, the quest for herd improvement led Illinois pig farmers to purchase purebred strains. Some of these strains had been developed by U.S. breeders. Like British farmers, they benefited from far-flung trading networks. Merchants and naval officers carried animals to the United States on their vessels.23 The Mackay breed, for example, can be traced back to the Boston-based Captain John Mackay, who procured hogs from “various parts of the world, whither he was led in his commercial intercourse.” His subsequent breeding efforts led to “the production of a stock to which his name was applied.”24

  Yet even as U.S. breeders refined various lines, U.S. farmers looked to Britain as a leading source of quality pigs. As in the case of cattle importations, it was not only the reputation of the British breeding industry that made it the top place to look for pedigreed animals, it was also the long-standing connections between Britain and its onetime colony. Not coincidentally, Berkshire historians traced the start of the line in the United States back to an English emigrant who had a farm in English Neighborhood, New Jersey. That importation was in 1823. The next came in 1832, also by an English emigrant, this one settled in the vicinity of Albany, New York. “I have heard,” wrote a Berkshire historian, “that by the year 1838 a few followed into Canada, and some of the Western States, from England.”25 Their popularity grew so quickly that by the 1840s the demand for them “amounted almost to a craze.”26 Even as the U.S. Berkshire breeding industry took off, U.S. breeders continued to import English Berkshires, such as Lord Liverpool 221, who sold for $700 in 1874 (meaning about $14,400 in inflation-adjusted 2018 dollars), and Lord Bromley-Manley, imported in 1914.27

  The Berkshire rose to
glory from a wider field of globe-trotting contestants, all polished in the British Isles. The Neapolitan breed, “descended from the Roman pigs of antiquity,” might seem Italian, but it came to the United States from Britain. So did the Essex, a Neapolitan cross. The Middlesex had a larger infusion of “the Chinese.” The Suffolk mixed old Suffolk lines with Berkshire and Chinese breeds.28

  Though each of the imported British breeds had its advocates and investors, the Berkshire won particular favor among Illinois farmers. In the late 1870s, Berkshires were the most popular hog at the Illinois State Fair.29 And the Illinois State Fair was a good place to look at hogs, for in 1870, Illinois had more swine than any other state.30 The pioneers had depended on hogs from the start, but the pig population of Illinois took off in the second half of the century, plateauing in the 1880s at nearly six million snouts.31

  THE BERKSHIRE CRAZE IN ILLINOIS

  The farmers of Champaign County contributed to the count. According to the 1850 census, the average farm in the county held between thirty-five and thirty-six swine.32 That was enough to give the county seat the moniker “Hog Town,” due to the animals that thronged the streets and blocked the sidewalks, irritating the fastidious with their abundance of fleas.33 If the county seat was a hog town, the surrounding area was increasingly a hog district. As they shifted from cattle grazing to fencing fields and feedlot fattening, the farmers of central Illinois rounded up the last semiferal pioneer hogs and set to work constructing pigpens.

  A more hands-on style of pork production meshed well with more managed approaches to beef. After the harvest, farmers gave their cattle first crack at the stubbled fields and then let loose their pigs to scour what was left (thereby providing some grounds for claims that they fattened on manure).34 In the 1860s, Champaign farmer Isaac Funk kept four to five hundred hogs for this purpose.35 A generation later, cattle raiser H. H. Harris fattened about six hundred to seven hundred hogs on the side.36 If, for some farmers, pigs provided a means to make money from leftovers, for others, pigs became the main means to condense grain into meat. Pig production took off in Illinois, as in other parts of the emerging Corn Belt, because pigs waxed well on corn.

  Looking from the windows of his office in the mid-1850s, the editor of a Champaign newspaper saw “hundreds of acres of corn, luxuriant in its growth . . . promising food to the hungry and wealth to the growers,” towering so tall that it took “two looks to see the top.”37 In 1869, the county had 120,428 acres planted in corn, yielding nearly four million bushels of grain.38 The more that farmers drained their swampy fields, the more they planted, with corn gaining ground against wheat.39 By 1898, Champaign resident H. J. Dunlap boastfully referred to Champaign as a leading county of the corn zone.40 Although Illinois fell in the hog-producing rankings to the fifth-place state by the turn of the century, pig counters continued to place Illinois at the “center of the world’s swine producing industry,” thanks to its fields of corn.41

  The history of Berkshires in Illinois can be traced back at least as far as 1857, when the Illinois Stock Importing Association purchased several Berkshire hogs to breed with native sows. Three years later, Champaign County resident Benjamin F. Johnson claimed that “the Berkshire hog is surely, and in some places swiftly, winning its way to general favor, and promises in a few years to take the eminent rank among swine, that the noble Short Horns do among our cattle.”42

  The farmers of Champaign joined in the larger enthusiasm for Berkshire hogs. “It is rare that we find scrubby hogs in this county,” boasted an 1878 county history that mentioned Berkshires as a leading breed.43 Champaign County farmer Jesse Cloyd won premiums for his Berkshires at the state fair in the 1860s and 1870s.44 A. M. Fanley, also of Champaign County, recommended Chester Whites for families that wanted a single pig to eat the kitchen slop. But for those who wanted hogs to glean amid their cattle, he advised Berkshires, which, for all their refinement, were still sprightly enough to avoid being trampled underfoot.45

  ANGLOPHILIA IN THE PORCELLIAN CLUB

  It may seem that the popularity of the Berkshires was a straightforward business proposition, in which the Britishness of the animals was just an incidental attribute. Insofar as the Berkshire hog tells us anything about transatlantic connections, the important players would be the English emigrants who introduced the breed to the United States and the handful of breeders who crossed the Atlantic to purchase choice animals. Yet the Britishness of the animals did matter considerably to the farmers who invested in Berkshire hogs, judging from the amount of ink spilled over their origins.

