The Heartland

by Kristin L. Hoganson

  Consumers were so suspicious of imported animal flesh that in the 1840s a British patent medicine company concocted a remedy for the side effects deemed likely to follow from the “American pork and other kinds of Foreign Food being now freely imported into this country.” Its ads counseled those whose stomachs had suffered “serious derangement” to turn immediately to STIRLING’S STOMACH PILLS. These could be safely administered to “sufferers of all ages, whose lives might, without their immediate aid, be lost, or placed in imminent danger, before medical assistance could be procured.” Doubters could see evidence of their efficacy in the “good effects . . . daily experienced by thousands who have been tormented with windy spasms, head-ache, indigestion, giddiness, nervous debility, and other complaints arising from a disordered state of the digestive organs.”151

  The lingering nature of this disrepute fortified efforts to pass U.S. pork off as Canadian. This enterprise can be tracked back to the era of British protective tariffs, when colonial hams entered at a lower rate than ones considered “foreign.” It did not take U.S. farmers long to figure out that by exporting their “productions” to the Dominion of Canada “at a small rate of duty, in a raw or unmanufactured state,” they could gain favorable access to the British market. Even hams that had been pickled in the United States could be considered colonial produce, so long as they were then smoked in Canada.152 Tariff reductions pulled the rug out from under Canadian processors, but they did not eliminate the Canadian export route altogether. In the 1860s a reciprocity treaty between the United States and Canada enabled packers in Toronto and Hamilton to import hogs duty-free from Chicago. The Canadian packers then sold the meat to Britain as Canadian, thereby reaching consumers who favored products from the empire and those who thought that pea-, barley-, and rye-fed Canadian pork tasted better than the corn-fed U.S. product.153

  METAMORPHOSING MEAT

  Besides justifying the extra expense of transshipment through Canada, British consumer preferences can explain the curious dynamics of the English-Irish pork swap. Starting in the 1860s, Liverpool merchants shipped U.S. bacon from that city on to Ireland. This freed up Irish bacon for the English market. Though roughly the same amount of meat traveled each direction, the scales of value favored the Irish product.154 This early foray into meat exchange grew over time into an Irish industry devoted to laundering American pork.

  Limerick dealers in particular developed a reputation for reselling American pork as Irish bacon and hams. By putting American hams on the market as the Irish product, they could charge as much as 24 cents per pound, at a time when American hams were selling for less than 18 cents per pound.155 As the London Echo reported: “It is estimated that 3,000,000 American pigs will be manufactured this year into many more millions of American hams for sale in England; but these hams are seldom sold by retailers for what they are. They are carefully selected and ‘dried’ in England or Ireland, returning from the latter country in the form of the well-known Belfast hams . . . The American ‘long rib’ is transmuted into ‘Irish rolled’ bacon . . . Wholesale dealers sell what is known as clear middles at 3d. a pound, and find it marked on the counter of a retailer who keeps ‘no Yankee rubbish’ at 8d. per pound.”156

  As the reference to duplicitous retailers suggests, Irish dealers were not alone in naturalizing American pork. In 1880, The Illustrated Household Journal and Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine claimed that American pork products were “sold under many aliases . . . in Bond-street and other fashionable London shops, where their Chicago origin is not conspicuously set forth.”157 An 1893 parliamentary investigation substantiated these accusations. It turned up ample evidence that British dealers falsely marketed American bacon, lard, and hams as domestic. Witnesses produced wholesale price lists that “gave evidence of a systematic and quite open practice of consigning to retailers articles of food received from shippers in the United States and Canada, designated as ‘prime Wilts,’ ‘best Irish,’ ‘best Waterford,’ &c.”158

  British breeds of animals packed according to British methods could be passed off by British provisioners as the pricier domestic product.

  W. H. Simmonds, The Practical Grocer: A Manual and Guide for the Grocer the Provision Merchant and Allied Trades, vol. 3 (London: The Gresham Publishing Company, 1906), 246. The New York Public Library.

