from CHICAGO – Carl Sandburg
HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell
me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
In his book, The City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and The Making of America, author Donald L. Miller states that “the epic of Chicago is the story of the emergence of modern America. The same forces and personalities that created Chicago helped make America the most powerful nation in the world by 1900.” Novelist Frank Norris said, “Here of all her cities throbbed the true life – the true power and spirit of America.” Very simply, Chicago was made by the Industrial Revolution and the westward expansion, but also made the Industrial Revolution and facilitated that great expansion.
Marquette, that’s in Milwaukee!
The first Europeans to visit the area were Louis Joliet, a fur trader, and Father Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest. They had explored the Mississippi River during the summer of 1673 and were on their way back to Marquette’s mission on the Upper Peninsula of present day Michigan. Natives told them of a short cut from the Mississippi river to Lake Michigan by sailing up the Illinois River and utilizing a small portage to the Chicago River. The onion-like smell of the plants growing along the Chicago River led them to call the area Chicago, after an Indian word meaning onion. Joliet realized at that moment that this dismal, swampy area would become important if a canal was built connecting Lake Michigan and the Chicago River to the Illinois River and the Mississippi River. Nine years later Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle came through the Chicago portage, down the Mississippi and discovered the mouth of the river and took possession of “Louisiana” in the name of the French King. The first permanent resident of Chicago was a black French fur trader named Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who built a cabin on the north bank of the Chicago River in 1779.
Fort Dearborn Massacre
In 1803, the federal government built a fort at the mouth of the Chicago River. The site can be found at the south side of the Michigan Avenue bridge today. In 1812, the fort was destroyed in frontier fighting associated with the war of 1812, and a raiding party of Potawatomi Indians killed most of the soldiers and their families as they attempted to get away from the fort. The fort was rebuilt in 1816 as surveying began for an eventual canal.
Black Hawk War
In 1832, a chief named Black Hawk led one thousand Fox and Sauk Indians in Iowa across the Mississippi River into Illinois to reclaim lands ceded to the U.S. under shaky circumstances. Settlers in northeast Illinois, among them a young Abraham Lincoln, signed up to fight the Black Hawk War. Though most of the fighting took place near the Mississippi river, the conflict brought an end to the presence of the Potawatomi Indians in the Chicago area. In 1935 the last several hundred left Chicago, performing a ceremonial dance through the streets of Chicago on the way out.
Build me a canal and give me a city!
In 1833, the state bill to build the long awaited canal connecting the Chicago River with the Illinois River passed. This bill included the incorporation of the city of Chicago. German and Irish immigrants built the canal between 1836 and 1848. The Irish workers lived along the Chicago River in a town called Hardscrabble, which is present day Bridgeport, home to many Chicago mayors, such as the Daley family.
The Illinois and Michigan Canal was completed in 1848. Though it brought a large amount of commerce to Chicago, mostly at the expense of St. Louis, the day of the canal had already ended and railroads began to steal most of the commercial traffic.
1847 – Cyrus McCormick reaper
In 1847, Cyrus McCormick became the first major industrialist to come to Chicago when he moved his reaper plant to the north bank of the Chicago river, about 300 feet east of the present day Michigan Avenue Bridge. This brought McCormick closer to the farmers who would use his invention.
I got caught by another train!
By 1848, Chicago was already well on its way to becoming the countries largest lumber and grain port. The building of the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad ushered in the era of the railroad, making Chicago the transfer point for U.S. trade. The Chicago Board of Trade was formed to help facilitate the buying and selling of grain and other related products.
Give that good ol college try!
In 1850, a group of Methodists led by a physician named John Evans formed the cities first college, Northwestern University. In 1892, John D. Rockefeller will finance the founding of The University of Chicago, with William Rainey Harper it’s first president.
There is what in my water!
Like most cites at the time, growth took place before sanitation and water systems could be set up. Because of this, cholera epidemics often killed as much as 5% of the population in a year. Being basically built on a swamp, Chicago could not dig to install sanitation pipes. So, they instead built the streets up, above both the endless mud and the pipes that were laid on the streets to facilitate waste removal. However, all this did was allow the raw waste to all be deposited in the Chicago River, the main supply of drinking water for the city. Thus, the epidemics continued. In 1867, cribs were built several miles out in Lake Michigan to pump cleaner water back to the city for its water supply. The Water Tower is one pumping station for these cribs, which are still in use today.
What was in my hot dog?!!!
In 1856, the Illinois Central Railroad was completed, connecting Chicago with all of the major cities to the south, all the way to New Orleans. This will also connect to the eventual transcontinental railroad. Now Chicago truly was the railroad capital of the world and the transfer hub for the U.S. economy. In particular, the meat packing industry will center itself in Chicago, as cattle and pig ranchers will be able to ship their cattle from the cattle towns in Kansas up to the meat packing plants of Oscar Meyer, Gustavus Swift and Phillip Armour. In 1865, the Union Stockyards were built to facilitate the transfer of these animals to the plants.
