Business: The World’s Ex-Hog Butcher

The square mile of stockyards and packing plants on Chicago’s South Side long gave the city a distinctive aroma, inspired poets and reformers. Carl Sandburg hailed Chicago as “Hog Butcher for the World.” Novelist Upton Sinclair achieved fame with The Jungle, and it was a major factor in the passage of the nation’s pure food laws. Sinclair was so revolted by the packing industry that he wound up the book with a prophecy that some day Chicago’s great packing industry would wither away. Last week economics was doing what reformers had failed to accomplish. Armour & Co. announced that it will end its packing operations at Chicago this summer; a month ago Swift decided to do the same thing. The other Big Three packer, Wilson, shut down in 1955. With the major packers gone, Chicago will become just another regional livestock market, with small packers slaughtering for the Chicago area.

In Chicago’s heyday its claim as meat capital of the world rested firmly on its strategic geographic position: midway between two-thirds of the nation’s meat production, to the west, and two-thirds of its meat consumption, to the east.

The growth of major cities on the West Coast encouraged packers and farmers to set up markets at Denver, Kansas City, Omaha and other points closer home. At the same time, the spread of new highways and the upsurge of the trucking industry offset Chicago’s advantage as a rail center. Livestock production spread east and south. In World War II, rationing and price control, strictly enforced in Chicago, encouraged behind-the-barn slaughter throughout the farm belt. Once broken of the habit of shipping to Chicago, many farmers never went back. By 1954 there were 2,367 separate packing establishments in the U.S., nearly double the prewar number.

Buffeted on all sides, Chicago packers made heroic attempts to cut costs by automating, but their big, old (up to 80 years), crazily laid-out buildings defied modernization. Even so, Chicago’s competitors in other markets believed the city might have held on if its slaughtering operations could ever have stabilized at some reasonable volume. But nothing Chicago did could stop the drain. Whereas in the 1920s Chicago marketed and slaughtered up to 18 million head of cattle, sheep and pigs annually, this year its marketings are expected to be only 5,000,000. Some 2,000,000 head of these will be shipped out of Chicago for slaughter elsewhere. More and more, Chicago is becoming just a place where livestock stop for water and fresh feed.