  More evidence of this nature emerged in an 1897 suit, brought by the Bacon Curers’ Association of Great Britain against the Junior Army and Navy Stores of London. The Stores manager (who had since procured other employment) testified that the company was in the practice of rubbing American hams with oil or holding them over a gas jet and rubbing them with pea meal to sell them as Wiltshires. “Was that often done?” asked the prosecution. The witness: “Yes, practically whenever we required a Wiltshire ham.” The ex-manager went on to report that if the customer wanted a York ham, they brought up a genuine York ham, but if the customer asked for a smoked York ham, they forwarded an American one instead, though billing for the more expensive British product.159 The Stores company used similar stratagems to turn midwestern animals into Irish, Yorkshire, Scotch, and Cumberland hams. The Bacon Curers’ Association won the case.160

  It took more than a little ingenuity and a flexible sense of ethics to pass American pork off as the British product—it also took a chunk of meat packed according to British practices. Irish and other tricksters could sell U.S. pork as the British product because U.S. meat-packers—many of them Irish in origin—separated joints and preserved the flesh in English and Irish styles.161 Making the most of their familiarity with British markets and methods, they cured cuts named after northern cities (Cumberland, Yorkshire, Stafford, and Wiltshire) known for fattier bacons and hams.162 The Chicago Board of Trade aided this business by providing guidelines for cuts such as “Birmingham Sides.”163

  After cutting hogs up with British markets in mind, Chicago preserved the meat with British methods. These included smoking and pickling in a brine composed of salt, saltpeter, and sugar or molasses. Meat-packers seasoned some of their products with red Zanzibar pepper, allspice, cloves, mace, nutmegs, and Jamaican and African ginger—all of which suggest some reliance on the imperial trade networks in which Britain figured largely.164 (The Chicago-based manufacturer of a powder used in meat products thought British imperial connections so desirable that it faked them, naming its product “Zanzibar carbon” and advertising it with images of scantily clothed hut dwellers in that British colony.)165 Chicago packers also produced singed bacon, in imitation of a British cure.166 Even the low-cost salting method referenced Britain, because packers preferred Liverpool salt—much of it actually mined in Upstate New York, but named after the world-renowned British product. The practice of rubbing pork with salt and then stacking the pieces in a salt-filled box, where they would continue to cure while in transit, gained ascendance over wet-barreled pork by the end of the nineteenth century.167

  Despite its growing popularity, this method had some problems. The longer that bacon packed in layers of salt stayed in its box, the more salt it absorbed, which meant that the longer the voyage, the saltier the meat. English critics had this method in mind when they denounced American pork as “intolerably salt.”168 To reduce the salinity, some retailers soaked the meat in large butts of water for four or five days, after which they beat it into shape and hung it up to dry.169 The most successful of these grocers then smoked the bacon and sold it at a handsome profit as “Prime Wiltshire” or “First-class Yorkshire.” But other grocers complained that no matter how long they steeped it, they could not adequately desalt it.170

  To reduce the saltiness, U.S. packers started using borax (a compound now widely used in detergents) as a preservative and color enhancer for bacon and ham. They dusted it on the meat in order to prevent it from becoming flyblown (a euphemistic reference to fly eggs and maggots). The borax treatment also helped absorb moisture, thereby making the meat less slimy. And finally, it
reduced the amount of salt needed as a preservative. British bacon curers had pricier methods for the long-distance trade, involving extra drying and canvas cases to buffer their hams from the surrounding salt. Suffering from the American competition, they sent borax-cured bacon out for analysis. Their chemists found that, contrary to claims that the borax could be pared off the surface, it penetrated the meat. Although American pork products had been gaining a better reputation in some quarters (perhaps aided by the realization that consumers had been buying them inadvertently all along), the resulting scandal stoked the lingering conviction that U.S. pork was inferior to the domestic product.171

