- [Narrator] Coming up.

- It was just a shock to the system.

In your face.

This is what the world is gonna be like.

- [Narrator] On Chicago's South Side, a few powerful men completely transformed the way Americans eat.

- A small handful of people reinvented the system of meat delivery.

They streamlined it, industrialized it, automated it.

- [Narrator] But behind the cheap meat were hidden costs.

- The smell was like being in the toilet 24/7.

- This is the results of different accidents that I have.

- You have all of this animal waste and blood running in this creek.

- [Narrator] And in time, the American people would fight back.

- It was just constant lawsuits.

There was just constant investigations, constant bad news.

- The story of meatpacking in Chicago is a story of American capitalism.

- [Narrator] The Union Stockyards, next on Chicago Stories.

(bright upbeat music) ♪ Hot dogs ♪ ♪ Armour hot dogs ♪ ♪ Hot dogs ♪ ♪ Armour hot dogs ♪ ♪ Fat kids skinny kids ♪ ♪ Kids who climb on rocks ♪ - This clean, smooth hot dog in this beautiful bun, and of course everybody wants to eat that.

- [Joshua] Especially if we don't look too hard, or too closely.

(man and children singing) (pigs grunting) (cows mooing) - It covers up such exploitation.

It covers up the using up of human life.

There's no connection between the hot dog I eat and what that worker is paid and how they're living.

- I'm sure that all the kids chasing the hot dog, if they had any clue about what it took and where it came from, they probably wouldn't have been as running as fast.

- [Narrator] The Armour Hot Dog was one of the many meat creations of Chicago's Union Stockyards, a square mile of pens in slaughterhouses on the South Side.

(cows mooing) The stockyards fundamentally changed the way food gets from America's farms to people's dining room tables.

- [Joshua] A world of unimaginable scale, it shocked and fascinated people.

- One single big, huge place where you break the animal down into its minutest parts to make something else.

- They'll use everything but the squeal, and if you could have packed the squeal, you would have used that too.

- It was truly a social transformation and technological transformation.

Everything from agriculture to the natural environment, to public health, to the economies, refrigeration.

This is huge.

(cows mooing) - [Narrator] One of the architects of this brave new world was the meat king of America, Philip Danforth Armour.

- Armour's idea was that abundant beef was the highest goal and it could justify this whole world of industrial production.

And I think the average consumer, as long as they could trust that it wasn't gonna poison them, they would buy into his worldview.

- [Narrator] Philip Armour was no butcher.

- [Philip] I would like to say right here that I never had a knife in my hand, and I am not a butcher by profession.

It may seem ridiculous, but if you showed me a piece of meat, I could not tell you what part of the bullock it came from.

- [Dominic] He was a salesman and a manager.

He knows how to manipulate things.

He knows how to put things together.

(birds chirping) - [Maureen] Philip Armour was born in the early 19th century in Upstate New York.

(rooster crowing) He did what any smart young man did in the 19th century.

He went west all the way to California because of the great Gold Rush.

- [Narrator] Armour crossed vast stretches of America's West, places where herds of bison roamed, hunted by native people.

He saw opportunities here for making money.

(people chattering) - [Philip] When I began my tramp across the continent, we thought the only opening in the world was in California.

I saw openings all the way there.

If you got any really good thing to sell, there are always enough people to consume it.

- He was by any measure, a very smart guy, and realized panning gold was not where the money was gonna be made.

- [Narrator] Instead, he made a small fortune supplying water to gold miners.

Armour then moved to Milwaukee and invested his wealth in hogs.

He predicted the price of pork was going to plummet and sold contracts for future deliveries.

The move reportedly made him a millionaire.

- Market manipulation is very important to a guy like Phil Armour.

- Pretty soon realizes, if you really wanna make some money, you got to go to Chicago.

- [Narrator] In the years before the stockyards opened, the Civil War was already making Chicago a major meat producer.

It was right at the center of the nation's waterways and an ever expanding web of railroads.

- Phil Armour looked at that and said, I want in.

- [Narrator] Armour opened a small provision company along the south branch of the Chicago River.

- [Joshua] People like Armour, they get these lucrative contracts with the Union Army to supply them with cattle, with grain.

