Cover of Slaughterhouse
Slaughterhouse Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made
by Dominic A. Pacyga
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Cloth: 978-0-226-12309-7 | Paper: 978-0-226-56603-0 | Electronic: 978-0-226-29143-7
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291437.001.0001

AVAILABLE FROM

University of Chicago Press (cloth, paper, ebook)
Brytewave (CafeScribe-Follett Higher Ed)
ebrary
EBSCO eBooks (formerly NetLibrary)
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

From the minute it opened—on Christmas Day in 1865—it was Chicago’s must-see tourist attraction, drawing more than half a million visitors each year. Families, visiting dignitaries, even school groups all made trips to the South Side to tour the Union Stock Yard. There they got a firsthand look at the city’s industrial prowess as they witnessed cattle, hogs, and sheep disassembled with breathtaking efficiency. At their height, the kill floors employed 50,000 workers and processed six hundred animals an hour, an astonishing spectacle of industrialized death.
Slaughterhouse tells the story of the Union Stock Yard, chronicling the rise and fall of an industrial district that, for better or worse, served as the public face of Chicago for decades. Dominic A. Pacyga is a guide like no other—he grew up in the shadow of the stockyards, spent summers in their hog house and cattle yards, and maintains a long-standing connection with the working-class neighborhoods around them. Pacyga takes readers through the packinghouses as only an insider can, covering the rough and toxic life inside the plants and their lasting effects on the world outside. He shows how the yards shaped the surrounding neighborhoods and controlled the livelihoods of thousands of families. He looks at the Union Stock Yard’s political and economic power and its sometimes volatile role in the city’s race and labor relations. And he traces its decades of mechanized innovations, which introduced millions of consumers across the country to an industrialized food system.
Once the pride and signature stench of a city, the neighborhood is now home to Chicago’s most successful green agriculture companies. Slaughterhouse is the engrossing story of the creation and transformation of one of the most important—and deadliest—square miles in American history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Dominic A. Pacyga is professor of history in the Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author or coauthor of several books on Chicago, including Chicago: A Biography and Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1922, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

REVIEWS

"Pacyga is the great bard of Chicago-historian, raconteur, social critic. Slaughterhouse is a critically important book about one of the city's epic neighborhoods."
— Robert Slayton, author of Back of the Yards

"For many people Henry Ford’s 1913 Detroit assembly line is a symbol of technological triumph. This book shows that Chicago’s 1865 disassembly line was an earlier more complete wonder, rapidly transporting animals, keeping them healthy and watered, dividing them into a wide variety of of products, communicating ownership and destination, and keeping meticulous accounts of all the processes. The speed and dexterity were put on display, proudly exploiting labor, advertising efficiency, making Chicago incredibly wealthy. This is a stunning account of the growth, complexity, rewards, and costs of modernity."
— Garry Wills, author of Lincoln at Gettysburg

"Pacyga has taken as his subject a single square mile, a small patch of urban land on the south side of Chicago, and has told an epic story—the rise of the Union Stockyards and Packingtown, their heyday as a great industrial complex and engine of modern America, their precipitous decline after World War II and their unexpected recent resurgence as a site of new industrial possibilities. It is a big story of rapid, and frequently unsettling, economic, technological, and social change, and Pacyga has told it in a vivid and compelling way."
— Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois at Chicago

“Pacyga has written an intimate, elegant, fascinating, and informative story of one of America’s greatest industrial complexes. As Pacyga shows, the dismal, exploitative, vibrant, and contested histories of the stockyards and the meatpacking factories are illustrative of both the fractured dynamics of American industrial capitalism and the rise and fall of the great industrial city of Chicago. Slaughterhouse is vital reading for all concerned with urban, industrial, and social history.”
— Robert Lewis, author of Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis

“An illuminating history of this Chicago industry long vital to the city and the nation.”
— Wall Street Journal

“In Pacyga's capable hands, the arc of the stockyards mirrors Chicago's—a model of the Industrial Revolution that fell on hard times in the late twentith century and is now reinventing itself. His writing is as streamlined and efficient as the disassembly lines that inspired the book.”
— Chicago Tribune

“Chicago meatpacking is a well-trod subject, but historian Pacyga offers a fresh cut by focusing on the ‘Square Mile’ encompassing the Union Stock Yard and Packingtown. . . . Highly recommended.”
— Choice