  BRITISH ORDERS

  The repeated investigations into American meat reveal a certain vulnerability on the part of U.S. exporters, whose ability to sell pork to the British market depended not only on British breeds, rails, bottoms, packing methods, merchants, and tastes, but also British tariff policies and public health measures (or lack thereof), and the British inability to purchase comparable products for lower amounts from other suppliers. By the end of the nineteenth century, the consumption of American preserved meats fell off in Britain, as rising U.S. demand inflated prices and cheaper meats flowed in from places such as Australia and Argentina.172

  The realization that Britain was turning to other suppliers for meat made U.S. hog raisers anxious. Illinois farmers fretted about competing in the Liverpool markets with the “millet-fed wheat farmers of India, the lately emancipated serfs of Russia, and all the other poorly fed and poorly clothed farmers of creation.”173 They expected that this competition would only get worse, given imperial railroad-building projects in Russia, Australia, India, “the Turkish dominions in Europe,” and Egypt. Making matters worse, British capitalists had begun investing in Argentinian and Chilean lines too.174 “Lower prices are coming,” warned the Prairie Farmer.175

  In presenting the vast supply chains of the British Empire as a dangerous threat to their own interests, midwestern pork producers overlooked the importance of the empire for their British trade. In the nineteenth century, Britain typically ran trade deficits with the United States. What enabled Britain to pay for all the pork was U.S. trade with India. In this circle, the United States purchased Indian products and India used that money to pay for British investments and the charges that Britain levied on India for the privilege of pertaining to the British Empire. Britain, in turn, relayed some of these monies to the United States, in its purchases of agricultural goods.176 By casting India as a threat rather than an enabler, the U.S. agricultural press hid the extent to which hog farmers depended on Indian subordination for the bulk of their export trade.

  Although midwestern farmers did not acknowledge their dependency on Indian payments, they did worry about their dependency on British markets. The British press stoked such fears by claiming that if there were ever a war with the United States, Britain would procure its meat from its colonies. Once they had lost their major export market, U.S. farmers would not be able to regain it. When the United States and Britain clashed over a Venezuelan boundary dispute in 1895, the Mark Lane Express and Agricultural Journal issued a stern warning: “Should a great commercial country deliberately go out of its way to seek a quarrel with its best customer it must be prepared to take the consequences.”177

  The costs of this dependency could be seen in the cases of other agricultural nations that had supplied Great Britain with food. According to Illinois Department of Agriculture reports, Russia, “the granary of England,” had received so little for its breadstuffs that it depended on British loans. The same held true for Ireland, plagued by “suffering, famines and horrors unknown to any other Christian people on the face of the earth.” Egypt, India, Italy, and Spain had also poured forth their agricultural goods, receiving so little in return that they, too, depended on foreign capital. Grain-exporting India was so immiserated that it suffered from famine one out of every four years in the century before 1900. Midwesterners wary of such a fate saw their salvation in rail connections to the Gulf of Mexico, from whence they could end Britain’s dominant role in setting the terms of trade.178

  The Illinois Central, now largely under U.S. ownership, heeded these calls. It built docks, elevators, and warehouses at its southern terminus in New Orleans. By the 1890s, it had become a leading carrier of bananas and coconuts—more than three million bunches and fifteen million woody balls each year. It also invested in Cuban American Sugar Company stocks and bonds. With the construction of the Panama Canal, it found itself well positioned in the Pacific trade.179

  Bananas waiting to be loaded onto an Illinois Central Railroad car in New Orleans. The British capital investments that had gotten the Illinois Central going later helped connect the Midwest to the Caribbean via rail.

  Cargo of Bananas, item fbm000313, Frank B. Moore Collection, Louisiana and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans.

  Embracing U.S. expansion into the Caribbean at the turn of the twentieth century, the Illinois Central positioned itself as the main north–south conduit between the tropics and the vast interior of the United States as well as the main carrier for imports through the Panama Canal from the Pacific and East Asia.

