In Meat We Trust (11 page)

But Americans coupled their fears to a sense of entitlement. Any increase in the price of porterhouse or roasts, even if only a penny a pound, as was the case during the so-called beef famine, provoked outrage. Urban Americans didn’t care that meat comes from animals, or that food for those animals, like its human counterpart, depends on weather. Never mind the price of corn that determined the cost of raising hogs and cattle. Never mind the push-pull of the global demand for American beef and pork, demand that drove up prices paid by consumers at home. Never mind that the making of meat, like the making of steel, shoes, or chairs, depended on the cost of fuel, power, labor, and the like. As far as consumers were concerned, the price of meat was connected only to their own pocketbooks, to an intangible price defined not in dollars or relative to rainfall, but simply as “affordable.”

The relationship between the nation’s food production system and the people who ate that food embodied a contradiction: Americans insisted on access to cheap food, regardless of its true cost, but believed the worst of those who made that cheap food possible and abundant. And in the early twentieth century, the meatpackers processed and distributed not just meat but a host of other foods as well. It’s not surprising that they became the primary targets of the public’s outrage over food prices.

By the 1890s, all of the big packers had followed Armour’s lead and added hog slaughter to their activities, and bacon, ham, and fresh pork to their offerings. They also sold sausages, bolognas, and “luncheon” meats, and a host of other meat-based foods like canned gravy. They built laboratories and hired scientists in an effort to squeeze as much profit as possible from a carcass, whether bovine or porcine. They operated glue factories, sold animal oils as gun lubricant, and transformed byproducts into billiard balls, chess pieces, buttons, sandpaper, and fertilizer. Thyroid, thymus, pancreas, and spleen could serve as ingredients in tonics and elixirs, or as compounds used to tan hides and print fabric. A bemused commentator described the packers as magicians who sold beef and pork simply “for the purpose
of getting [the meat] out of the way” in order to perform “tricks” with their byproducts. They eyed cattle and hogs “with distrust,” suspicious that the animals were holding back a source of profit. There was money in that magic, lots of it. The more byproducts a packer had, the lower the price at which he could sell his beef and still earn a profit. The larger the packer, the greater his volume of wastes, and the bigger his cost-cutting advantage.

But the meatpackers had also discovered the magic of diversification, and they performed tricks with vegetables and fruits, milk, cheese, and eggs. And why not? They owned thousands of refrigerator railcars and continent-wide networks of warehouses chilled by mechanical refrigeration (a relatively new technology that spread quickly in the 1880s and 1890s). They had developed the expertise necessary to deliver large quantities of perishable goods to retailers and wholesalers, skills that were relatively rare at the time. Having constructed this technological and managerial infrastructure, it made sense to use it for other goods as well. Moreover, the meatpackers found a ready market for these services. In California, for example, industrial farmers—“growers,” they called themselves—clamored for the one thing that hindered both profits and expansion: reliable, speedy transport to carry their tomatoes and lettuce, grapes, oranges, and plums from West Coast to East. When Gus Swift moved to Chicago back in 1875, he would have been hard-pressed to find a fresh orange any time of year, and if he had, he would have paid dearly for it. By 1900, oranges—and bananas, plums, and peaches—had become year-round staples. Some of that produce arrived as canned goods (the packers owned many canning factories), but a great deal of it was delivered fresh, carried in the packers’ railcars and stored in their warehouses. The packers’ ability to centralize and organize distribution injected efficiency into what we take for granted today but what was new then—a national food system—with the result that Americans enjoyed access to more food, and a wider variety of foodstuffs, than at any time in their history—food provided, it should be noted, by a shrinking number of farmers.

So the
New York Herald
’s claims that the Beef Trust controlled both food and prices rang true with many people. The reporting prompted the U.S. attorney general to launch an investigation, but he found nothing to support the newspaper’s charges. Ten or twenty years earlier, this particular scandal might have gone the way of so many
causes célèbres
and day-old newspapers, or been overshadowed by other, bigger journalistic exposés—the
Herald
’s series landed on newsstands just as Ida Tarbell published her investigation into the inner workings of the Standard Oil Company. But in 1902, the man in the White House shared Americans’ rage about corporate mischief and, ever the savvy politician, understood that in an urban nation high food prices could knock even the most beloved of elected officials out of office.

