In Meat We Trust

by Maureen Ogle

  But stockyards and slaughterhouses were only one piece of a rich mixture of odor, filth, and muck. Imagine, if you will, New York or Des Moines or Tulsa—minus the water supply. Minus plumbing, minus flush toilets. Minus sewer systems and zoning regulations. Imagine block after block of tightly packed wooden structures, each illuminated by candles or oil-filled lanterns. Imagine “tenant-houses,” as they were called at the time: two- or three-story buildings crammed with hundreds of people sharing one or two outhouses. Add in teams of horses pulling carts, carriages, wagons, and streetcars, all of them depositing tons of manure each day. Toss in the constant—and bewildering—presence of diseases whose causes no one understood and thus could not prevent: cholera, typhus, smallpox, dysentery, malaria. And to all that add the business of supplying townsfolk with meat, which necessitated moving thousands of animals—a million or more in the case of a city like New York—from train yard to stockyard to slaughterhouse, and thousands of pounds of meat from market to dinner table.

  It’s no wonder, then, that as cities increased in both size and number, urban Americans pondered their hellish surroundings and acted to improve them. Their efforts constituted one of the great feats of the nineteenth century, one from which we still benefit every day. Urban Americans voted to fund fire, police, and public health departments. They engineered systems to deliver water and remove wastes and invented the technologies necessary to operate them. They created plumbing codes and zoning regulations and built hospitals, all in the name of making urban life both safe and healthful.

  And they revolutionized the business of making and delivering meat. Aside from the addition of the railroad, it had not changed much since the colonial days and, charged an official with the newly created Massachusetts State Board of Health in 1870, was “old-fashioned, clumsy and wasteful,” as well as a “dangerous source of filth.” It was all well and good for farmers to live cheek by jowl with cows and pigs, he argued, but that same situation among a “crowded population” was both “offensive and dangerous.” The “nuisances” of meat making “cannot exist in our midst without depriving someone of what he has an inherent right to enjoy,” namely, clean streets and pure air. On the other side of the country, a San Francisco newspaper editor agreed, urging residents there to eliminate “cramped [slaughterhouses] and terrible stenches” by banning the “old plan of driving cattle through the city and of hauling the carcasses on wagons through the mud.”

  In the years just after the Civil War, city councils and (mostly new) boards of health passed ordinances that forced butchers and slaughterhouse owners to move away from crowded neighborhoods and restricted the movement of live animals to late night or early morning. But in hundreds of cities, officials also worked to eliminate as many slaughtering operations as possible by replacing them with what one physician described as “great central slaughter-house[s] [operated] under strict superintendence,” meat factories, as it were, whose modern efficiency would replace old-fashioned clumsiness. One of the first of these new “abattoirs,” as they were then called (Americans adopted that word because they modeled such facilities after the publicly operated slaughterhouses of France), opened in late 1866 on the New Jersey shore just opposite the southern tip of Manhattan. The Communipaw Abattoir, a fifteen-acre collection of buildings, stock pens, and rail sidings, was built by the New Jersey Stockyard and Market Company, whose owners were intimately connected to a powerful railroad corporation (and, of course, the stockyards owned by that road). Communipaw’s yards could hold thirty thousand hogs and sheep (the former greatly outnumbered the latter) and twenty thousand cattle, animals that would no longer need to be shuttled across the river to Manhattan.

  Communipaw was a model of modernity. An employee drove a steer onto the killing floor, and another cinched one of its hind legs with a sturdy rope dangling from a winch overhead. A hard yank upended the beast, but just far enough to leave its jaw pressed into the blood-sodden floor and its throat taut and exposed. The “sticker” sliced through the animal’s neck to the vertebrae. Another employee aimed a stream of water at the ensuing whoosh of blood. A steam-powered conveyor track whisked the carcass to the dressing tables, where knife-wielding butchers transformed the hulk into sides and quarters. Sixteen minutes from live stock to skinned carcass. The hog operation took place on the second floor. Humans herded hogs up a gangway into one of a series of pens where a man armed with a heavy mallet awaited his victims. He swung his weapon overhead, and—thud. The mallet connected with the hog’s skull. Another man shoved the animal, which may or may not have died from the blow, down a short incline and into a vat of boiling water. The gang of “fishers” who ringed the vessel prodded the bloody stew with long iron hooks, shoving the bodies toward a revolving wheel that snagged the carcasses and hefted them onto a workbench. There a line of men armed with bristle scrapers attacked each warm hulk, scraping it clean and pushing it along the table. The last man grabbed the beast’s hind legs and tossed the carcass onto an overhead hook. One shove and a pulley system carried its cargo to a duo armed with knife and hose. A quick jab and slice, a barrage from the hose, another shove, and what was left of the animal swayed along the conveyor line to the hanging room, which could hold thousands of carcasses. Thanks to the abattoir’s efficient design, raved an observer, the “entire hog can be saved, economized and utilized, from the [end] of his snout to the tip-end of his tail—except the squeal.” And, thanks to Communipaw’s steam-powered winches, pulleys, and conveyors, employees could slaughter and dress a thousand cattle and another thousand hogs every day, needing but a few minutes to transform a live animal into a market-ready carcass. An attached rendering operation transformed wastes into tallow, lard, and other byproducts. The operation could supply a large part of New Yorkers’ meat, and the expectation was that butchers in Manhattan would either shut their doors or relocate to Communipaw, where they could rent space for slaughtering.

