In Meat We Trust by Maureen Ogle Read Free Book Online

north of where the World Trade Center once stood.) Having demolished the old, crews began constructing the new: a structure that ran eighty feet front to back, stood two stories high, and was reported to be a giant “refrigerator.” No one knew much about the property’s purpose or owner, but the rumor mill churned with tidbits that pointed toward a company that planned to distribute fresh beef shipped from Chicago.
    The speculation ended in early October when workers hoisted a sign into place— G. F . & E. C. SWIFT . A barge crossed the Hudson River from New Jersey and delivered several tons of fresh beef to the water-side door, and the manager opened the facility to visitors, buyers, and reporters and explained the whats and whys of the venture. Yes, he said, the Swift brothers would ship fresh beef rather than live cattle from Chicago to New York; doing so would reduce the price that consumers paid for steaks and roasts. The shipments of fresh beef would also eliminate the need to transport live cattle from west to east and to march them through New York’s streets to the nearby slaughterhouses. Dressed beef, crowed a reporter, promised to eradicate the city of the “abominable nuisances”of local butcheries, rendering plants, and “bone-boiling works.” Now all of that could stay out in Chicago “where they rather like such things.”
    If only it were that simple. Within days, the city’s stockyards and slaughterhouses buzzed with new rumors, this time warning of retaliation and warfare. According to gossips, the Swifts’ dressed-beef venture threatened the titans who transported live cattle by train from Chicago to New York; who owned the trains that carried the cattle; who owned all or part of the stockyards in Chicago, New York, and along the route to the East; and who owned New York slaughterhouses where the animals were turned into beef for Manhattan, Brooklyn, and other towns and cities in the region. Surely those men would not allow the Swifts to drive a wedge between them and their profits. By early November, newspapers nationwide were reporting that the railroad-stockyard-cattle-dealer-slaughterhouse kingpins, led by the powerful Vanderbilt family of New York, planned to destroy the Swift brothers by launching a rival dressed-beef venture. The old guard denied the rumors, but they warned the public to beware: the Swifts were “trying to force their beefon the public,” explained John Dutcher, a major cattle dealer and investor in both railroads and stockyards. If they succeeded, they would create “one of the greatest monopolies ever known in this country,” and then they would “put on the screws, and make consumers pay whatever price they please” for meat. Nonsense, retorted the man who had designed the Swifts’ refrigerated railcars. The brothers were neither monopolists nor “sharks”but entrepreneurs who had developed a “superior system” of supplying beef. Gustavus Swift was a good “Christian” and a “public benefactor,” he told an inquiring journalist, who wanted to “do good rather than evil” by providing Americans with inexpensive meat and employing “hundreds” of men with “good and sure pay.”
    A Boston newspaper reporter took the matter directly to the Swifts themselves in an interview at their offices in that city. Did they believe the rumors? he asked. Did they fear Vanderbilt and his cronies? Gustavus Swift dismissed the fuss. The name-calling and rumors of revenge were inevitable, he said. His opponents had invested millions building an infrastructure to transport live cattle from west to east and had earned “gigantic fortunes”doing so. But in the end, what did they have? Stockyards, and those were nothing more than a few acres of “sheds and fences,” property that his “refrigerator business” would render worthless. So, prodded the reporter, would the Swifts back down? Could the “cattle yard railroad ring” stop them? “Stop us!” G. F.