Winner
— 2016, Illinois State Historical Society's Russell P. Strange Book of the Year

“A lively and accessible introduction to the significance of Chicago’s Union Stock Yard.”
— The Journal of American History

“This is the thrilling story of Chicago's rise to power on the national stage; not just the ‘hog butcher to the world,’ but an industrial giant that led in technological innovations.”
— Journal of Illinois History

“(A) considerable achievement: writing a short, readable, multi-dimensional history of the Union Stock Yard from dawn to dusk that prompts readers to think differently about the past and also points neighborhood residents to a potentially brighter economic future.”
— Journal of American Ethnic History

“Pacyga's book about Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the surrounding neighborhood is all at once a history of technology and a work of urban, business, and labor history. More impressively, he covers all these subdisciplines well in a slim 200 pages of text. The pictures, almost all of them from the author's own collection of Union Stock Yard ephemera, are astonishing and worth the cost of the book all by themselves. . . . The mastery of so many diverse subdisciplines on display here could teach any historian a thing or two about subjects thy think they already know.”
— Winterthur Portfolio

"Tracing the development of the 500-plus acre facility from the consolidation of several geographically scattered smaller stockyards before the Civil War, through the heyday of the Chicago industry, and into the era of decline in the 1950s, Pacyga ably synthesizes a vast amount of recent scholarship and draws upon his own original research to craft a compelling and highly readable narrative."
— The Historian

“The city of Chicago has an endlessly fascinating history that scholars have explored for several generations. Dominic A. Pacyga, who has written distinguished histories of the city, is one of those scholars. His latest work to examine the history of Chicago is Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made. . . . Few scholars . . . have focused on the Yard as a distinct place with a history all its own and how that history relates to Chicago, the Midwest, and the world. Pacyga writes that history, primarily as the rise and fall of the Union Stock Yard, though that significant “Square Mile,” Pacyga makes clear, has a life after the Yard. 
— H-Net

“Adds to Dominic A. Pacyga's extensive Chicago scholarship, Slaughterhouse: Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made surveys the city's meatpacking industry from its mid- nineteenth-century origins to its post-World War II demise and beyond. . . . Slaughterhouse is an accessible introduction to the history of Chicago's famous stockyards, holding appeal for a general audience—particularly those interested in Chicago history—and undergraduates.”
— American Historical Review

"Slaughterhouse focuses on the site where Chicago staked its claim as Hog Butcher of the world, not on a particular era, firm, organization, or technology. The book explains physical transformations—like the erection of elevated livestock viaducts and fires that ravaged structures on the site...A strength of the book is that it tells both the rise of the Chicago stock-yards and also catalogues their decline...The stockyard’s decline adds new insights into developments in Chicago’s social and economic history, and that of the political economy of modern food systems."
— Kendra Smith-Howard, Technology and Culture