1. Discuss why the authors Miller and Norris feel Chicago is the city of the Century.
2. Discuss the travels of Father Marquette and Louis Joliet.
3. Discuss the role of Jean Baptiste du Sable.
4. Discuss the Fort Dearborn Massacre.
5. Discuss the role the Black Hawk War played on Chicago.
6. Discuss the role the canal played on the city of Chicago.
7. Discuss the McCormick reaper and its role in the building of Chicago.
8. Discuss Chicago and railroads.
9. Discuss the problem of waste removal and how Chicago solved it.
10. Discuss the impact of the Illinois Central Railroad.
11. Discuss the stockyards and the meat packing plants.
-by Donald L. Miller
excerpt from Chapter 8 – The Chicago Machine
1. Empires of Order and Blood
"You shall find them about six miles from the city," wrote Rudyard Kipling, "and once having seen them you will never forget the sight."
The private carriage that took Paul Bourget and his traveling companions to the Union Stock Yard crossed a huge patch of the city cobwebbed with train tracks and crammed with two-story frame cottages, stores, and saloons. "Never a hill and never a hollow," Upton Sinclair said of that stretch of Chicago, "but always the same endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings." The carriage stopped at what must have seemed like hundreds of busy rail crossings and passed over bridges spanning creeks and canals lined with factories whose stacks sent up curling streamers of smoke, darkening the entire sky.
Then, just as the landscape turned bare and the sky grew even blacker, there came the smell-a sickening odor carried toward the city on high prairie winds. It was made up of mangled meat, animal blood, dung, and urine, and it announced the end of the journey. Holding handkerchiefs to their faces, Bourget's party passed through the imposing stone gate of the Union Stock Yard, built in 1879.
Inside the yards, the smell mingled with the sounds-the bellows, squeals, and bleating of seventy thousand and more cattle, hogs, and sheep amid the "yips" and "ki-yies" of buyers and sellers on horseback cracking long whips and riding up and down the wooden alleyways between the neatly gridded pens. Standing on the visitor's viaduct that overlooked the yards, Bourget watched deals being struck right in the open, in clouds of dust sent up by masses of moving animals, the bargains sealed "at the crook of a finger," the nod of a head. As a seller galloped off, the gates securing his sale were swung open, and gangs of mud-draped drovers led the animals to immense scales to be weighed and priced, and then herded them over ramps and viaducts to the holding yards next to the big packing factories to cool off before they were killed and cut up.
Almost every animal in the vast ocean of animals that Bourget looked out over had arrived the previous night by train and been unloaded under sputtering arc lights. And by the end of the day, almost all the pens would be empty, and the ritual of collection, selling, and killing would begin all over again.
For years the city's leading tourist attraction, "Chicago's Pride," the stockyards were on display for the Columbian Exposition of 1893. All the leading packing companies had exhibits at the fair, and exhibitors invited fairgoers to visit the yards, the second-biggest show in town that summer. They came in record numbers, as many as ten thousand a day, and were met by company guides at the Halsted Street gate or at the new passenger depot Burham and Root had designed for the occasion of the fair. Touring the works, they were bombarded with facts and figures about Chicago's largest industry, the one that best expressed its character and spirit. The combined livestock and packing operation, an industry comprising almost a hundred separate concerns, was at that time the "greatest aggregation of labour and capital ever gathered in one place," an economic power "greater than courts or judges, greater than legislators, superior and independent of all authority of state or nation," in the words of the muckraker Charles Edward Russell. To Upton Sinclair's Jurgis Rudkus, fresh from the fields of Lithuania, "it was a thing as tremendous as the universe."
In 1893 a workforce of some twenty-five thousand men and women, boys and girls, processed almost 14 million animals a year, the value of packinghouse products equaling nearly $200 million, an expansion of over 900 percent since the Great Fire. "In Chicago," the historian Sigfried Giedion would write a half century later, "we are dealing with dimensions for which there is, even today, no yardstick. A spontaneously growing center of force, it embodies, as few other places do, that brutal and inventive vitality of the nineteenth century." That vitality was nowhere more clearly in evidence than in the Union Stock Yard, the central symbol of this burly giant of a city. In Philip Armour's Chicago "they did it straight," Norman Mailer would write, "they cut the animals right out of their hearts-which is why it was the last of the great American cities, and people had great faces, carnal as blood, greedy, direct, too impatient for hypocrisy, in love with honest plunder."
On a tour of North America, Sarah Bernhardt retained only two impressions of Chicago-the hospitality of Potter Palmer and the "butchering of the hogs, a horrible and magnificent spectacle." No one "can be said to have a proper appreciation of the enterprise and business ability which have made the city what it is," observed the Scientific American in 1891, "without an investigation of the vast business carried on at the Chicago stock-yards."