President Theodore Roosevelt’s considerable historical baggage includes his reputation as a “trust buster,” but his view of corporations was nuanced and complex. On one hand, he shared Americans’ mistrust of corporations and harbored no illusions about the greedy self-absorption of many corporate titans, as demonstrated by what happened when his Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against a proposed railroad merger masterminded by a collection of Wall Street financiers. None other than J. P. Morgan, the biggest of the big financiers, descended upon the White House to straighten things out. “If we have done anything
wrong,” he told Roosevelt, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up,” believing, apparently, that Roosevelt was simply another tycoon who played by the same rules as himself. The president declined the suggestion, describing the encounter as an “illuminating illustration of the Wall Street point of view. Mr. Morgan could not help regarding me as a big rival operator who either intended to ruin all his interests or else could be induced to come to an agreement to ruin none.” On the other hand, Roosevelt had no desire to dismantle the corporate-industrial structure. Like many Americans, he recognized that large, national enterprises drove what he described as “the wheels of modern progress,”
and he was less interested in busting trusts than in using federal authority to corral corporate power and manage an economy that was as temperamental as it was robust.

So it’s no surprise that as president, Roosevelt engaged in battle with a variety of business behemoths, including the railroads, steel makers, tobacco manufacturers, Standard Oil, and, of course, the alleged Beef Trust. Indeed, from a political perspective, Roosevelt’s war on the Beef Trust was his smartest battle. Voters blamed meat makers for high food prices, and packers were an easy and visible target. (It was also the meat men’s misfortune that the president had owned and worked a cattle ranch in Dakota Territory in the 1880s; he understood and sympathized with cattlemen’s woes.)

Initially, Roosevelt went after the packers on the grounds that they violated antitrust and interstate commerce laws, a challenging angle of assault. In 1902, the Sherman Antitrust Act remained what it had been at the time of its passage in 1890: a model of flabby political expedience that did little to clarify the distinction between mergers and trusts; between corporations that were simply large and those that monopolized industries; between “good” trusts and “bad” ones (the latter being a distinction in which Roosevelt firmly believed). Worse, neither that law nor any other had cornered that elusive animal known as interstate commerce. The Constitution granted Congress the authority to “regulate commerce . . . among the several states,” a principle affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1824. There certainty ended. Neither the states nor Congress, neither chief executive nor judiciary (indeed, the judiciary least of all), knew for certain what constituted interstate commerce. Suppose a packer bought cattle at the stockyards in Kansas City, transformed the animals into carcasses in the same city, and then shipped those to Indiana. Where did his business end? In Missouri? Or in Indiana? What body ought to regulate said business? The state of Missouri? The federal Congress? The packers themselves? Did Congress have all the authority over interstate trade, or only part of it? How much authority could or should remain with the states? For that matter, what marked the distinction between “commerce” and “manufacturing”? Questions abounded but answers would not be found anytime soon. In early 1903, and in response to the
Herald
’s reports, a judge issued an injunction forbidding the packers from fixing prices and from engaging in
“combination”—unless it was necessary to do so. The ruling allowed the packers to withhold meat from the market whenever necessary in order to “prevent the over-accumulation” of those “perishable articles.” In short, the judge affirmed the point Phil Armour had made fifteen years earlier about the difficulties of making and selling perishable foodstuffs for a national market.

But not long after that ruling, and in a case of excruciatingly bad timing (at least in terms of public relations), officials at Armour, Swift, and Morris, another major dressed-beef outfit, made a move that confirmed the public’s suspicions: they merged most of their assets and created a separate entity, the National Packing Co., to manage those shared holdings. There was nothing illegal about the venture, but that was irrelevant to an angry public; the merger seemed to confirm the belief that the packers wanted the whole earth. When Gus Swift died a few weeks later, the manager of the company’s Trenton, New Jersey, facility lowered the building’s flag to half-staff. An enraged delegation of neighbors promptly descended upon his office. Swift did not deserve the honor, the group’s spokesman informed the manager, because he was “simply a dead multi-millionaire,
a trust magnate.” Raise the flag, he warned, or the crowd would “make trouble.” As the neighbors “shout[ed] in triumph,” the Swift employee hoisted the flag.

