TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 313 However, it does lead to the second theme. White suggests that the slow rate of technological innovation was compounded by the con servatism of the railroads and freight car companies. The unstated question is how long-haul truckers wrested control of the refrigerated transport business. The implication is that more aggressive behavior and a sharper eye toward innovation could have staved off the truck ers. Human behavior, not technical limitations, spelled the demise of this technology. How accurate is this view? Although the human factor is important, I remain unconvinced that earlier adoption of betterinsulated cars and mechanical refrigeration would have done much to change the story. With development of the interstate highway sys tem, the speed and flexibility of refrigerated trucks became the critical consideration in shipping many perishable fruits and vegetables. The scores of photographs and diagrams, as well as descriptions of exterior paint colors, reveal that this is a book intended for railroad enthusiasts. Historians may find points of interest, but they will have to do some sifting. For example, a study of White’s blueprints will provide a good sense of how the cars operated. In another case, there is a remarkable series of photographs which document the mass icing of refrigerator cars and communicate more about refrigerated trans port than any ten pages of text. While these features can be a pleasure, their volume can easily prove frustrating. In general, the book would have benefited from a sharper sense of purpose and a stronger story line. Moreover, many important issues remain below the surface. There is little to suggest the ways in which a nationwide refrigeration network created new business interests, altered agricultural patterns, and helped to transform the diet of most Americans. Mark Wilde Mr. Wilde, a former Hagley Fellow, is currently completing a dissertation on the industrialization of food processing in America. Chicago’s Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the Nine teenth Century. By Louise Carroll Wade. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. xvi + 423; illustrations, maps, notes, bibli ography, index. $32.50. Louise Carroll Wade’s Chicago’s Pride is a well-researched, thor oughly documented history of what many 19th-century Chicagoans were proudly calling “the eighth wonder of the world” well before Carl Sandburg immortalized the city as “Hog Butcher for the World.” Until its annexation by Chicago in 1889, the great red-meat complex that included the stockyards, packing town, and environs was actually situated in the independent township (or Town) of Lakes, which by then was a community as large as Denver. 314 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE It had not always been so. When canal builders connected the Chi cago and Illinois Rivers in 1848, thereby linking Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River, the ambitious midsize city of Chicago quickly became a natural marketplace for assorted regional agrarian com modities, purveyors of red meat being in the vanguard of develop ment. Local butchers and seasonal packers had plied their trade since the early 1830s, but with enhanced transportation available—soon augmented by a veritable spiderweb of nine railroads radiating in all directions—the community was poised to overtake Cincinnati as America’s Porkopolis. Even so, the smelly local meat trade was not altogether welcome, for beasts destined for slaughter regularly clogged the city’s streets as they plodded between numerous widely scattered stockyards and packinghouses, and the packers’ tankage fouled the water supply. When competing railroads organized the Union Stock Yards Com pany in 1865 to centralize the market on the south side of Chicago, in Town of Lake, packers took advantage of the innovation to move out of the city and thereby escape unwelcome regulation, simulta neously gaining greater access to raw materials. Then, with the advent of refrigeration in both processing and transportation in the latter 1870s and early 1880s, packers shifted from seasonal pork-packing to the year-round “dressed beef” trade, experiencing “wonder growth.” Immigrants by the tens of thousands found work at Armour, Morris, Swift, and other, smaller plants that processed an increasingly large proportion of the nation’s red meat as well as a myriad of smelly by products. Offensive to delicate...