Standing by the holding pens next to the pork plant of Armour and Company, Paul Bourget watched a long line of hogs being driven up an inclined chute – the Bridge if Sighs, packinghouse wags called it – to a small opening in the top story of the boxlike building that, when he entered it, gave off an overpowering stench that seized him "by the throat." Walking across a sticky floor saturated with a "sort of bloody mud," he and his companions were led up several flights of stairs to a visitors' gallery at the top of the building. From there they could see the entire slaughtering operation. The tour of this "House of Blood," Bourget later wrote in his notes, "will always remain to me one of the most singular memories of my [American ] journey."
Just ahead, in the catching pen, were the pigs, "alive grunting and screaming, as if they had a vision of the approach of the horrible machine, from which they can no more escape than a doomed man whose head lies on the guillotine." This killing instrument was an immense, spokeless wheel with chains hanging from its rims. As it began to move, the chains dragged on the floor, and a man fastened a hook on the end of one of the chains around a hind leg of a pig. When the wheel began to rotate again, the defenseless creature was jerked into the air, upside down, screeching and squealing, kicking and biting, and was carried by the movement of the wheel to an overhead railway that ran the length of the building on a descending angle from the top to the bottom floor. For the helpless hog, "this is the carrier from then on, and the rail is a direct sloping path to death, dissection, and the refrigerator," Theodore Dreiser described the world's first assembly line, or more accurately, disassembly line, after his tour of the Armour plant in 1898.
Hanging by its feet from the trolleys on the aerial railway, the pig was carried by gravity to its executioner, a brawny "red-headed giant" covered with blood. With a quick thrust of his knife, he cut the soft throat of the animal and a stream of blood spurted out, "jet black and thick as your arm," some of it hitting the butcher as he dodged to avoid it.
Meanwhile, another hog was pinioned to the wheel, "and then another, and another," wrote Upton Sinclair of this unchanged process a decade later in The Jungle, until the wheel was filled with them, "each dangling by a foot and kicking in a frenzy-and squealing. The uproar was appalling, too much for some of the visitors." The men looked at one another and smiled nervously; the women, wringing their hands, grew pale and faint.
After the butcher made his cut, the animal gravitated downward for ten yards or so, bleeding into a catch basin that preserved its contents for fertilizer. When the hog-still twitching and perhaps still alive- passed over a vat of boiling water, it was released from the guide rail and disappeared with a splash, silenced forever. The scalding water softened and loosened the hair and bristles, and the pink carcass was then scooped out of the tub by a rakelike device and lifted onto a table. An endless chain was attached to a ring in its nose and the animal was pulled through a scraping machine, emerging ten seconds later shaved from nose to tail. What hair remained was removed by teams of fast-working hands. The head was then almost completely severed, left hanging "by a thread," and the body was hitched up again to the over-
head rail and carried by its own weight to a lower level of the plant, where it passed over a table flanked by a cutting gang, six workers to a side. This was highly specialized work, each man working ''as if a demon were after him" to perform a series of cuts and scrapes as the carcass glided past him. Animal parts flew everywhere in this whirligig of disembowelment, and each of the cutters was "blood-red" from head to heels.
As the cleaned carcass passed down the final stretch of the "railway of death" it was cut down the middle by expert "splitters," and the halved carcasses were pushed into enormous chilling rooms-thirty or forty acres of them at the Armour works-where they were suspended for twenty-four hours to cool and become firm and "where a stranger might lose himself in a forest of freezing hogs."
The entire operation, from the killing wheel to the death locker, took less than ten minutes.
Walking past the big doors of the chilling rooms, Bourget saw carcasses being pushed out along the ubiquitous rail to a cutting-up room, where each table was a "sort of human chopping machine," as Frederick Law Olmsted described the same operation in a Cincinnati packinghouse. Two men lifted and turned the carcass, and two others did the butchering with cleavers that had glistening blades two feet long. "No iron cog-wheels could work with more regular motion. Plump falls the hog upon the table, chop, chop; chop, chop; chop,chop fall the cleavers. All is over. ...Amazed beyond all expectation at the celerity, we took out our watches," Olmsted wrote, "and counted thirty-five seconds, from the moment when one hog touched the table until the next occupied its place."
The unerring cuts created hams, sides of pork, and racks of ribs; and these were sent through chutes to pickling, salting, and smoking rooms below. From there they were put in boxes and barrels and sent to platforms where huffing freight trains were waiting. Standing there, Bourget realized that he had come finally to the ground floor of this gigantic killing concern.
In the Beef House, where Bourget and his party went next, the "death struggle" was different. There were no shrill cries from the animals, and the work was done on one floor only, with an overhead visitors' gallery down the center of the dimly lit building, from where Bourget looked down into an inferno of blood, steam, and sweat.
