Michael's Reviews > Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Excerpted as "Railroads and the Reorganization of Nature and Time" in Gary Kornblith, ed., The Industrial Revolution in America (1998)

To understand Chicago's relationship to the west, one must understand the railroad. At the same time as they came to constitute an infrastructure that enabled the national market, railroads also transform the way Americans perceived space and time. Doing away with localism, the railroads introduced "a new capitalist logic to the geography of the Great West." (p. 140)

Focusing on Railways in Chicago, Cronin explains that railroad promoters cast the technology as "natural" and described it variously as a "geographical power so irresistible that people must shape their lives according to its dictates." (p. 132) At times, railroads even assumed supernatural dimensions as ""talismanic wands" which magically transformed the landscape. Rhetorical excesses or not, these flights of fancy evoke the genuine awe which the railroads inspired. An awe which obscured the social and economic process taking place as the railroads crossed the great western lands.

Railroads transcended the limitations of geography like no other transportation system had before. Unlike the river transport systems of the past, railroads could be built to fit engineers' conceptions of efficient construction, thereby liberating the transport system from the limitations of geography in a way not possible in the past. For the farmers of the Midwest as producers, the greatest benefit was the freedom which rail transport allowed them from the constraints of muddy roads. From the perspective of consumption, the railroad brought the latest goods and fashions from New York and Paris year round. No longer did Chicago's consumers need to wait for the spring thaw.

In addition to overcoming geography, railroads transformed time and space in powerful ways. When railroads and telegraph lines reached Chicago in the early 1850s, a two week trip to NY now took two days and messages that had taken weeks to travel to Chicago now took seconds. With the increased efficiency of rail travel over traditional conveyances of wagons and boats, farmers began to value their own time more highly. Why take a wagon over bad roads and waste now precious time when rail transport was so much more efficient? With this new emphasis on the value of time, the mechanical clock came to replace natural cycles. Rail travel isolated the passenger from the weather and provided a safe and regular way to move people and goods.

The most powerful testament to the power of railroads over time and space is the adoption of standard time. By 1883, the railroad adopted standard time doing away with the local times along the rail routes. On November 18, 1883 the railroads established 4 time zones. This standardization brought greater safety by allowing improved coordination of rail traffic. With standardization of time just one of the daunting management tasks which the railroad owners faced, the management of railroads accelerated the concentration of capital and ownership of a wide range of infrastructure including "land, rails, locomotives, cars and stations, not to mention the labor and fuel that kept everything moving." (p. 139) Coordination of all of these assets required increasing professionalization of management and ultimately led to new hierarchies of power that impacted the entire US economy and shaped American society.

Further notes directly from the text:

In his "Preface" to the book, Cronon builds on the insight from his historiography of the Frontier thesis. He writes a history of the connections between the city of Chicago and the West, not a comprehensive history of either. He does this my looking at commodities as they flow from the producers on the periphery, through the metropolis of Chicago and on to the markets of the East and beyond. Chicago is in this sense the gateway to the Great American West. In his own words:

In Nature's Metropolis, I describe one aspect of the frontier experience on a very macro level: the expansion of a metropolitan economy into regions that had not previously been tightly bound to its markets, and the absorption of new peripheral areas into a capitalist orbit. Frontier areas lay on the periphery of the metropolitan economy, while cities like New York and London lay near its center. Chicago sat in between, on the boundary between East and West as those regions were defined in the nineteenth century. (p. xvi)

His claim that people might need to fight "mystification and boredom" to get through the book are hardly justified. He is an excellent narrator and the tale is fascinating.

In Part II of this book, entitled "Nature to Market," he talks about the commodification of three products -- grain, lumber and meat. The section "Annihilating Space: Meat" describes the industrialization of the commodification of meat. Starting with "The Great Bovine City of the World," he takes us to the stock yards of Chicago's South side. In the 1840s and 50s the yards were run by an assemblage of different owners in a more or less haphazard way with cattle and pig drives coming in from the hinterland. With the coming of the railroads, however, things changed.

The railroads could provide the means to escape these problems and transform Chicago's role in the meat trade. The solution -- the single unified stockyard would concentrate the city's livestock business at one location -- was proposed in the fall of 1864, when Chicago's nine largest railroads, in conjunction with members of the Chicago Pork Packers Association, issues a prospectus for what they called the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company. (p. 210)

In the Exchange Building that was erected next to the yard, men came to buy and sell the animals that were butchered in the yard. In its plush, even luxurious environs, they build an intricate network of trade that abstracted them from the killing happening right outside the door.

Starting in Illinois and Indiana, and moving west further in the country beyond the Missouri River, stood the high grass plains of Nebraska and Wyoming -- with a population in the 1860s of Native Americans and as many at 40 Million Bison. The "Slaughtering the Bison" began in earnest after the Civil War, with the arrival of the Union Pacific in Nebraska and Wyoming in the 1860s.

