In Meat We Trust (41 page)

[>]
“ranch to table”: “A Marquis under Arrest,”
New York Times
, May 20, 1887, p. 1. For more on the marquis, see Donald Dresden,
The Marquis de Morès: Emperor of the Bad Lands
(University of Oklahoma Press, 1970); and D. Jerome Tweton,
The Marquis de Morès: Dakota Capitalist, French Nationalist
(North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1972).

[>]
“We propose”: Quoted in D. Jerome Tweton, “The Marquis De Mores [
sic
] and His Dakota Venture: A Study in Failure,”
Journal of the West
6, no. 4 (October 1967): 529.

[>]
“distinguished scholar, gentleman”: “De Mores [
sic
],”
Brooklyn Eagle
, October 5, 1885, p. 2.

[>]
“an agreeable cross”: “In the Bad Lands,”
Bismarck Tribune
, January 20, 1885, p. 6.

[>]
“I have tried everybody”: Quoted in Kleeb, “The Atlantic West,” 189, 190.

[>]
“contain the enormous car-loads”: Quoted in ibid., 220.

[>]
“men who did not know”: U.S. Senate,
Investigation of Transportation and Sale
, 4.

[>]
“I do not think”: Ibid., 5.

[>]
“monopoly”: Quoted in “Opposed to the Chicago Men,”
New York Times
, February 28, 1886, p. 2.

[>]
“dressed beef syndicate”: Quoted in “Views of a Ranchman,”
New York Times
, November 26, 1886, p. 6.

[>]
“I want part”: U.S. Senate,
Investigation of Transportation and Sale
, 360–61.

[>]
“at the mercy”: “Butchers to Protect Themselves,”
New York Times
, March 9, 1886, p. 3.

[>]
“an age of organizations”: Quoted in ibid.

[>]
Most of them unloaded: The Iowan’s comments are in U.S. Senate,
Investigation of Transportation and Sale
, 255.

[>]
“entirely unfamiliar”: Quoted in ibid., 82, 83.

[>]
Phil Armour begged: All of Armour’s comments and statistics are in ibid., 425, 472, 480.

[>]
“artificial and abnormal”: Ibid., 33.

3. The (High) Price of Success

[>]
“
BEEF TRUST SQUEEZES
”: “Beef Trust Squeezes Poor for $100,000,000,”
New York Herald
, March 28, 1902, p. 3. The “Beef Trust” label stuck despite the fact that packers sold as much pork as beef; nor did the packers ever organize a formal, legal trust.

[>]
“secretly”: “Beef Trust Now Seeks Corner in Egg Supply,”
New York Herald
, April 18, 1902, p. 3.

[>]
“grip”: Ibid.

[>]
“Cattle and meat”: “Prosperity Causes High Meat Prices,”
Duluth News Tribune
, March 30, 1902, p. 5.

[>]
“Corn is the corner-stone”: George Buchanan Fife, “The So-Called Beef Trust,”
Century
65 (November 1902): 150.

[>]
“wholly unfit”: “Unwholesome Meats,”
Worcester (MA) Daily Spy
, April 30, 1884, p. 6.

[>]
“It is made to look”: Quoted in James Harvey Young, “‘This Greasy Counterfeit’: Butter Versus Oleomargarine in the United States Congress, 1886,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
53, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 398.

[>]
“oleomargarine sacred?”: Quoted in James Harvey Young,
Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906
(Princeton University Press, 1989), 89.

[>]
“how long will it be”: From debate during the 57th Congress, quoted in Young,
Pure Food
, 161–62.

[>]
“a pestilential lot”: Quoted in ibid., 162.

[>]
“We are no longer”: Mary Hinman Abel, “Safe Foods and How to Get Them,”
Delineator
66 (September 1905): 394, 396.

[>]
“for the purpose”: Fife, “The So-Called Beef Trust,” 155, 156.