The cattle were led up a lime-washed gangway by an old red "Judas" steer, and when he disappeared by an escape gate, they were driven into narrow chutes, one or two to a chute, penned in so tightly they were almost immobile. On a platform above and adjacent to the chutes, iron-muscled men in shirtsleeves guided the steers into the stalls, "caressing" them with the tips of their sledgehammers to calm them down after they had picked up the scent of blood. Then, suddenly, one after the other of the men lifted his bludgeon high in the air and slammed it with a thud into an animal's forehead, and the beast sank down "in a lifeless heap." One side of the pen was then raised, and the unconscious animal was pulled by a chain onto the killing beds, breathing heavily and bleeding from the nose and mouth. Its hind legs were shackled, and with a press of a button the huge beast was lifted up by a steam hoist, placed on an iron railway, and sent down the line to a "sticker," who plunged his knife into its heaving chest, severing in one surgical slash its principal arteries. The animal was left hanging to bleed, and then the "headman" decapitated it with two or three well-aimed blows.
“If the pig men were spattered with blood," Kipling wrote of the scene on the killing bed, "the cow butchers were bathed in it. The blood ran in muttering gutters," and the terrible stench "bred fear." The blood on the floor looked to be almost an inch deep despite the work of hard-faced immigrants who shoveled it into holes in the floor. The cutting-up process was as quick and efficient as in the hog factory, only here there were many lines of carcasses. And instead of the animals being brought to the men, the men moved from one carcass to another, working with "furious intensity, literally upon the run." Each man had a specialized task to perform on the suspended carcass. When he was done, he would rush to the next carcass in the line, to be followed by a different kind of specialist. In this way, a gang of almost two hundred men could stun, kill, gut, scrap, clean, and cut tip over eighty cattle per hour.
Here also, at the end of the line, were the chilling rooms. But whereas almost all the pork was preserved after cooling, most of the beef was sent directly to refrigerator cars, bound for butchers' cabinets and dinner tables in New York and Boston, Richmond and Savannah. "It will arrive," Bourget wrote of the work of the refrigerator car, the decisive invention in the history of the meat industry, ''as fresh, as intact, as if there had not been thousands of miles between the birth, death, and dismemberment of the ….peaceable creatures."
Seated in their carriage as they headed back to town, Bourget and his party began discussing what they had seen, trying to "discern the intellectual significance" of this unsurpassed operation. "We all agreed that the first characteristic of this enterprise is the. ..stupendousness of its conception," Bourget wrote. But behind this "colossal" effort of imagination was a driving passion for order, and this union of order and vision, Bourget and his companions agreed, was the key to Armour's great manufactory. They were surprised, however, at how little this production system depended on modern machinery.
"It was all so very businesslike," Upton Sinclair wrote of the pig-slaughtering process, "that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery." It was not actually, for almost all the work was done by skilled butchers, assisted by many more unskilled workers. "I had expected to see machinery of surprising ingenuity, almost superseding hard work, which would kill, cut and prepare an animal without the direct intervention of any workman," Paul de Rousiers said after visiting the Armour plant. But organization, not invention, explained the brutal efficiency of Chicago's packing plants, modeled after crude assembly-line operations first developed in Cincinnati before the Civil War-and later the inspiration for Henry Ford's assembly line for making Model T's. "Of all the large industries in this country," observed the Monthly Labor Review, "slaughtering and meat packing ranks as the one which is probably least susceptible to mechanization." This was because the raw materials-the hogs, cattle, and sheep-varied greatly in size, shape, and weight. Of all the machines experimented with by packinghouse technicians, only the automatic scraping machine could adapt itself to the organic irregularities of the animals. "Even when dead," Giedion wrote, "the hog largely refuses to submit to the machine." Meatpacking, then, became the first assembly-line industry because packers were not able to mechanize their operations, which forced them to turn from technology to the division of labor as a way of reducing production time and costs.
Chicago's slaughterhouses, however, were most definitely machines-machines made up almost entirely of human parts, like the machines that had built the pyramids of ancient Egypt before the invention of the wheel or the pulley. Unable to mechanize operations, the packers built mass-production engines that depended, ironically, on hand labor. As the socialist A. M. Simmons wrote in 1899: "That marvelous speed and dexterity so much admired by visitors is
simply inhumanly hard work."
Bourget saw Armour and Company and the other big Chicago enterprises he visited as reflections of the men who ran them, businessmen with the vigor and vision of "grand seigneurs." Every important business in Chicago seemed to be "made in the image of who [founded] it. ..the visible will of that man, his energy, as it were, incarnated and made evident." These businessmen were, to him, the real makers of America, capitalist conquistadors who had tamed a continent and raised great cities in one generation, a "phenomenon" that had not elsewhere been seen, and. ..will. ..never be seen again." They were truly the "heroes of modern times."
What Bourget found most arresting about these businessmen was their warlike combativeness-and coupled with it their taste for risk taking. "The cautious rentier mentality that betrays later generations-be they individuals or nations-" wrote Sigfried Giedion, "could have brought not a single stone to the building of these giant [meatpacking] concerns. All this called for men ready for danger, ready to win or to lose. There was no middle course. It was a staking of
all against all."