- [Narrator] But livestock trading in Chicago was chaotic.

Cows and pigs were herded through the streets.

So, in 1865, a group of railroad bosses and businessmen centralized the industry.

They founded the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company on an inhospitable patch of land, four miles south of downtown.

- [Dominic] It was built on a swamp.

They put a huge sewer down Halsted Street and drained the area.

- [Narrator] The stockyards were outside the city limits, in the town of Lake, where they were free of oversight by city officials.

And the open land offered railroads a clear path in and out.

- It opened on Christmas Day, 1865.

What better way to celebrate Christ's birthday in the most capitalist city in the world than to open a Union Stockyard and create a vast industry?

- [Narrator] Armour set up a meatpacking plant next door in a complex that became known as Packingtown.

Chicago and Philip Armour were now in the middle of a new nationwide meat distribution system.

- The stockyard is essentially a clearing house for animals.

- [Dominic] Cattle can come in from Colorado.

Cattle can come in from Montana.

Cattle can come in from Texas.

- [Joshua] And they're redistributed from Chicago to the northeast of the United States.

- [Dominic] They used to call it a hotel for animals.

Farmers had to pay to have their animals there, fed, watered, and maintained.

A sea of pens, it's almost as far as the eye could see.

- [Narrator] Meatpackers like Armour hoping to turn these animals into steaks and ham sent bidders to look over the merchandise.

- Are you crazy?

How much you want for them cattle?

Come on.

- Like 30 and a quarter.

- How about nine and a quarter?

- [Narrator] It could be dangerous work, especially for a city kid.

- I worked in the hog house.

There's a hog up above, and he turns and he looks at me one way and he turns and looks at me the other way.

And before you know it, he's between my legs and he knocks me down.

And I look up and 200 hogs are coming at me and I turn around and I realize I had not locked the gate.

And they were all headed to Halsted Street.

200 hogs, oh my God (laughs).

So fortunately, the guys on the dock heard me screaming and they came and they slammed the gates and they closed the hogs off.

(cows mooing) - [Narrator] The stockyards radically changed the way Americans bought, sold, and consumed their meat.

(rooster crowing) Traditionally, cattle and hogs had traveled a few short miles or feet from pasture to plate.

- My ancestors used to do it right on the farm.

More of a whole day process to butcher a beef probably, kind of a dirty, messy, (chuckles) dirty, messy atmosphere.

- When you went to a market, you would be staring at a carcass, a large carcass and asking for a specific cut of meat.

Americans were aware of where their food came from in a very visceral way that would likely turn all of our stomachs now.

- [Joshua] Meatpacking is a business of cutting up an animal so you can make money off selling its parts.

And how exactly you do that, and what exactly that looks like, it changed a lot between 1865 and 1920.

(cows mooing) - [Narrator] Now much of the nation's livestock converged in a single, smelly place.

- Roses are red, violets are blue, the stockyards stink, and so do you.

It was a children's rhyme we used to say when we were kids, yeah.

- The smell was like being in the toilet 24/7.

It was terrible.

- My mother's dress was a green linen dress, and the odor in the stockyards permeated this dress.

- [Narrator] The Union Stockyards opened at the height of the Industrial Revolution.

From London to Chicago, new factories were mass producing everything from textiles to tractors.

Philip Armour used a system that was similar to an assembly line, but this was a disassembly line where cattle, hogs, and sheep were rapidly killed and taken apart.

A process that was painstakingly slow on the farm.

- On a farm, it took about eight to 10 hours for a skilled butcher and his assistant to dress a steer.

At Armour, it took 34 minutes.

Back on the farm, you grab a hog, it takes about six hours.

At Armour, it took 24 minutes.

The hog wheel was this huge wheel, sort of like a Ferris wheel.

And the fellow named a shackler would grab the hind leg of the hog and shackle it, and then the wheel would lift the hog up into the air, down to the next man who was the sticker.

And the sticker would slice its throat open.

Cattle were more difficult, cattle are big animals.

- I went to see them actually butcher a cow once.

It's actually terrible to watch.

- They were driven into the pens that were very narrow pens.

And then on a platform up above was a man called a stunner, he carried a sledgehammer.

He would take the sledgehammer and rub its nose, and then it would look up, and as it looked up, he would come down.

