and fuel, drive up the prices of goods in a national economy. Their belief that Armour and other packers earned excessive profits was based entirely on the fact that the prices butchers and wholesalers paid for beef appeared to be high relative to the prices those packers paid for cattle at the stockyards.
In 1890, the packer hearings and the outburst of antimonopoly fever resulted in the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which banned any activity that restrained trade. But the law proved a milquetoast piece of legislation that appealed to voters and eased politicians’ consciences and did little to stanch corporate power. It oozed loopholes, and in the decade after its passage, mergers, syndicates, and holding companies proliferated as corporate managers sought ways to create efficiency and earn profits. More to the point, however, it also left the dressed-beef packers free to expand their empires, and that, in turn, saddled them with a reputation for playing foul with the nation’s stomachs and placed them on a collision course with a president and a novelist.
3
The (High) Price of Success
I N 1902, A MYSTERIOUS and short-lived “beef famine” drove meat prices into the stratosphere. “BEEF TRUST SQUEEZES POOR FOR $100,000,000” announced a headline in the New York Herald in March 1902. The Herald reporter told readers that a “Beef Trust” “dominat[ed]” the nation’s food supplies by using “despotic and aggressive” tactics that had “killed” competition. Readers who stayed with the story—and who could resist?—learned that the trust controlled 75 percent of the nation’s egg and poultry supply. Swift executives had “secretly”stashed 43 million eggs in cold storage and planned to release or hold the cache “as suits their convenience in manipulating the market.” The trust (whose membership numbered either four, five, or six firms, depending on the whim and knowledge of reporters) practiced collusion through a hired hand who maintained a secret office somewhere on Madison Avenue in New York City. The trust controlled the stockyards, cheated livestock producers, fixed prices for steak, and woe be to anyone or anything that tried to stop it. Americans’ only hope of escaping the trust’s “grip,”concluded one reporter, was by becoming “rigid vegetarians.”
Cooler heads tried to explain that the “famine,” which was less a famine than a temporary shortage of preferred cuts like tenderloin, had more to do with weather conditions and tight cattle supplies than the evil machinations of corporate tycoons. Agriculture Secretary James Wilson, himself an Iowa farmer and livestock producer, blamed high meat prices on a bad corn crop. “Cattle and meat,”he explained, “like all other commodities, have to follow the laws of supply and demand”; supplies of corn and cattle were low and prices of meat high. “Corn is the corner-stoneof the livestock industry,” explained the author of an essay in Century magazine. When the corn crop was “off,” beef prices rose. He added that farmers could not bring cattle or hogs to market weight fast enough to keep pace with consumer demand caused in part by an increase in national population; meat prices would remain high until cattle and hog herds increased.
Logic and facts be damned. The Herald ’s exposé, which was reprinted in hundreds of newspapers and read into the Congressional Record , ran long on supposition and rumor and short on substance and facts. Many of its most dramatic revelations came from anonymous sources alleged to be former employees of one or another of the packinghouses. But its accuracy, or lack thereof, mattered not a whit to readers predisposed to believe the worst of corporations in general and the meatpackers in particular, and who were increasingly suspicious about foodstuffs that came from factories, especially their meat. Although the meatpackers did not yet know it in 1902, the famine uproar would land them
In 1890, the packer hearings and the outburst of antimonopoly fever resulted in the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which banned any activity that restrained trade. But the law proved a milquetoast piece of legislation that appealed to voters and eased politicians’ consciences and did little to stanch corporate power. It oozed loopholes, and in the decade after its passage, mergers, syndicates, and holding companies proliferated as corporate managers sought ways to create efficiency and earn profits. More to the point, however, it also left the dressed-beef packers free to expand their empires, and that, in turn, saddled them with a reputation for playing foul with the nation’s stomachs and placed them on a collision course with a president and a novelist.
3
The (High) Price of Success
I N 1902, A MYSTERIOUS and short-lived “beef famine” drove meat prices into the stratosphere. “BEEF TRUST SQUEEZES POOR FOR $100,000,000” announced a headline in the New York Herald in March 1902. The Herald reporter told readers that a “Beef Trust” “dominat[ed]” the nation’s food supplies by using “despotic and aggressive” tactics that had “killed” competition. Readers who stayed with the story—and who could resist?—learned that the trust controlled 75 percent of the nation’s egg and poultry supply. Swift executives had “secretly”stashed 43 million eggs in cold storage and planned to release or hold the cache “as suits their convenience in manipulating the market.” The trust (whose membership numbered either four, five, or six firms, depending on the whim and knowledge of reporters) practiced collusion through a hired hand who maintained a secret office somewhere on Madison Avenue in New York City. The trust controlled the stockyards, cheated livestock producers, fixed prices for steak, and woe be to anyone or anything that tried to stop it. Americans’ only hope of escaping the trust’s “grip,”concluded one reporter, was by becoming “rigid vegetarians.”
Cooler heads tried to explain that the “famine,” which was less a famine than a temporary shortage of preferred cuts like tenderloin, had more to do with weather conditions and tight cattle supplies than the evil machinations of corporate tycoons. Agriculture Secretary James Wilson, himself an Iowa farmer and livestock producer, blamed high meat prices on a bad corn crop. “Cattle and meat,”he explained, “like all other commodities, have to follow the laws of supply and demand”; supplies of corn and cattle were low and prices of meat high. “Corn is the corner-stoneof the livestock industry,” explained the author of an essay in Century magazine. When the corn crop was “off,” beef prices rose. He added that farmers could not bring cattle or hogs to market weight fast enough to keep pace with consumer demand caused in part by an increase in national population; meat prices would remain high until cattle and hog herds increased.
Logic and facts be damned. The Herald ’s exposé, which was reprinted in hundreds of newspapers and read into the Congressional Record , ran long on supposition and rumor and short on substance and facts. Many of its most dramatic revelations came from anonymous sources alleged to be former employees of one or another of the packinghouses. But its accuracy, or lack thereof, mattered not a whit to readers predisposed to believe the worst of corporations in general and the meatpackers in particular, and who were increasingly suspicious about foodstuffs that came from factories, especially their meat. Although the meatpackers did not yet know it in 1902, the famine uproar would land them
Similar Books