Suddenly it became possible for market and sport hunters alike to reach the herds with little effort, shipping back robes and tongues and occasional trophy heads as the only valuable parts of the animals they killed. Sport hunters in particular enjoyed the practice of shooting into the herds without ever leaving the trains. As they neared a herd, passengers flung open the windows of their cars, pointed their breechloaders, and fired randomly into the frightened beasts. Dozens might die within minutes, and rot where they fell after the train disappeared without stopping. (p. 216)

The slaughter reached its peak in Kansas in 1870-73 and move on to Texas between 1974-8. The white Americans moving westward were able to defeat the Native Sioux and others because they had destroyed the bison on which native life depended. The defeat of Custer at Little Big Horn was a minor victory on the road to defeat. As the Bison were slaughtered, "Open Range" was transformed into fenced grazing land for cattle ranchers. "Feeding Lots" in Illinois and Iowa fed beef on shocked corn and then shipped them via rail to the Stockyard in Chicago. The railway network allowed Chicago to extend its reach as far as a thousand miles into the hinterland.

The demand for packaged pork in the early 19th C was huge. Unlike cattle, which take well to being herded to a market and could thus be slaughtered near the place were they were to be eaten, hogs are less amenable to herding and were thus often slaughtered where raised and prepared there for shipment elsewhere. Pork packing was an early industry that sprung up on the frontier. As Buffalo rose to prominence in commerce in grain through the pioneering grain elevator system, so Cincinnati, Ohio (located at the confluence of rivers) developed an early dominance in the pork packing trade by pioneering the "disassembly line." As a result of the blockade of the southern Mississippi by the Confederacy Northern farmers had excess grain to feed the pigs, and the demand for packed pork from the Union Army caused a boom in pork packing in Cincinnati, which emerged from the war as the undisputed "Porkopolis."

The convergence of railway lines in Chicago also allowed it the steal the title of "Porkopolis" from Cincinnati, Ohio. The limitation on river based shipment of live hogs had restricted business in Cincinnati during the winter also affected the fledgling Chicago pork packing industry early on. In Chicago they invested in the infrastructure to build slaughter houses along the same lines as Cincinnati, and they started to use the rail lines to ship in ice to preserve pork and also beef. Combining ice harvesting with rail transport, Chicago meat packers gained the ability to "Store the Winter." Gustavus Swift, who moved to Chicago in 1875 experimented with the shipment of dressed beef on the rails, inventing a refrigeration rail car that made it possible to ship all the way to the East Coast. He also added icing stations along the rail lines to keep the beef in good condition.

"Triumph of the Packers" in Chicago was not foreordained when they solved the refrigeration problem. They also had the huge task of convincing people in the East, used to eating freshly slaughtered beef, that beef killed over a thousand miles away was appetizing and safe. The Chicago packers had a real price advantage with dressed beef over fresh, as they only had to ship the edible part of the steer (at first the railroads resisted this move because it would mean less tonnage shipped on their line, until Swift started shipping using the lesser used Grand Trunk Line that skirted the Great Lakes) . Also Swift was a pioneer in the marketing of dressed beef, cutting up the meat in attractive ways for display at the market. He was also brilliant at co-opting the local beef wholesale butcher, having his agents set up partnerships with them to win them over. When they encountered resistance, their economies of scale allowed them to sell at very low prices to establish a foothold in the market. The efficiency of these operations was abetted by the combinations which packers entered into to protect prices. Stock raisers who were hurt by economic slowdowns joined with the wholesale butchers in opposition to the packers.

The meat packers of Chicago were possessed by the same pursuit of efficiency that would animate the progressive reformers that followed them. They came up with uses for unused parts of the slaughtered animals, producing a wide variety of meat byproducts. Yet, this was not unalloyed "progress," since the pollution created by the packing plants and the dangers of adulterated product were ever present. Sinclair Lewis' The Jungle would drive this home in 1906, but the practices described by the muckraking journalist were going on long before his muckraking expose. Cronon points to the fact that if we are too caught up in the progressive revolt against the combinations that ran the packing business, we may forget that, as a congressional commission later pointed out,

Because of the Chicago packers, ranchers in Wyoming and feedlot farmers in Iowa regularly found a reliable market for their animals, and on average received better prices for the animals they sold there, At the same time and for the same reason, Americans of all classes found a greater variety of more and better meats on their tables, purchased on average at lower prices than ever before. Seen in this light, the packers "rigid system of economy" seemed a very good thing indeed. (p. 255)

This "progress" was achieved through the creation of massive vertically integrated corporations. The legacy of figures like Armor and Swift is not so much a personal one of entrepreneurial leadership, as one of large impersonal corporations they left behind, corporations managed by professional managers who, like the consumers, were dissociated from the acts of slaughtering animals. The legacy of the meat packers was one of "Unremembered Deaths" in the stockyards of the South side, which fell into disuse as the corporate form liberated the business from the geographic location in the city. By the 1930s, the rise of diesel fueled trucking made the economic advantage of the railroad concentration at Chicago less beneficial. As meat packing plants opened at other locations more strategically situated, the stockyard shut down all meatpacking in 1960 and then closed in 1970.