- A sledgehammer on the middle of the head.

And when the guy missed, you know, you'd see the eye hanging or anything like that on the animal and until he hit him right.

This is hell (chuckles).

You know, for the first week I was not able to sleep because of that.

- [Dominic] The shackler would grab the legs and shackle it.

Then it would go up and the steam pulley would take it all the way up.

- Going along the line and they got stabbed in the neck.

(Marlene laughs) - And they take this great big sharp knife, one guy does it, and he cuts that cow open right down the middle.

And then all of the guts come out.

I was like.

- [Dominic] Then it would go on to the next person, and next person and next person.

- They would pick a few workers to work as what they called pacesetters.

Everyone had to work at their speed.

And so you could pay just one person to ensure everyone else went faster.

- Efficiency means profit.

- [Narrator] Philip Armour was obsessed with efficiency.

He maximized the money made from each animal by using every last unsavory piece of the pig.

In a word, byproducts.

- [Philip] In the packing houses, every bit of the animal is saved.

Our profits come out of the waste and it is from these profits that we can afford to sell better and cheaper meat than the ordinary butcher.

- [Narrator] Armour said he packed everything but the last breath of a hog.

- There's no way to overestimate the importance of byproducts in terms of subsidizing the low cost of meat for Americans in the late 19th century.

- [Narrator] It was an impressive list of products, some edible, many simply useful.

- [Maureen] Turn it into gravy, turn it into canned corned beef hash.

- [Dominic] Put into things like chili hot dogs.

- And the intestines, no that doesn't go away, that becomes chitterlings.

- Faces of cows, you know, they're removed, and they're turned into dog chews.

Hog guts were used for violin strings, tennis strings.

Hog hairs, you know, they weren't discarded.

Would snip these little hairs out and they'd be used for paintbrushes.

They stuffed sofas and cushions in the Model Ts, purses, belts, shoes, all that stuff is made out of cowhides.

- People had some pretty nice shoes.

- You're also gonna get some blood which can be used for a number of things.

- [Dominic] Fertilizer, all kinds of chemicals, including pharmaceuticals.

Supposedly, you could buy buttons made out of blood on Halsted Street that were from animals that were slaughtered that morning.

And they would bake buttons out of blood.

- [Joshua] It's a grizzly business, but it was a profitable one.

- [Narrator] While Armour enjoyed the profits, an army of laborers did the backbreaking work.

On Armour's vast disassembly line, each was given one repetitive task.

- If you're Phil Armour, what you really want is just an unskilled worker so you can pay them as little as possible.

- [Joshua] Chicago is a city full of immigrants desperate for work.

- [Robert] They're Polish, they're Lithuanian, they are Bohemian, Italian.

- [Joshua] They might not have good command of English.

- My English was very none.

You can imagine that, (laughs) that you hear some guys yelling in Spanish, and other ones in German or in Lithuanian or in Italian, or whatever, you know (laughs).

- [Dominic] Squeegee men had mops to push the blood into the gutters.

You did this for 16 hours, getting 14 and a half cents an hour.

- I had to scoop the blood and the manure from the floors.

This was my job.

It was the worst.

- Beef luggers, beef luggers had to be strong, young men who would lug the beef.

The skilled workers who they were dependent on, they're getting about 50 cents an hour.

- Certainly better pay and opportunity than they would have found in the countries in which they were immigrating from.

But that pay still left them well below what a minimum quality of life would have required.

- In the packing houses, there were no restrooms.

You know what you do?

You find a corner, you know.

You've got steam coming up from the blood, sometimes it's hard to see through the steam.

In the bone plants where they would chop up bones for fertilizer, the little pieces of bone would be in the air and they'd get in your nostrils, and they'd get into your lungs, and they would cause lung disease.

Guys who pulled hides, they had to use chemicals and they didn't wear gloves so their fingers would get all kinds of sores and cuts.

- This is the results of different accidents that I have.

This one was, one day as I was working, one of the pork loins did squash my finger.

This one over here, they just pick up the other part of the finger throw it in the garbage, not on the hamburgers, on the garbage.

- Not only a meat killing, but a kinda human consuming machine that was almost impossible to escape from.