In 1893 the most famous of these "Chicago giants" was Philip Danforth Armour, "the Meat King of America," a trader and manufacturer of world influence. " A map of his business," a journalist wrote, "is a map of civilization." But the real founder of the modern packing industry was Armour's dour, simple-living rival Gustavus Swift; "Stave," his family called him. In a city of risk takers, he was the most audacious gambler of them all.
Armour and Swift arrived in Chicago in the same year, 1875, and their careers as meat barons and city builders are closely linked. One was a ditchdigger, the other a country butcher, and their ascent was greatly attributable to their entrepreneurial energy, yet one enormous advantage was theirs. They arrived in Chicago at a time ideal for men with giant projects. National conditions were ripe for a historic leap forward in the meatpacking business. Both were supremely capable organizers, and in the approaching era in the industry, organization
would be everything.
2. A Fortress of Oppression
"Be quick, damn you, be quick," a foreman yelled at a Lithuanian immigrant as he waved him through the gate of the packing plant, one of the fortunate few among the hundreds waiting there at dusk every day for the chance to work. This man was sent that winter morning to the beef house to push blood along gutters in the floor. "They get all the blood out of those cattle," a fellow worker shouted to him from across the steam-filled room, "and all the work out of us men."
In their unrelenting effort to cut costs, the builders of these machines for making meat and money turned in the 1880s to the speedup. It was not enough to minutely divide up the work-to deskill it, as the experts would say; the work had to be done faster and faster. In the pork house this was simply a matter of a foreman pushing a lever and moving the hogs at a quicker rate along the slaughtering line; in the beef house, "pacers" were placed among the workers and paid extra to speed up the job. And in both places there were barking foremen who drove the men like galley slaves.
With this, the work grew more dangerous. Upton Sinclair explains: "Sometimes, in the haste of speeding-up, they would dump one of the animals out on the floor before it was fully stunned, and it would get upon its feet and run amuck." Men would shout warnings and scramble for the nearest pillars, slipping on the blood-wet floor and falling over one another. It was especially dangerous if a steer got loose in the winter season, when the room was so thick with steam from the hot blood and the hot water that the men, carrying razor-sharp knives, could not see more than a few feet in front of them. " And then, to cap the climax, the floor boss would come rushing up with a rifle and begin blazing away!"
The cold increased the incidence of accidents. The plants were un-heated, and workers on the "lightning line" would tie up their feet in old newspaper, which would become soaked with blood and frozen. Sometimes when their foremen were not looking, the men would plunge their freezing feet into the hot carcasses of the steers, but there was no way to warm their hands. The workers were unable to use gloves because of the nature of the job, so their fingers would grow numb; and then, with the quickened pace, there would be injuries- the severing of a finger or a hand, or a deep cut that would become infected from the grime all around the workplace.
In yet another effort to keep down labor costs, packers hired many workers only as long as they were needed-for a week or a day or even hours. An expanding city of job-hungry immigrants, Chicago had all the desperate laborers the packers needed to run this system. The unemployed showed up at the plant gates of the big houses every morning at dawn, and the strongest-looking ones or those who could afford to pay bribes were picked out by company guards and ushered quickly into the plant. "[Then] some policemen waved their clubs," a rejected Lithuanian worker recalled, "and we all walked on."
With a system like this, it was easier to keep down the wages of steady workers. There was always a hungry man at the gate eager to have another man's job at whatever rate they paid him. At the turn of century, as many as one-third of a plant's workers were "casual"
hands hired in this manner.
As he toured the House of Armour, Paul Bourget's sympathies went out to the doomed animals, but Giuseppe Giacosa, a visiting Italian dramatist and journalist, could think only of the workers. These men “have neither the face nor the body of humans," he wrote in his book of American impressions. A mixture of animal grease and blood-red shiny-stained their faces, and blood hardened in their hair and beards and on their overalls, forcing them "to walk with long stiff strides." This and "the abrupt and rapid movement by which they throw severed pieces to neighboring workers ...gave them an appearance altogether ahuman, and rather like the.... animals they destroy with much dispatch." As a British correspondent told Upton lair: "These are not packing plants at all; these are packing boxes crammed with wage slaves."
But it was not that clear-cut, as Giacosa learned to his amazement when he walked past the packinghouse gate at closing time. Out through the portals came "a lordly collection of gentlemen whom one of our country ladies would take as models of sporty elegance. They are often young, tall and blond, with well-trimmed mustaches and polished shoes. They wear handsome ties, plaid jackets in the English style and little hard hats."
These were the "subhumans" of an hour earlier, scrubbed, dressed, eager to spend "on the good things" what "they earned in the blood mud." Living in "a nation which knows no ease, the Americans accept the inequality of labor in order to attain a relative equality of goods.” Giacosa caught the central paradox of well-paid mass production work. The butchers did not will it this way. The skills of their trade devalued, their work degraded, they had come to depend for their self-esteem more on what they purchased than on the kind of work they did.
