Packingtown, Chicago, Illinois

Approaching Packingtown, the neighborhood adjoining the
Union Stockyards of Chicago, one noticed first the pungent
odor, a mixture of smoke, fertilizer and putrid flesh, blood
and hair from the slaughtered animals. A little closer, the
stench of the uncovered garbage dump blended in. Finally
one crossed "Bubbly Creek," a lifeless offshoot of the
Chicago River aptly named for the carbolic acid gas that
formed from the decaying refuge poured in by the plants.
Railroads crisscrossed the entire area, bringing in thousands
of animals each day and carrying out meat for sale in
markets across the country. Just south and west of the yards
lived a community of 30,000-40,000 people who depended
for their livelihood on Chicago's great meat-packing
industry. A rapidly growing population of old and new
immigrants resided on about one square mile of land
bounded by the stockyards, packing plants, and freight
yards. Wooden houses divided into four or more flats were
typical. An average household included six or seven
people--parents, two or three children, and two or three
boarders. Although Irish, Germans, Bohemians, Poles,
Lithuanians, and Slovaks were squeezed together in this
solidly working-class neighborhood, strong ethnic identities
persisted. Few households included residents of more than
one nationality, and interethnic marriages were extremely
rare. Nearly everyone professed the Roman Catholic faith,
yet each ethnic group maintained its own church and often
its own parochial school, where children were taught in their
parents' language. Political organizations, fraternal societies,
and even gymnastic clubs and drama groups reflected these
ethnic divisions. The one local institution that bridged the
different groups was the saloon. Located on virtually every
street corner, saloons offered important services to the
community, hosting weddings and dances, providing
meeting places for trade unions and fraternal societies, and
cashing paychecks. During the frequent seasons of
unemployment, Packingtown workers spent a lot of time in
saloons. Here they often made friends across ethnic
divisions, an extension of their common work experience in
the nearby stockyard and packinghouses. Packingtown
workers had walked to their jobs since the first day the
Union Stockyards opened--Christmas 1865. Germans and
Irish made up the majority of the industry's first "knife
men," the skilled workers who formed "killing gangs" that
managed the actual slaughtering and cutting operations.
Many of these butchers had learned their craft in the Old
Country. Below them were the common laborers, mainly
recent immigrants from eastern Europe. Having no previous
experience in meat packing, these workers found themselves
in the lowest paid jobs, such as the by-product
manufacturing of glue and oleo. A sizable portion had never
before earned wages. They soon discovered, as one
Lithuanian laborer put it, that "money was everything and a
man without money must die." Occasionally, even a daily
wage of $2 (or less) could not save them. The death rate
from tuberculosis in Packingtown was thought to be the
highest in Chicago and among the highest in the nation. The
Packingtown community was bound up in an elaborate
economic network that reached distant parts of the United
States, transforming the way farmers raised livestock and
grains, railroads operated, and consumers ate their meals.
These workers helped to make Chicago a gateway city, a
destination point for raw materials coming in from the West
as well as a point of export for products of all kinds.
Chicago meat packers, led by the "big five" of Armour,
Cudahy, Morris, Schwarzschild, Sulzberger, and Swift,
expanded their business over 900 percent between 1870
and 1890, dominating the national market for meat and
establishing a standard for monopoly capitalism in the late
nineteenth century. In the process, they also became the
city's largest manufacturing employer. The huge, specialized
factories built during the 1860s and 1870s speeded up the
killing process and established a year-round production
schedule for packing, thanks to mountains of ice imported
by rail from ponds and lakes. The next feat, an efficiently
refrigerated railroad car introduced in the 1880s, made it
possible to ship meat nationwide. Consumers who had long
convinced themselves that only meat butchered locally was
safe to eat now discovered that Chicago-packed beef and
pork looked fine and was much cheaper. Forcing local
packinghouses to shut down throughout the Midwest,
Chicago's ruthless competitors put their product on nearly
every meat-eater's table. Chicago's control of the mass
market for meat affected all aspects of the industry. For
their part, Midwestern farmers practically abandoned raising
calves on open pastures. Instead, they bought two-year-old
steers from the West and fattened them on homegrown
corn, making sure that bulk went into edible parts rather
than muscle and bone. The resulting "feedlot" was a rural
factory of a kind, replacing pasture just as pasture had
earlier supplanted prairie grasslands. The majority of the
workers in Chicago's stockyards where cattle and sheep
ended their journey had scarcely seen a farm since they left
their homelands. But as the working hands of what poet
Carl Sandburg would later call the "City of the Big
Shoulders," "Hog Butcher for the World," they played their
part, along with the farmer, the grain dealer, the ironworker,
teamster, and many others in bringing together the
neighboring countryside, distant regions, and the city in a
common endeavor.