The combination of public outrage and the new holding company encouraged Roosevelt to move forward with his plan to force the packers into submission, if not through the courts then by some other means. “Daylight,”
he believed, was a “powerful discourager of evil.” Shine enough light on a situation, its evils would be revealed, and lawmakers would cure them. To that end, he prodded Congress to establish a Bureau of Corporations whose employees would gather information about corporate activity, analyze the results, and present Congress with recommendations for action. With his usual bull-in-a-china-shop enthusiasm, the president pronounced it an important step toward solving the problems posed by “the great corporations
and corporate combinations” and the relationship between them and the public well-being. The bureau’s information, he assured the skeptical, would be deployed “in a spirit of absolute fairness and justice and of entire fearlessness.”

The bureau’s first (and, as it turned out, only) task was to flood the packers’ operations with daylight. Roosevelt asked James Garfield (son of the former president) to launch a full investigation into meat making in general and the packers’ firms in particular, including company files and account books. Alas, the report that Garfield delivered to the president in the spring of 1905 failed to satisfy TR or to mitigate the public’s outrage. It consisted of three-hundred-plus pages packed with tables, statistics, charts, graphs, and excruciatingly detailed descriptions of American livestock production and meat processing, all couched in equally excruciating prose. It was, remarked one newspaper editor, not the kind of thing “young ladies
will take to the seashore for perusal during vacation days.” Nor, Roosevelt knew, was it a document that would captivate a public accustomed to the sensationalism of yellow journalism. Worse, instead of confirming the public’s suspicions, Garfield concluded that high meat prices had nothing to do with cabals and conspiracies and everything to do with crop failures and corn prices. He confirmed what the agriculture secretary had tried to explain three years earlier: the corn crop in 1901 had been “exceptionally poor,”
and so meat prices had gone up in 1902. When crop conditions improved the following year, prices paid for livestock fell, and so had the cost of meat for consumers. Garfield also affirmed what packers had long insisted: Americans enjoyed quality, affordable meat because the packers subsidized its production and distribution with other components of their operations, especially the processing and sale of byproducts.

Garfield’s conclusions mattered not the least to the public, whose reactions alternated between outrage and uproar. As one newspaper put it, the public had no interest in “tedious and voluminous reports.
It only wants to know why its steaks and roasts cost more than they did a short time ago.” Few people bothered to wade through Garfield’s charts and tables, so the press performed its usual magic, simplifying his complex analysis, contents, and conclusions to the point of distortion and portraying Garfield as a patsy who’d been bought off by the packers. Garfield himself shrugged off the calls for his job (and his head). He knew that his findings failed to accord with
“popular demands—but it is the truth,” he wrote, and “I care not for popular clamor.”

Fortunately for Theodore Roosevelt, prices for all foods, and especially meat, continued to climb, keeping the pot of public rage at full boil, and not long after Garfield delivered his report, a Chicago grand jury indicted the packers for antitrust violations. Even better, the editors of the national publication
Everybody’s Magazine
ran a multipart exposé on the meat industry or, as the series’ author, Charles Edward Russell, termed it, “the greatest trust in the world.”
The series ran for much of 1905 and detailed the inner workings of a “greedy monopoly” aimed at crushing anything and everyone in its path and “follow[ing] to its logical conclusion the idea of the survival of the fittest, the right of the strong to annihilate the weak.” But Roosevelt knew that so far, the courts had delivered nothing but disappointment, and it was possible that neither the new exposé nor high prices for steak would be enough to bring the packers to heel. “The experiences
that [the attorney general] has had in dealing with these beef trust people convinces me that there is very little that they will stop at,” he fumed. And so TR added another weapon to his arsenal: the public’s demand for federal legislation to guarantee the safety of the nation’s food supply.