[>]
“If we have done anything”: Quoted in Michael McGerr,
A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920
(Oxford University Press, 2003), 156, 157.

[>]
“the wheels of modern progress”: Quoted in Hans B. Thorelli,
The Federal Antitrust Policy: Origination of an American Tradition
(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), 414. More than a half-century after publication, Thorelli’s study remains one of the most useful histories, and certainly the most thorough one, of antitrust policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[>]
“combination”: Quoted in Mary Yeager,
Competition and Regulation: The Development of Oligopoly in the Meat Packing Industry
(JAI Press, 1981), 184.

[>]
“simply a dead multi-millionaire”: “Object to Half-Mast Flag,”
New York Times
, April 1, 1903, p. 2.

[>]
“Daylight”: Quoted in Thorelli,
Federal Antitrust Policy
, 430.

[>]
“the great corporations”: Quoted in Arthur M. Johnson, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Bureau of Corporations,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
45, no. 4 (March 1959): 578.

[>]
“young ladies”: “The Public and the Beef Business,”
New York Sun
, April 29, 1905, p. 6.

[>]
“exceptionally poor”:
Report of the Commissioner of Corporations on the Beef Industry
, H. Doc. 382, 58th Cong., 3d sess., xxvii.

[>]
“tedious and voluminous reports”: “The Public and the Beef Business,” 6.

[>]
“popular demands”: Quoted in Gabriel Kolko,
The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–191
6 (The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 81.

[>]
“the greatest trust in the world”: Charles Edward Russell,
The Greatest Trust in the World
(Ridgway-Thayer Co., 1905), 89. Russell’s work originally appeared in
Everybody’s Magazine
from February to September 1905. For background and a biography, see Robert Miraldi,
The Pen Is Mightier: The Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

[>]
“The experiences”: Elting E. Morison, ed.,
The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt,
vol. V,
The Big Stick, 1905–1907
(Harvard University Press, 1952), 176.

[>]
“One feels”: Quoted in Suk Bong Suh,
Upton Sinclair and “The Jungle”: A Study of American Literature, Society, and Culture
(Seoul National University, 1997), 89.

[>]
“I am going to do my share”: Quoted in ibid., 74. A useful recent biography of Sinclair is Anthony Arthur,
Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair
(Random House, 2006).

[>]
“blood and guts”: Quoted in Suh,
Upton Sinclair
, 87.

[>]
“seriously embarrassed”: Arthur,
Radical Innocent
, 70. According to Arthur, Sinclair’s book got a boost when, a few weeks after publication, an attorney for Armour descended upon the Doubleday offices and invited Frank Doubleday to lunch, ostensibly to discuss the possibility of buying advertising in
World’s Work
. The rule about free lunches never proved so true. In exchange for advertising dollars, the attorney explained, Armour wanted Doubleday and Page to curb their support and publicity for the novel. Frank Doubleday was infuriated by the “unbounded cheek” of the suggestion. “Of all the moral degenerates that I ever saw, he was the worst,” fumed the publisher. Doubleday had not been particularly interested in
The Jungle
and certainly not in Upton Sinclair (a “wild man,” according to Doubleday), but the bribery offer turned indifference into a desire to fight Armour. See Arthur,
Radical Innocent
, 71.

[>]
“I have such awful times”: Morison, ed.,
Letters of Theodore Roosevelt
, vol. V, 140.

[>]
“Personally”: Ibid., 179.

[>]
“charitable view”: Ibid., 190.

[>]
“merely perfunctory investigation”: Ibid., 176. Roosevelt wrote the letter after he’d requested Wilson to investigate; the investigators arrived in Chicago on March 10.

[>]
“My dear Mr. Sinclair”: Ibid., 208, 209.

[>]
“the apostles of sensationalism”: Quoted in Young,
Pure Food
, 239.