  Poole Brothers, Aero View of the Panama Canal, Looking Southwest, the World’s Greatest Engineering Feat to be Realized 395 Years After First Proposed (Chicago: Poole Bros, 1912), Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

  These new connections are the kinds of relationships that William Appleman Williams alluded to when he spoke of the modern American empire. Yet these investments did not introduce the Midwest to empire. To the contrary, they built on an older imperial infrastructure—the British-financed line from Chicago that had assiduously recruited settler colonists. Nor did these connections displace older imperial relations, for even as the Illinois Central became a leading banana distributor, it continued to carry pigs with Berkshire blood to Chicago, there to be slaughtered and packed, with Britain as the leading export destination.

  Thanks to U.S. farmers, British consumers ate more pork products than they had previously. But they also ate different pork products, and the wide availability of lower-cost U.S. hams and bacons ended up driving down the prices of farm products in Britain. Falling commodity prices combined with the advent of more labor-saving devices to lower wages among agricultural workers. This in turn prompted young people from lowland Scotland and Northern England to leave the countryside for English cities and overseas destinations, foremost among them Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.180 In this respect, midwestern farmers had unleashed some of their main rivals.

  Yet they also fed those rivals, even as they ventured to the far limits of empire. Emigrants bound for the antipodes on British ships were entitled by law to a pound of pork every week. Given that in practice they often got more, a typical ship took on board ten tons of ham and bacon every year.181 Salted pork products fed the merchant marine as well as passengers. In 1852, a man connected with the naval victualing department reported that London merchants “provision their ships entirely with American meat.”182 That tendency persisted over time. In a 1903 hearing, a ship’s cook with fifty years’ experience reported that all his beef had “the American stamp on it.” When asked whether Lipton’s sold American beef, the cook replied: “Yes, American beef, American pork—he supplies vessels with anything—and if you went to Lipton’s and asked for English cured beef or pork you could not get it.”183

  The same long shelf life that made preserved pork suitable for distance shipping also made it a significant food item for explorers. Polar and tropical expeditions alike relied heavily on American bacon and salt pork.184 And so did the British military. Pork was such a staple in the military that one of the leading types of barrel-packed pork was known as “Mess” pork, in reference to the military market.185 Another variety, known as India or navy pork, likewise suggested, by its name, military use.186

&n
bsp; Although the British military preferred beef—to the extent that military personnel sometimes used the word meat to refer to beef alone—it also relied heavily on pork, spurred on in part by pork packers who insisted that “pork can be transported more readily and economically to troops in the field than can any other meat.”187 In the 1860s, troops in New Zealand ate salt pork from England and the United States as well as more proximately sourced pork. (The latter gave “occasional trouble to the Commissariat,” having been fed mainly on fish. While in the cask it looked excellent and smelled inoffensive, but when cooked it emitted a powerful fishlike odor.)188 The soldiers in the 1868 Abyssinian campaign ate “salt beef and pork, and preserved potatoes.”189 Even the Royal Engineers stationed in the country outside of London ate American bacon and ham as part of their rations.190

  Despite accusations that Chicago packers had sold embalmed beef to U.S. troops serving in Cuba in 1898, the British government looked to American packinghouses to supply Her Majesty’s troops in the Boer War.191 During the Boxer Rebellion, Chicago packers shipped about ten carloads of barreled pork and various beef products to the Far East for the Allied troops. They shipped another seven carloads of canned goods (mostly corned beef) to England for army use.192

  It was not just men on the march who got their protein from salt pork. In an article on the supremacy of the American hog, the Chicago meat-packing magnate J. Ogden Armour boasted that the American hog had “provisioned the navies of the world.” Armour undoubtedly knew what he was talking about when he spoke of naval provisioning, but he would have characterized the situation more accurately if he had pointed out that U.S. pork toured the world on British naval vessels in particular.193