These craft-proud butchers, most of them Irishmen, Germans, and Bohemians, lived in well-kept cottages in neighborhoods north and south of the yards. When Giacosa visited the yards in 1898, however, the skilled workers were being rapidly replaced by miserably paid Eastern European immigrants, who made up almost two-thirds of the industry's labor force by then. Taking what they could afford, they moved into the deteriorating neighborhood just behind the yards that the butchers and their families were fast abandoning. A pastoral little settlement in the 1870s, by the 1890s Packingtown, or the "Back of the Yards," as it was also called, was the vilest slum in Chicago.
What made Packingtown so extraordinarily bad was not the depth and extent of its poverty-most of the heads of households were at least employed-but the nature of the industry that brought it into being. "No other neighborhood in this, or perhaps in any other city," wrote the housing investigators Sophonisba P. Breckenridge and Edith Abbott, "is dominated by a single industry of so offensive a character," an industry whose atmosphere of blood, death, and disintegration permeated everything, having a demoralizing effect "not only upon the character of the people, but the conditions under which they live." The only open space in this squalid pile of meat mills and acid-eaten houses was the "hair field," where the hair of hogs and the skin of cattle were spread out to dry, drawing great clouds of bluebottle flies.
When a committee was called together by Robert Hunter, Jane Addams, and other Chicago reformers to document the tenement problem in the city, the Stockyard district was not included in the survey because sanitary and environmental conditions there were so shocking-"as bad as any in the world"-that investigators thought they were unrepresentative. Even a lawyer for the packers said that the only "remedy" for the Back of the Yards was its "absolute destruction. You should tear down the district," he told his clients, "burn all the houses."
The Back of the Yards was surrounded by a circle of stench and disease, smoke and slime. To the east were the yards and the slaughter mills. To the west was the largest municipal dump in Chicago; to the south, a maze of railroad tracks servicing the yards; and to the north, Bubbly Creek, a dead arm of the Chicago River named for the carbolic acid from decaying refuse that bubbled to the surface. Bubbly Creek annually took pollution equivalent to a city of a million people. In the summer, when a hard brown scum settled on its surface, cats and chickens could be seen scurrying across it.
When residents of the Back of the Yards, led by Mary McDowell, complained about the unprotected rail crossings on the forty-three lines of track that spread out from the yards, giving the names of children killed or maimed by stock trains, or complained about the loathsome creek, citing ordinances forbidding dumping, they were ignored, for city government, as everyone knew, was a branch office of the packers. And when residents lodged protests about the garbage dump, stung into action by the deaths of one out of every three infants in the households facing it, they were told by a lawyer beholden to Tom Cary, the ward boss who owned the dump, that "a place segregated for unpleasant things [was] a necessity in a great city like Chicago." In this necessarily unpleasant place lived over thirty-five thousand people in 1893.
In the summer, when the flies and mosquitoes came in like a plague, women had to close the windows of their houses, for they had no screens, and seek relief from the heat out-of-doors, dressing their pre-school children in long clothing to prevent them from being bitten. Sitting on the steps of their wooden cottages on these long summer nights, they could see the women of newly arrived families in Packingtown scavenging on the mountains of garbage at Cary's dump, picking around for kindling for cooking, for old mattresses, and even for edible pieces of food. "A worker ill-nourished from improper food [and] poisened by bad air in his house and in his neighborhood. ..is an almost ideal soil for tuberculosis," reported Caroline Hedger, a heroic young physician who practiced in Packingtown. "You have but to supply the germ." At the turn of the century, tuberculosis rates in Packingtown were among the highest in the country.
But the people who lived there feared the cold more than they did disease they never quite understood. On winter nights, families sat around the kitchen stove and ate supper in their laps and then went directly to bed with all their clothes on, including their overcoats. “The cold which came upon them was a living thing, a demon-presence in the room." It tore through the cracks in the wallboards, wrote Upton Sinclair, "reaching out for them with its icy, death-dealing fingers; and they would. ..try to hide from it, all in vain. It would come, and it would come."
The smells from the yards were overpowering, and residents were able to clearly distinguish six of them. "In the night we would be awakened by a choking sensation,” recalled Mary McDowell. “One night it would be the odor of burned flesh, another of feathers, another of stys, etc. And the smoke from the trains and the plants was so impressive that children got it mixed up with their religious ideas. "Yes, He sees everything," Mary McDowell overheard a little boy tell his friend. “He can see inside of you. Why, He can see down through the smoke, God can!"
