Slaughterhouse: Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made

摘要

In "Chicago," poet Carl Sandburg challenged: "Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning." Dominic Pacyga's Slaughterhouse suggests that the plucky, prideful song of Chicago bellowed especially loudly from Packing-town. As Swift and Armour sent chilled beef and canned hams to consumers around the world, Pacyga reminds readers that their plants also drew thousands of visitors annually to see the spectacular scale of the meatpacking district. When the list of products manufactured by the plants lengthened to include hides, hair clips, and sandpaper, so also did the plants produce stereopticon photographs and advertising cards boasting about the act of transformation. While railroad tracks were critical, the organization of the International Livestock Show played a key role in cementing Chicago's preeminence as a livestock shipping destination. 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. The book notes the effects of reform, from workers' fight for shorter hours to reformers' efforts to make livestock slaughter more humane. To tie together these disparate strands, Pacyga argues that the Chicago Stockyards brought into being "the modern" industrial culture-one characterized by large corporations, a factory system that merged human and machine labor, and a transportation system reaching deep into the hinterlands. This modern system, Pacyga writes, "shifted the relationship between worker and owner, manufacturer and consumer" (p. 4). But the notion that the Union Stock Yard helped usher in a modern industrial culture mirrors that of many existing works about the stock yards, and only loosely captures many of the strands in the book, making it difficult to distill what is gained from a site-specific approach. Pacyga disavows categorizing the book as business, labor, ethnic, or social history, and yet, I longed to hear more about how honing in on the stockyards' history addressed core questions in any one of these fields: What does the history of the Union Stock Yard reveal about the character of nineteenth-century capitalism? Did industrial tourism at the stockyards reflect the trends of factory tours taking place elsewhere? How does looking closely at the social geography of the stockyards, specifically, reframe the way we think about Chicago and its hinterlands, or the social history of Chicago, more generally?