  The breeding industry was obsessed with lineage, and Berkshire backers were no exception. Some ostensible experts, including Benjamin F. Johnson of Champaign, described the Berkshire hog as a “native of the South Sea Islands,” introduced into England “by Cook or his contemporary discoverers.”46 A piece in the Prairie Farmer traced the Berkshire’s origins to a cross between Chinese and Portuguese swine and the “original hog of Berkshire.”47 Six months later, the Prairie Farmer published another piece tracing the line to a cross between a Siamese boar and “old unimproved Berkshire sows.”48 Professor W. J. Fraser of the Agricultural College in Champaign tried to settle the matter of Chinese or Siamese ancestry by claiming both.49

  The confusion about the Berkshire hog’s origins led farmers to dig deep into English agricultural writings, for their prize essays on the hog cite a variety of English agricultural guides. Berkshire devotees also tried to settle the matter by traveling to England, where they sought out “aged men in different parts of Berkshire” for information on the history of the breed.50 Such travels help explain why an English farmer reported that he sometimes thought American farmers “were much better informed upon English subjects than the English farmer himself.” (His audience greeted this statement with laughter and cries of “hear, hear.”)51 Although the ostensible purpose of such travels was to gather more evidence for the Chinese, Siamese, or South Pacific question, these travels yielded an emotional return. Expeditions to England fostered feelings of affiliation—and in some cases, firsthand connections—with English breeders, whose role in producing the Berkshire was beyond doubt.

  These English breeders were not ordinary farmers. The membership lists of the British Berkshire Society include names like the Countess of Camperdown, Lord Arthur Cecil, and Lord Chesham. Merely basking in their aura conveyed cultural capital, for these were the kind of people that those at the pinnacle of the American meat complex aspired to become. Meat magnates revealed their aspirations in the 1913 American Meat Packers Association Dinner. After donning red coats with brass buttons, the assembled men followed the Master of the Hounds and his pack of dogs down to the Elizabethan Room, where long tables were “set in the style of an English country house hunt breakfast.” Waiters in knee breeches with “typical English mutton-chop whiskers” served an eight-course meal, starting with “English Savoury Fantasie” and proceeding on through filet of English sole, Yorkshire pudding, and cheddar cheese to glasses of Scotch whisky.

  Though far from the red-coated pinnacles of the packing elite, pig breeders and their customers also strove to associate themselves with the British landed gentry, through their acquisition of high-class pigs.52

  The “English Hunt Dinner” given by the American Meat Packers’ Association in Chicago in 1913. Telling though this photograph is, it fails to capture the baying of the pack of foxhounds at one end of the room and the horns that sounded the hunter’s call “ever and anon.”

  “The English Hunt Dinner,” The National Provisioner 49 (Sept. 27, 1913), 109.

  These pigs did more than mark the distance traveled from the hardscrabble times of savage woods hogs to the prosperous times of well-fenced fields. More than mere symbols of gentility, they were a means to increasing affluence. Whereas the earliest settlers had lived the threadbare existence of a largely subsistence economy—wearing straw hats and buckskin overclothes, living in notched lo
g cabins caulked with mud, devoid of window glass—their descendants stitched their farms more thoroughly into wider markets. By the 1850s, residents of Champaign County could purchase Castile soap, gum arabic, oil of cloves, oil of cinnamon, opium, Peruvian bark, Columbo root, fine silks, satin vestings, and Cuban hats on their trips to town.53 Young ladies of good fortune could study English history, geometry, Latin, Greek, piano, embroidery, the making of crepe flowers, and the molding of wax fruit (among other subjects) at Mrs. Fletcher’s Female Institution.54 As time marched on, the upper-crust residents of the county continued to bridge the gulf between themselves and the Berkshire breeders of England, thanks in part to the profitability of their hogs.

  As the role played by the Berkshire in regional economic development suggests, enthusiasts who crossed the ocean were driven by more aspirations than just rubbing shoulders with country gentlemen. They also traveled to England to research porcine genealogies because of the financial stakes. Farmers stood to make—or lose—considerable money by favoring a particular breed. If the breed seemed to be on the rise, animals sold at a premium. If it seemed overrated, the value of the animals fell. Berkshire breeders’ investments in animal stock brought them together across national lines due to their common economic interests. Thus when the American Berkshire Association met in Springfield, Illinois, in 1885, delegates from Londonderry, Ireland, and Abingdon, England, joined presidents from seven U.S. state associations to formulate Berkshire policy.55

  The widening networks of interpersonal connections extended beyond research expeditions and livestock breeding associations to the fair circuit. Whereas farmers without pedigreed pigs found few venues for display, those with certified lines could compete in county, state, and world’s fairs, such as the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, touted as having an unsurpassed display of Berkshires.56 Breeders met in such places as potential dealmakers as well as competitors. As they inspected the animals on display, they cultivated relationships that crossed national boundaries. But that was not all: they also fostered allegiances to a British-led branch of scientific agriculture and to British-led standards of taste.