- The prevailing belief was a businessman like Phil Armour should be and is free to do what he wants in his business.

And if people don't wanna work for him, there's always another schmuck who just got off the boat, who will do the work.

- [Narrator] Armour and Company was the world's wealthiest meat-packer by the late 1870s, slaughtering a million pigs a year.

But a challenger was emerging who would completely transform the business.

Gustavus Swift began his career as a butcher in Massachusetts.

- Swift was a real butcher.

I mean, he butchered animals.

He's a major rival.

- He was fed up with having to pay middlemen for his cattle on the East Coast, so he simply relocated his family to Chicago with the intention of only buying cattle and shipping them.

- [Narrator] But Swift soon discovered a problem.

It was expensive to ship live cattle out East.

- [Dominic] Live animals are heavier, and they charged by the pound.

- Very quickly realized that smart money said, slaughter the cattle here and only ship the parts that you need.

His big need right off the bat was for something to move this meat in from Chicago to Boston in two to three days, without it spoiling.

Refrigeration is key to this.

- [Joshua] And so Swift starts to experiment with the refrigerated rail car.

- [Narrator] Swift's new rail cars featured ice chambers on either side.

As warm air rose, it was pulled into the chambers, where it was chilled and recirculated.

- Basically a train that could keep food chilled with ice.

That's not as easy as it sounds.

I don't know.

It sounds like maybe you just put some ice cubes in a train car.

It actually is quite complicated.

- [Dominic] Swift began to build these huge fleets of these cars.

- [Narrator] Keeping beef cool between Chicago and the East Coast required an infrastructure.

Swift set up icing stations along the rail lines to serve as his fleet of refrigerated cars.

- You can never just make a product and sell it.

There has to be an entire network of wholesalers who then had to organize to deliver to retailers who then would finally sell to the customers.

Gus Swift was building a new system, a new system of food logistics.

- [Dominic] It was a tremendous amount of white collar work.

Accountants, bookkeepers, lawyers.

- My job at Armour and Company was a stenographer for three district managers.

Whatever I had to do, I did.

The people working in the offices were mostly white.

- You have to build a system, and that is what Gus Swift did.

It was the system that Phil Armour let him build so that Gus Swift could make all of the mistakes.

It's almost like Gus Swift wrote the dummies guide to building a meatpacking company.

- [Narrator] Armour followed Swift's lead, building his own refrigerated cars, dozens of sales offices, and cold storage spaces across the country.

- He became the biggest meatpacker in the world.

I think he did need a competitor.

I think competitors made him strong.

It certainly was a competition, and a competition that eventually Armour won.

- [Narrator] As Swift and Armour set out to conquer the nation with their refrigerated rail cars, the rivals faced a common enemy, the railroads.

- The railroads had invested millions and millions of dollars in this system.

They had built watering stations and feeding stations along the rails.

They owned the slaughterhouses in New York.

They owned the stockyards in New York.

- Railroads, they don't wanna use the refrigerated cars because they make much more money on transporting live animals.

They refused to carry these refrigerated cars.

- [Narrator] So Swift and Armour shrewdly bypassed the American railroads altogether and used the Canadian Grand Trunk Railway.

- They were more than happy to help because they loathed American railroad companies.

And we're more than happy to do anything they could to mess with their minds.

- And once they had a route to a place like New York or Boston, they were doing so much business that the American railroads became desperate for it.

And so they had to cave and they had to agree to ship Chicago dressed beef.

- [Narrator] Armour and Swift now flooded East Coast cities with a steady supply of Chicago beef.

They threatened to destroy an entire industry.

New York's butchers were starting to feel the squeeze.

- Meatpackers like Armour, like Swift, they would show up in town, they would find all the leading retail butchers, and they would say, basically, either you sign up with us to sell our meat and distribute our meat, or we'll bankrupt you.

- [Maureen] What are you gonna do?

So what you do is attack the meat.

- All of these traditional, wholesale, retail butchers, they'd have signs in their window that said, you know, no Chicago beef sold here.

- This meat is unwholesome.

It's not safe.

Anything from Chicago is probably poisonous.

- Swift says, fine, I'll open my own stores.

Armour says, fine, we'll open our own stores.

- And what they would do is they would sell it at fire sale prices.