Most of the streets in Packingtown were prairie mud, and most of the houses were balloon-frame cottages and two-story tenements without sewers. Garbage and drain water collected in ditches beside the roads, and this stagnant water stood for so long that a "thick, green leathery scum covered the surface." A child that Mary McDowell knew walked into this solid-looking muck, thinking it was part of the street, and drowned in the ditch. At night, with the streets lit only by kerosene lamps, drunken men stumbling home from Whiskey Row, a solid line of saloons on Ashland Avenue, would fall into these ditches and have to be pulled out by their friends.
When Mary McDowell moved to Packingtown in 1894 from her parents home in affluent Evanston, it looked to her like a "frontier" town. “Even the people seemed rural in their manner and customs. ..[and] there were more saloons than grocery stores, while gambling, horse and dog racing were the frontier sports." Had old John Dean Caton gone down there in the year McDowell set up her settlement house, he would have been reminded of the Chicago he settled in sixty years before, a slatternly settlement of wood on a wet and forbidding prairie. An immigrant to this new urban frontier, however, would not have the same chance Caton had to rise with his adopted town. Many Poles and Slovaks had been lured to this stinking square mile of stockyards by labor agents of the packing companies to take the jobs of those who came before them, hardly the kind of conditions that had kindled the dreams of Caton, Hubbard, and Ogden. They kept coming in-these immigrants-like the trainloads of cattle and hogs they were hired to slaughter. "Cattle and hogs from the West. Women and men from the East.”
The customer is always right!
Marshall Field, originally in a partnership with Potter Palmer, had bought out his partner and by now had become the giant of Chicago retail and wholesale goods. He built his empire by making the buying experience like a day out for women. In 1868 he moved his store from Lake Street to State Street, to get away from the awful stench of the Chicago River. Thus, merchants were encouraged to make State Street the center of shopping. Potter Palmer built his dream hotel right next door.
Poor Mrs. O’Leary. These cows just don’t listen anymore!
In addition to sanitation and clean water, another major problem with the fast growing cities in America was fire. Wood buildings went up so fast with little regard to potential fires and little technology existed to put out fires. Across the country, cities were devastated. The summer of 1871 brought severe drought and the famous Chicago Fire of 1871, where a major portion of the city was burnt to the ground. Oh , by the way, it wasn’t the cows fault. The barn had been broken into by local delinquents, knocking over a flame and igniting the fire. More importantly, the world got to see the resolve of Chicago as businessman began to rebuild while the ashes were still smoldering. More emphasis on fire control led to the elimination of wood frame buildings in the city, both steel and cement block construction and the onset of Chicago skyscrapers. The Home Insurance Building was the first skyscraper built in Chicago in 1884.
We sat at the dinner table on top of that Sears catalog!
Montgomery Ward began his career as a salesman in Marshall Field’s wholesale business, traveling the Illinois countryside selling merchandise to local general stores. When he saw just how much these stores were marking up prices, he felt for customers who could not come into the city to buy directly from Fields downtown. Thus, in 1872 he developed the first mail order catalog business in America.
In 1887, Richard Sears moved from Minneapolis with his mail order watch business and completely revolutionized the mail order business, offering a money back guarantee. He expanded his catalog far past watches and what Montgomery Ward included, even going as far as selling kits to build houses.
I’m on top of it!
A third major problem to these fast growing cities was congestion on the roadways. Streetcars, passenger cars and streets crowded with pedestrians led to a large amount of accidents and deaths. In 1892, Chicago built its first elevated tracks and the “El” was born.
All revved up and no place to go!
In 1889, Jane Addams was representative of many young women with a college education – they were unable to get a job in the business world. For that reason, many talented women went into social work. Addams was one of the originators of the settlement house – a place where young immigrant women in particular could access services ranging from housing, food, English classes and eventually athletic and leisure activities. Settlement house such as Hull House became central to dealing with the poverty of the inner cities.
All the world is a stage!
In 1893, Chicago hosted the Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus discovering America. Technology and culture was the centerpiece of the fair, as America showcased their society to the world. More importantly, Chicago was able to showcase the tremendous recovery from the devastating fire only 22 years earlier. In 1933, Chicago will again host the world’s fair, with The Century of Progress, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the city of Chicago. Though both of these fairs had technology as their centerpiece, the midways where people could come for entertainment from freak shows, to naked dancers, to entertainment rides proved to both popular and profitable to the city. This led directly to the establishment of amusement parks such as Coney Island in New York and Riverview in Chicago.
Chicago – A Great Place to Live
As Chicago continued to grow, becoming one of the most important industrial cities in the world, those industrial giants fueling that growth began to think about how American cites compared with their European counterparts. They began to think about culture, leisure and the kind of life lived by the people of their city. Thus, men like Marshall Field, Montgomery Ward, Potter Palmer, Dankmar Adler, John Shedd and George Pullman began to pool their resources and ides to make Chicago a great place to live, as well as work.
· In 1879, the Art Institute of Chicago opened. It was actually Bertha Palmer who donated the early collection of the institute, which would become one of the finest collections of French impressionist painters. Palmer had used the advice of Mary Cassatt, America’s foremost impressionist artist, to develop her collection.