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291437.003.0000
[Place, Memory, Urban , Industrial, Innovation, Modern, Spectacle]
The preface explains the basic book outline and the author's interest in the topic. From the time the Union Stock Yard opened it provided a site for both innovation and spectacle. The chapter also relates the idea of the modern and its relationship to the Union Stock Yard as well as the importance of place and memory in documenting urban and industrial history. (pages ix - xviii)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291437.003.0001
[Tours, Union Stock Yard, Packinghouses, Factory System, Spectacle, Innovation, Guidebooks, Stereopticons, Postcards, Trading Cards, Advertising]
From the very beginning the Union Stock Yard attracted curiosity seekers to witness the innovation and spectacle on hand in the Square Mile. Uniformed guides took visitors through the plants explaining the process that had revolutionized the meat industry and advertising their various products. In addition guidebooks, stereopticons, postcards, trading cards, and various souvenirs were developed to further depict and explain the industry to a curious world. Chicago's packinghouses fascinated the public as they portrayed all of the basic themes of modern industrialization; the large corporation, the factory system with its merging of human labor and machinery, the mass marketing of goods, and a transportation system that collected natural resources from a vast hinterland and distributed goods internationally. (pages 1 - 28)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291437.003.0002
[Livestock receipts, Union Stock Yard, Packinghouses, Packingtown, Octave Chanute, Refrigeration, Ecological problems]
As livestock receipts to Chicago grew having various stockyards located across the city proved less than efficient, and the growing importance of the railroad made those without rail connections obsolete. Construction of a new market officially began on June 1, 1865 and it opened on Christmas Day. The Union Stock Yard, designed by Octave Chanute, quickly developed into the nation's premier livestock market. South Branch packinghouses eventually relocated to the area west of the market soon know as Packingtown. Refrigeration and the development of the refrigerated rail car allowed Chicago's packers to dominate the nation's supply of meat products. Ecological problems emerged from the beginning especially as the packing industry grew at a phenomenal rate (pages 29 - 62)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291437.003.0003
[Town of Lake, Technological Change, Corporations, Workers, Unions, Strikes]
Workers flocked to suburban Town of Lake, built the stockyards, and manned the packinghouses. The area boomed as the industry expanded. Many of the new residents at first were Irish, German, and Czech workers. Working conditions were often poor. The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of the modern in many ways. The structural shifts that appeared in the twentieth century were born in places like the Union Stock Yards and Packingtown in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. An enormous ecological and economic change took place. The development of technology and vast transportation changes created national corporations. Workers created labor unions and stockyard workers played an important role in the 1877, 1886, and 1894 strikes that shook the city and the nation. Modern industrial America emerged out of these clashes. (pages 63 - 92)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291437.003.0004
[Robber Barons, Organizational Revolution, International Livestock Exposition, Immigration, Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, American Meat Institute, Workers, Unions]
After the 1886 strike, the packers felt free to develop their industrial power without resistance from organized labor. The thirty-five years from 1900 to 1925 was a period of almost unlimited growth for the industry. Concentration increased and by 1905 six meatpackers dominated meatpacking. As the industry underwent an organizational revolution that gave the packers more control over the market for livestock and meat products, the public came to perceive them as robber barons. The source of immigration shifted. Spectacle continued to play a role with the creation of the International Livestock Exposition. Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, represented the peak of criticism and controversy. Still the industry sustained its growth and livestock receipts at the Union Stock Yard reached their height in the early 1920s. One of the responses to Sinclair and various government investigations was the creation of the American Meat Institute as an important industry-wide body. Workers meanwhile continued to organize unions. (pages 93 - 136)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291437.003.0005
[Fire, CIO, Great Depression, World War Two, Decentralization, Truck, Direct Buying, Decline, International Livestock Exposition]
On the morning of December 23, 1910, as the city prepared for Christmas, a fire broke out in a Morris & Company plant in the stockyards. This event marked the beginning of the long decline of the Union Stock Yard. Even as it reached its peak in Chicago during World War One, the industry began to change. Both the direct buying of livestock by meatpackers and the use of the truck soon impacted on the industry. A fire again struck in 1934 nearly destroying the livestock market. Meanwhile, the Great Depression witnessed the rise of the CIO's packinghouse union. After World War Two, both packers and the union saw each other as adversaries. The increased use of trucks to move livestock, and the refrigerated truck to move meat products provided a greater geographical flexibility for the industry. Decentralization, the truck, single-story plants, interstate highways, and the suburbs created a new sense of the modern. The big packers fled Chicago. Livestock receipts at the Union Stock Yard continued to decline and in 1971 the Union Stock Yard closed. The International Livestock Exposition outlived the Union Stock Yard: the last stock show took place in 1975 putting an end to spectacle in the Square Mile. (pages 137 - 176)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291437.003.0006
[Central Manufacturing District, Park Packing, Chiappetti Packing, Industrial Park, Tax Increment Financing (TIF), Special Service Area (SSA), Testa Produce, The Plant, Locovore]
After 1971, the Central Manufacturing District (CMD) planned to create an industrial park at the former stockyard location. The original CMD had been the first multi-firm planned industrial site in the United States. Various small packinghouses operated nearby, but soon most left. Two small independent packers, Park Packing and Chiappetti Packing remained in the area. The State of Illinois established a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) law in 1977 and the City of Chicago created a TIF for the Stockyard/Packingtown site in 1989 eventually attracting roughly seventy firms including Testa Produce. In addition "The Plant," a not-for-profit food business incubator has opened outside the TIF area. Both the TIF areas and Special Service Area #13 have revived the square mile and adjacent industrial districts. When the CMD left the area in the 1980s, SSA #13 took over many of the services it once provided. Today the former stockyard site is home to Chicago's most successful industrial park. The chapter ends with a call for a new Chicago livestock, poultry and produce market to serve the locovore market. (pages 177 - 200)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2015. Page maintained by BiblioVault.