[>]
“not if Little Willie”: Quoted in John Braeman, “The Square Deal in Action: A Case Study in the Growth of the ‘National Police Power,’” in
Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America
, ed. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and Everett Walters (Ohio State University Press, 1964), 61.

[>]
In 1908, Americans consumed: Statistics are in U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
(Government Printing Office, 1975), 1:329–30. Also published as H. Doc. 93–78-pt.1, 93d Cong., 1st sess.

[>]
“We make great outcry”: Emerson Hough, “Owners of America VIII: The Swifts,”
Cosmopolitan
46 (March 1909): 406–7.

[>]
“a hundred and one million”: Quoted in “Armour Official’s Statement Before House Committee,”
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
, July 9, 1916, p. 11.

[>]
“We shall have”: Quoted in David B. Danbom,
The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930
(Iowa State University Press, 1979), 102.

[>]
“sedition and criminal anarchy”: Quoted in Linda J. Bradley and Barbara D. Merino, “Stuart Chase: A Radical CPA and the Meat Packing Investigation, 1917–1918,”
Business and Economic History
23, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 197. For the socialist leanings of FTC staff members, see the memorandum reprinted as Appendix II in David Gordon, “The Beef Trust: Antitrust Policy and the Meat Packing Industry, 1902–1922” (Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1983), 339–40.

[>]
Armour’s post-decree fortunes: The best summary of Armour & Company’s post-founder history is in N.S.B. Gras and Henrietta M. Larson,
Casebook in American Business History
(F. S. Crofts & Co., 1939), 623–44.

[>]
Consider the breakfast cereal: For the cereal examples, see E.H.S. Bailey, “When Does a Food Become a Luxury?”
Popular Science
77 (December 1910): 592.

[>]
“It is not so much”: “Breakfast Foods,”
The Independent
61 (December 27, 1906): 1577, 1578.

[>]
“herald[ed] the collapse”: “Explosion of a Fundamental Fallacy in Diet,”
Current Literature
43 (September 1907): 327–28.

[>]
“proteid (meat) poisoning”: Stoddard Goodhue, “Adding Years to Your Life,”
Cosmopolitan
55 (September 1913): 434, 438.

[>]
“gout, rheumatism”: Mary Davies Swartz, “How Much Meat?”
Good Housekeeping
50, no. 1 (January 1910): 108.

[>]
“not essential”: C. F. Langworthy, “Cheese and Other Substitutes for Meat in the Diet,” in U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture 1910
, 359, 369. Langworthy’s report appeared as part of the USDA’s annual
Yearbook
, a volume watched closely by home economists, nutritionists, and teachers, who carried its messages into classrooms around the country.

[>]
“We have a great surplus”: Herbert Hoover, “Food and the War,” in U.S. Department of Agriculture, United States Food Administration Women’s Committee, Council of National Defense,
The Day’s Food in War and Peace
(United States Food Administration, [1918]), 11. The document was intended for use as a “textbook” that the government issued in hopes of teaching Americans how to restrict their diets without losing flavor or nutritive value.

[>]
“incontrovertible evidence”: Quoted in Michael Ackerman, “Interpreting the Newer Knowledge of Nutrition: Science, Interests, and Values in the Making of Dietary Advice in the United States, 1915–1965” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2005), 59–60.

[>]
“Feed your body vitamines”: W. A. Freehoff, “Feed Your Body Vitamines,”
Illustrated World
31 (June 1919): 499.

[>]
“carefully balanced”: Ellwood Hendrick, “Vitamines: New Light on the Mysteries of Nutrition,”
Harper’s Magazine
142 (March 1921): 495.

[>]
“unsuited”: Quoted in “Advocate’s Fight for Frankfurter Progressing,”
Butchers’ Advocate and Market Journal
82, no. 10 (December 15, 1926): 9.

[>]
“This is an open attack”: “New York School Board Attacks Frankfurters,”
Butchers’ Advocate and Market Journal
82, no. 9 (December 8, 1926): 11.