It was also an extension of the control the meat packers had over their workers. . On Aug. 11, 1919, two former high school football rivals named Earl Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun organized a football team of their own. Upton Sinclair recognized the issues surrounding these conditions. The era of the cattle barons emerged as massive ranches sprung up in the West, where enormous herds could be grazed on endless open prairies before being ushered to market by cowboys on epic cross-country cattle drives. To uncover these issues, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, a novel about the meatpacking industry of Chicago in the early 1900s. Most common jobs in America 100 years ago, Americas first shipment of cattle by railroad, The most liberal public colleges in America, Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, 12 original companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (and what happened to them), poultry became the first factory-farmed animal, Where America sends its planes and 25 other manufacturing exports, The beef industry struggled during World War II, The most conservative public colleges in America, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Farm Animal and Field Crop and Research Facilities Protection Act, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/?ref=chooser-v1. At a time when half of the American population lived and worked on farmscompared to 2% todayLincoln called it the Peoples Department. The USDA is still charged with ensuring that meat is safe, properly inspected, and correctly packaged to this day. It spread through acres of stockyards, feed lots, slaughterhouses, and meat-processing plants. Sometimes, children worked as long as their parents, usually 10 to 15 hours a day. It doesnt take a big stretch of the imagination to realize that these workers would suffer, and did, a much higher rate of cardiovascular, respiratory, and many other illnesses. Dangerous substances, injuries, poor pay, and abuse of workers were widespread. After making surprise inspections to major plants across the country, the Neill-Reynolds report confirmed Sinclairs assessment of the horrors of the American meat industry. Cattle farmers and ranchers slaughtered their animals and brought the resulting meat to Brighton for sale. The law was substantially amended by the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967. In 1940, Jones perfected his design, Werner began building his trucks, and meat could now be reliably transported over the road for long distances any time of year. Of those journalists, American writer Charles Edward Russell is perhaps best known, for his series of articles about the Beef Trust that were published as The Greatest Trust in the World (1905). And that is exactly what happened. The impact on humans who ingested this meat was the passing of tuberculosis bacteria, a deadly lung infection. So why did it all go back downhill? One passage read, In a word, we saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts, in all of which processes it was in the way of gathering dirt, splinters, floor filth, and the expectoration of tuberculosis, and other diseased workers., You may also like: 12 original companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (and what happened to them). Workers, however, working in the wool, hair, or the bone grinding department, stood a good chance of contracting a serious lung infection, which many times developed into chronic coughs, then pneumonia, and ultimately death. First of all, one of the most important issues of the meatpacking industry in the early 1900s was the poorly way to kill animals. 17, No. On April 10, 2001, the Washington Post printed a front-page story with the headline They Die Piece by Piece. Harkening back to Sinclairs The Jungle, the article chronicled in graphic detail appalling and widespread instances of animals commonly and regularly being chopped apart at the joints, bled to death, skinned, disemboweled, dunked in tanks of boiling water, and strung up by a single leg while alive and fully conscious, after being improperly stunned or not stunned at all. Sinclair's primary purpose in describing the meat industry and its working conditions was to advance socialism in the United States. The Senate then formed the Pure-Food Investigating Committee, which held hearings in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York City from 1899 to 1900. The committee declared such common meat preservatives as borax, salicylic acid, and formaldehyde to be unwholesome. The press also reported from the committees hearings that some of the nations food supply was adulteratedmade impure by the addition of foreign or inferior substances. And, they felt it was time to drive them out of business. The dark days, however, did not end. Most importantly, the rent was affordable. Packingtown was notorious for their awful living conditions and working conditions. Dangerous. In fact, they turned the business of converting animals into food into a multi-billion-dollar industry. Today, fast-food is a $223 billion industryMcDonalds alone sells 75 hamburgers every second at more than 37,000 locationsand the incredible demand for inexpensive and instant meals can only be met with mountains of cheap meat. Meatpackers suffered from the following: Meatpackers were not the only ones impacted by the poor conditions in their facility. Muckraking articles and novels helped to call the publics attention to the industrys horrific practices; Upton Sinclairs novel The Jungle (1906) was particularly pivotal. His work days were usually 12 to 15 hours, and this day, he was simply hoping to stay warm. While workers unionized and went on strike to demand better conditions, employers used to divide and conquer tactics to win these struggles. Self-Service Meats: Supermarket circa 1950 Animal rights activists and. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of The man would not trouble to lift out a rat. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Join our new membership program on Patreon today. Not only did the people in the factories suffered, the people outside of the factory also suffered. Troops who consumed the meat fell ill, becoming unfit for combat, and some died. document.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); At the same time, new production techniques reduced the skill required of slaughterhouse workers. The meat-packing industry (also spelled meatpacking industry or meat packing industry) handles the slaughtering, processing, packaging, and distribution of meat from animals such as cattle, pigs, sheep and other livestock. The medical term was called dermatoconiesis; the workers, however, gave the infection a more appropriate term pickled hands. By 1898, even wealthy and influential cattle ranchers were under the thumbs of powerful interests like banks, insurance companies, railroad corporations, and stockyard groups, many of which were monopolies that enforced their will through price-fixing. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR. Large warts grew rapidly on the workers hands and split open and developed into ulcers. In early 1900, specifically, 1906, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was written. Chicago livestock trader Joseph McCoy wanted to position himself as the dominant middleman in the American meat industry and worked to bring cattle from Texas to his operation in Chicago for processing and distribution to the East. Meatpacking workers carrying their product to unrefrigerated and most likely rat infested storage areas. The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was a piece of U.S. legislation, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt on June 30, 1906, that prohibited the sale of adulterated or misbranded livestock and derived products as food and ensured sanitary slaughtering and processing of livestock. Quiz: Do you know these 50 famous companies by their logos? As the wheels of American industries began to move, so moved the meatpacking business in Chicago 1900 and the conditions were unsanitary, unregulated, and clearly unsafe. Designed to maximize production and profits while minimizing expenses without regard to animal welfare, factory farms breed, raise, kill, and process hundreds of thousands of animals in enclosed, unclean, dark, poorly ventilated, and horribly overcrowded indoor industrial settings without fresh air, grass, or sunlight. The answer was supplied by the late historian Gabriel Kolko. It might seem like this workoften done largely by immigrant, black, and Latinx workers with few job opportunitiesis simply doomed to be bad. Meat was a critical component of the food-supply chain, which was under enormous strain as the government struggled to feed its military, civilian population, and starving allies overseas. Force was also an option: the police often came to the aid of the industrialists. Conditions in Meatpacking Plants (1906, by Upton Sinclair) Many of the meats were rancid, rat infested, and bacteria filled. What were the Working Conditions of the 1900s US Meatpacking Industry? SOURCE: Sinclair, Upton. What impact did working in the meat packing plant have on workers? Where craft unions like Amalgamated gained power partly by limiting who could get a joboften along racial linesthe UPWA tried to reduce the companys ability to divide workers by race. Before the age of throw-away gloves and protective clothing, skin infections were a source of chronic concern. Human beings are no exception. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the wages of meat-slaughter and -processing workers remained significantly higher than the average in nondurable manufacturing. Upton Sinclair was written the most famous muckraker documents. You may also like: Quiz: Do you know these 50 famous companies by their logos? Meatpacking is physical, hands-on work conducted indoors in close quarters, conditions that put meat processing workerswho are mostly immigrants and African-Americansat risk more than virtually any population other than nursing home residents and prisoners. Can the conditions that produced the fast-growing economies of the Four TigersHong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwanbe replicated? Additionally, there were a number of nightmare diseases connected with working in the plants. In 1927, that agency was reorganized into the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration, which in 1931 became the Food and Drug Administration. The FTC issued a report stating that five companiesWilson, Swift, Morris, Cudahy, and Armourcontrolled virtually the entire industry and acted as a monopoly. He would go on to be one of the most prolific writers in American literature, publishing over eighty books, pamphlets, and studies. Boston, and later Philadelphia, had been the central hubs of the U.S. meatpacking industry in the countrys early years, but in the mid-1860s, the Midwest grew to become the core of the industry. The fate of the Western open range, the cattle barons whose fortunes were built on it, and the iconic cowboys who did the hard work of driving cattle for endless miles was sealed in 1867 with the arrival of one of historys most low-tech but consequential inventions: barbed wire. In a 1999 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, meatpacking was determined to be the most dangerous occupation in America. During this times people were often made sick and died either from working conditions or poor food quality. Meatpacking industrialists, seeing that skilled butchers had leverage, developed assembly lines of work that required little skill. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 applied the same standards to foods and drugs, notably banning the unsafe preservatives used to keep meat looking fresh. Encyclopedia.com. The meatpacking industry has played a major role in Illinois history, from labor issues and employment opportunities to the growth of certain . Injuries in the meatpacking business were five times the national average. Fax: (402) 241-2068 For one thing, child labor benefited his interests. Learn about the meat-packing industry of the 1900s in the United States. It also determined that at least one quarter of meatpackers suffered serious injury or illness in their careers. States across the country soon followed suit, passing their own laws and expanding on banned behavior, like getting a job at a meat plant for the purpose of exposing animal cruelty. The meatpacking industry was characterized by horrible sanitary conditions and the abuse of workers. They were packing filthy meat for human consumption. In which area did Progressive attempts at reform succeed in the late 1800s and early 1900s? It represented the first time that companies had to list active ingredients on labels for things like drugs and cosmetics, and that meatpacking companies were forced to list any preservatives or other chemical agents used in production. Conditions were extremely poor in the meatpacking industry in 1900. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. His novel, The Jungle (1906), a shocking expos of the unsanitary and dangerous conditions in the plants, was an immediate best-seller and incited President Roosevelt to enact a series of food safety laws. the economics of the industry only encourage faster line speeds. 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