  If only it were that easy. Butchers and slaughterhouse owners argued that ordinances designed to constrain their work and ventures aimed at replacing private businesses with Communipaw-like factories were “arbitrary, tyrannical and unjust, and contrary to the spirit of . . . free institutions.” And why, asked one butcher, would the people of New Jersey or “Long Island, or of any other place” embrace what others had declared to be “an intolerable nuisance”? In Chicago, too, butchers balked at being herded into a central slaughterhouse. The ensuing wrangle landed in the Illinois Supreme Court, which sided with the butchers and dismissed the argument that butchering constituted a nuisance. If that were the case, the judges pointed out, an official slaughterhouse must also be a nuisance and, by the city’s own ordinances, must also be banned. Far worse, however, the city’s attempt to require butchers to work out of a single, privately owned slaughterhouse was “oppressive, and create[d] a monopoly.” What would follow? asked the judges. Would the city council grant similar monopolies to sellers of fruit, flour, or vegetables?

  The struggle to reconcile property rights, public welfare, and Americans’ appetite for meat ended up in the Supreme Court as the “Slaughterhouse Cases,” which originated in New Orleans. For years, residents of that city had wrestled with the sanitary and health problems that accompany urban life at sea level in a near-tropical climate. Yellow fever paid regular visits, as did malaria, cholera, and other diseases. The business of putting meat on the city’s tables exacerbated those woes because the city’s butchers (150 of them by one count) routinely tossed unwanted carcasses, blood, and other wastes into the city’s main water source, the Mississippi River. As a result, putrefied offal clung to the mouths of water intake pipes, and one waterworks employee spent his days “skimming the scum” that collected in the tanks that held piped water. In the late 1860s, New Orleans residents reached the end of their sanitary rope and petitioned the city council for a centralized abattoir, arguing that the only way to keep both the river and the city clean was by forcing butchers to work in a single location. In early 1869, the Loui
siana legislature granted a franchise to the Crescent City Live Stock Landing and Slaughter House Company, which laid plans to build a state-of-the-art slaughterhouse and rendering operation.

  In an earlier day, New Orleans’s white butchers might have cooperated with the project, but in 1869 the wounds of war lay fresh on the body politic. White southerners resented the end of slavery and the presence of 4 million new “freedmen.” But they loathed the white northerners who had traveled south to create a new society there, and the Louisiana legislature that granted the slaughtering franchise consisted largely of Yankee “carpetbaggers” and freedmen. When the bill went into effect on June 1, the butchers raised an astonishing $40,000 for legal fees and staged a series of mass meetings to oppose the slaughterhouse. The new law, the butchers argued, threatened “the personal rights of the masses.” We “hold these truths to be self evident,” they announced, that “every man in this community has a property in his person and his faculties.” They would never “submit” to a law that violated what they regarded as their “natural and constitutional rights.” Lawsuits sprouted like mold after a flood, nearly three hundred of them in short order, as butchers, the state, the city, the board of health, and the slaughterhouse franchisees filed suit and countersuit. The gist of those cases echoed others around the country. The state of Louisiana argued that it possessed the right to protect the public health; the abattoir was one way to do so. The butchers, in turn, claimed that forcing them to conduct business at a centralized slaughterhouse violated their rights as defined in the recently ratified Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The legal wrangling ground through local courts to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which ruled against the butchers. The judges argued that the state’s “general police power” authorized it to protect the public health, in this case by authorizing construction of the abattoir. “Liberty,” said the justices, “is the right to do what the law permits.”

  The butchers appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, where their attorney argued that the city’s decision to franchise a centralized slaughterhouse was both unreasonable and obstructive because it “compelled” butchers to shutter their own shops. In doing so, the city had violated the butchers’ rights in favor of the Crescent City Live Stock Landing and Slaughter House Company. The judges disagreed. Nothing in the Louisiana law, they wrote in their 1873 ruling, “deprive[d] the butchers of their right to exercise their trade.” The law merely mandated the location where that slaughtering could occur. The Louisiana statute neither violated butchers’ rights nor constituted “deprivation of property.” In practical terms, the court ruled that the public’s health and welfare trumped private property and “natural” rights.

  Butchers weren’t the only ones who resisted the new slaughterhouses. In 1874, the managers of the New York Central Railroad, owned by the Vanderbilts, announced plans to build a massive stockyard and abattoir in New York City at West 59th Street, not far from where the Plaza Hotel now stands. City leaders supported the project because the single big meat factory would eliminate the need for many small ones, but property owners living nearby wanted none of it. At the time, the neighborhood marked the northern edge of municipal development and was home to wealthy families who had moved there precisely because it lay far from the factories, butcher shops, and open-air markets that rendered much of Manhattan an intolerable nuisance. A bitter struggle ensued. The editors of the New York Times, who sided with the neighbors, pronounced the project an “outrage,” the work of “a grasping monopoly.” Another man argued that the enterprise was “dangerous” because the ensuing slaughter would “impregnate the air of the surrounding neighborhood with noxious vapors.” How could it be otherwise, he asked, given that this one facility would be conducting the “work of about one hundred ordinary-size slaughter-houses”? Another opponent pointed out that even after the city had passed an ordinance requiring butchers to move out of congested areas, fifty-three of them had defied the order. If city leaders could not rein in those “comparatively poor and uninfluential” men, how could they expect to “control this immense corporation”? The arguments were to no avail. The Vanderbilts won, although no one could decide whether to credit that to the project’s public health merits or the wads of cash that Vanderbilt agents allegedly stuffed in the pockets of state legislators.

  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 eve
n 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.