Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America, by Joshua Specht

Abstract

Though reference to Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle is tempting, historians should resist this impulse because Joshua Specht’s monograph is far more expansive. Both prologue and epilogue to that iconic story of Chicago meatpacking immigrants, this is a book with a good reason to buy in hardback: its slick dust-jacket invokes the look and feel of butcher’s paper even before the reader cracks the cover. Inside, readers will find Specht’s analysis of a mixture of ranching corporation records from ranch managers in the west, material from eastern and Chicagoan meat buyers and agents, and cowboy songs, trade cards and recipe books. He offers a model of the ‘cattle-beef complex’, which made US beef a staple of the twentieth-century American diet. The cattle-beef complex—which encompasses institutions and practices that got beef into households and kept it on the table—developed after the US government, in concert with independent ranchers, seized land...