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Updated: May 21, 2025
The public cares little, and has not troubled to learn much about the conditions of the workers, without whom there could be no stockyards and no meat-packing industry. Not that some of the investigators have not tried to bring this point forward.
Whether the answer came from paper mills or machine shops, from meat-packing houses or from breweries, from electrical or chemical mills, from railroad or mining companies, from department stores or from publishing houses, everywhere it was acknowledged that they had given hardly any conscious attention to the real psychological dispositions of their employees.
Let us assume, moreover, that the "trusts," including railways, public service corporations, banks, mines, oil, and lumber interests, the steel-making and meat-packing industries, and the few other important businesses where monopolies are established, were owned and operated by governments of this character.
The city was already connected as early as 1863 by telegraph with Chicago, St. Louis, and since 1861 with San Francisco. Lines of the present great Rock Island, Burlington and Northwestern railway systems all entered the city in the years 1867-1868. Meat-packing began as early as 1871, but its first great advance followed the removal of the Union stock-yards south of the city in 1884.
Simons argues that many of the latter are well aware that the ownership of a farm is nothing more than the ownership of a job, and that the capitalists who own the mortgages, railroads, elevators, meat-packing establishments, and factories which produce agricultural machinery and other needed supplies, control the lives and income of the agriculturists almost as rigidly as they do those of their own employees.
It is not easy for America to assimilate large numbers of such backward peoples, but the Slav is coming at the rate of three hundred thousand a year. The Slav is depended upon for the hard labor of mine and foundry, of sugar and oil refineries, and of meat-packing establishments. Hundreds and thousands are in the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and West Virginia.
He had sat in the Congressional galleries in Washington, attended political meetings wherever he could obtain admittance, studied the press in even the smaller towns, travelled through the South and relieved himself of whatever abstract sympathy he may have cherished for the colored race, visited the sweat-shops of New York, the meat-packing establishments of Chicago, the factories of New England, every phase of the great civilization he knew of; and while he found much to admire and condemn, both left him evenly indifferent.
Chicago has long been the largest and the most important among the centers of the meat-packing industry. None of the food trades have received more investigation and publicity, and the need for yet more publicity, and for stricter and yet stricter supervision is perpetually being emphasized.
An agent of the great meat slaughtering firms ordered the butcher to cease slaughtering cattle, and when he refused the agent informed him that his business would be destroyed. He then found himself unable to buy any meat whatever from Chicago, the meat-packing center, and discovered that the railroad would not furnish cars to transport his supplies.
Not content to rest on his laurels, or his braces, he tackled the lumbering industry in the West and the meat-packing industry in the East, both with considerable success. Now he had to sit down and do some figuring when he wished to find out how many millions of dollars he was worth. His wife had died years ago and his only daughter was at home in Baltimore.
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