The Rise of the Midwestern Meat Packing Industry

Abstract

This book is a thoroughly researched, informative, and concise study of the transformation of a single industry, pork packing, from its beginnings in the 1840s as an unorganized seasonal pursuit of frontier merchants to its emergence in the 1870s as a technologically and organizationally near modern industry. The author successfully argues a multi-causal explanation for this transformation which intertwines the history and geography of pork packing with more general economic factors such as market forces, transportation innovations, and entrepreneurial initiatives. Two factors, however, are stressed in Walsh's narrative: the influence of the railroad and the role of individual businessmen. Throughout the Midwest in the 1840s, general merchants, who had a variety of other pursuits and access to capital, dominated the pork packing business because it was seasonal and unpredictable. Merchants obtained their hogs from the surrounding countryside and usually sought markets in nearby cities or shipped long-distance by river at much greater risk. The railroads altered both the lines of supply and the markets and concentrated pork packing in several urban centers. The Civil War further confirmed this pattern when river and rail traffic to the South was disrupted. Meat packing then concentrated in even fewer cities where there was access to capital, transportation, and government contracts. Yet some cities like Cincinnati and Chicago clearly outstripped their rivals such as Terre Haute, Indianapolis, and St. Louis. Walsh attempts to explain the differential growth of pork packing centers as a function of community entrepreneurial spirit. Comparing Cincinnati and Chicago, she finds that Chicago businessmen seized on the advantages of the railroad while Cincinnati merchants continued to conduct business on a smaller scale and favored river and traditional markets. Although never completely explaining why one business community ratheir than another chooses to innovate, Walsh does accompany her generalizations with in-depth descriptions of merchants in each city. In the late 1860s, entrepreneurial elements were even more important in changing the industry's structure. With the basic transportation network now completed, merchants adopted organizational and technological improvements to increase production and profits. Chicago merchants led the way when they built the Union Stockyards in 1865 to centralize hog markets, slaughtering, and packing. Soon the stockyards also included banks and telegraph facilities. Other cities, such as Kansas City and St. Louis, quickly imitated the Chicago model. The stockyards were an immediate success and stimulated further changes. Meat packers were now specialized manufacturers rather than general merchants, and they began to form national and regional associations to keep abreast of recent technologies. None were more important than ice-packing and curing which permitted the packers to operate nearly the full year rather than just the winter season. Although Walsh clearly describes these numerous technological and organizational changes within the meat packing plants, the reader needs to know more about individual businessmen and the particular forces which occasioned their business decisions. Overall this is an excellent monograph. It is solidly based on primary sources that include statistics gathered from census reports, publications of chambers of