· It was her husband Potter Palmer who built his mansion on the north side of Chicago in 1880, beginning the movement north of millionaires and their mansions and the creation of the Gold Coast.
· In 1886, the Auditorium was built so Chicago could have the world’s finest concert hall and theater. The hall inside is almost perfect acoustically.
· The Chicago Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1891, recruiting Theodore Thomas as its first conductor. Since the Auditorium was so large and Chicago could not fill its seats weekly, Orchestra Hall was built in 1905.
· In 1921, the Chicago Theater opened, originally as a movie house as Chicago ushered in the great age of the movie palaces. Today, it has been restored as a theater for plays.
· Montgomery Ward led the fight to keep Chicago’s Lakefront free and clear from commercial building, so it could be enjoyed by the people of Chicago. The land between Michigan Avenue and the Illinois Central Railroad had been filled with debris from the 1871 fire, forming Lake Park. It was eventually renamed Grant Park and became the centerpiece of the 1909 Burnham Plan of Chicago, an unobstructed lakefront park area stretching from Jackson Park on the south side, through Grant Park and north to Lincoln Park.
· One of the compromises Montgomery Ward had to make was to allow the building of the Field Museum on the lakefront, just south of Grant Park. He was not happy that the Art Institute had been built north of Grant Park, and he was very unhappy with the proposed location of the museum, right in the middle of the park. Thus, he compromised by moving the museum just south. The Field Museum of Natural Science opened in 1921. The Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium will be added later to what will become a museum campus.
· In 1916, Navy Pier was built to facilitate Chicago’s large marine trade. However, the age of the lake steamer had been transplanted by railroads and other than it’s use during World War 2 to help train American pilots, it slid into disrepair. In recent years it has been refurbished as one of the major entertainment and cultural centers in Chicago.
· After going into disrepair after the Columbian Exposition, the only permanent building from that fair was refurbished through the efforts of Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company. The building reopened in 1933 as The Museum of Science and Industry.
Strikes, Union and Management Violence – Chicago at the center!
It makes sense that if Chicago is the city of the industrial era, there will be a long history of union conflict and violence.
· Beginning with the Great Railroad Strike of 1876, strikes will usually end up spreading nationally through Chicago as the rail hub of the nation.
· In 1886, McCormick Harvester workers campaigning for an 8 hour workday called for a protest meeting after police had shot and killed two workers. When police showed up at the meeting in Haymarket Square, a bomb was thrown killing 1 policemen and wounding 6 others. The Haymarket Incident was used to arbitrarily round up anarchists, with 8 being convicted of murder on very little credible evidence.
· In 1894, a strike at the Pullman Palace Car Company turned violent when the president sent troops to break the strike, as did the Republic Steel Strike in 1937
American Tragedy – Phillip Evergood, Republic Steel Strike, 1937
Need a place to stay?
In 1881, George Pullman introduced the concept of the company town, developing the town of Pullman for the workers at his Pullman Palace Car Works. Unfortunately, this experiment which began with a wonderful idea of providing a great living experience, ended with Pullman using the housing to cut wages, culminating in a violent strike in 1894. When U.S. Steel built its plant on Lake Michigan south of Chicago, the city of Gary was developed in 1906 to house the workers.
What do you mean you made the water change direction – is your name Moses?
In 1871, engineers had reversed the flow of the Chicago river, hoping to disperse the industrial and human waste settling into the Chicago River and Lake Michigan away from Chicago. This was only a temporary fix, as the river reversed back. Then, in 1900 the Sanitary and Shipping Canal was dug parallel to the Illinois and Michigan canal. This succeeded in permanently reversing the direction of the river, allowing waste to flow down to the Illinois River and away from Chicago.
Chicago is one the cities most influenced by the major waves of black migration. Directly after the Civil War, during World War 1 and during World War 2, large numbers of African-Americans moved north and developed a unique culture in the northern cities such as Chicago. One effect will be the continued occurrence of race riots, particularly after the two world wars, as jobs so plentiful during the war became quite scarce. The Race Riots of 1919 are an example of this.
In addition, Chicago will become one of the centers of Jazz music, as well as the main center of northern or city blues.
Homework Assignment # 28
Discuss the role the following played in the development of Chicago.
1. Marshall Fields
2. Chicago Fire of 1871
3. Skyscrapers
4. Montgomery Ward
5. Richard Sears
6. El
7. Jane Addams
8. Columbian Exposition
9. The Century of Progress
10. Riverview
11. Art Institute
12. Gold Coast
13. Auditorium
14. Orchestra Hall
15. Chicago Theater
16. The Lakefront
17. Field Museum
18. Navy Pier
19. Museum of Science and Industry
20. Discuss the role strikes and labor violence has played in Chicago history.
a.
b.
c.
21. Discuss the company town and Chicago.
22. Discuss the reversing of the river.
23. Discuss the effects of Black Migration on Chicago.