- You sell at 10 cents a pound, I'll sell at 7 cents a pound.

You sell at 7 cents a pound, I'll sell at 5 cents a pound.

You sell at 5 cents a pound, I'll give it away at 1 cent.

And then I've got the market.

So it's absolutely ruthless.

- [Narrator] Slaughterhouses shut down across the country.

Butchers either started selling Chicago meat or went out of business.

The industry was now controlled by Armour, Swift, and just a few other Chicago companies.

- The Chicago meatpackers are the architects of a vision of our food that is industrial, divorced from the environments in which cattle were raised.

- You didn't need to think anymore about the four legs that had once carried all that meat upright.

When you were sitting down in your home, it was all relatively tidy and clean.

- Look, my kids as children, thought that, you know, meat came straight from God in a plastic container to Jewel or A&P, right?

The meat is cheap and we get hooked on meat.

- To be a successful American was to be able to afford beef in ever greater quantities.

- [Narrator] To satisfy Americans growing appetite for cheap, mass-produced meat, ranchers had to raise more cattle.

And that required a lot of open land.

The very land that Armour had passed through two decades earlier on his way to California.

- The Far West was the answer to a carnivore nation's dream.

Anybody with a brain could see this was the best place to raise meat for Americans.

It was rich with grass.

And that was the reason that there were millions of bison and the Native Americans relied on the bison.

- Bison were seen as a wild untamed animal, a kind of beast.

That's not compatible with industrial capitalism.

Cattle were seen as a domesticated animal and an animal you could kind of make money off of.

The way to defeat native peoples is to kill off the bison, which are driven nearly to extinction, right?

So there are 30 million animals, by 1900, just a few hundred.

Officials of the United States governments referred to cattle ranching as, "The most efficient instrumentality of solving the vexed Indian question."

- And it worked, it was cruel.

It's one of the worst episodes in American history.

Part of the hidden cost of cheap meat was the concerted organized effort to eradicate bison in order to get rid of indigenous people.

The indigenous peoples west of the Missouri River were in effect starved out of existence.

And we can trace the explanation of that directly into the mouths and stomachs of Americans who were insisting that meat be available to them.

There's no way to get around it.

(cows mooing) - [Narrator] Back in Chicago, Philip Armour reaped the rewards.

He lived near the lake on Prairie Avenue, a street known as Millionaires Row.

And he worked downtown in a home insurance building, the city's first skyscraper.

- [Philip] All my life, I have been up with the sun.

I have my breakfast by half-past five or six.

I walk downtown to my office and I'm there by seven.

And I know what is going on in the world without having to wait for others to come and tell me.

- Armour essentially says, you know, he doesn't love money.

He loves making money.

For Armour this is obviously a business, but it's also about remaking the world in terms of his vision, which is abundance, low cost.

And low cost is justifying anything he wants to do.

- And it gave him power.

It gave him power in the public realm because people like beef.

- [Narrator] Armour worked long hours by choice, but four miles south of his downtown office, it was a different story.

- [Dominic] There were no eight-hour shifts.

If packing house workers showed up a minute late, they'd get docked an hour's pay.

- And we were not permanent workers.

Sometimes we work eight, sometimes nine or 10 hours.

Sometimes we double up and we work 16 hours depending upon the demand of the work.

And we work all that they give us because we know that the following day might not be any work.

- They have so many men waiting, looking for jobs, some days, they just walking like between cattle and pick the best looking man or maybe the-- - Strongest looking one.

- You come.

Well, he come.

He got a job.

How long?

I don't know.

- And sometimes you might have to wait.

If the cattle hadn't arrived yet, they still wanted you on hand unpaid for hours.

- And the industrial power of the United States is just human bodies.

- They were part of the great packing machine.

- [Narrator] Early attempts to unionize were quickly crushed.

Philip Armour made it clear, he would sooner move his operations out of Chicago.

- [Philip] We shall employ what men we choose.

And when we can't, why, we'll nail up our doors.

That's all.

This sort of thing is the beginning of the end of Chicago's supremacy as a packing center.

- Chicago could go to hell.

He was always threatening to leave.

- Armour had an ideological opposition to labor unions.

He was a believer in the right to contract.

That anyone who would agree to something should be able to agree to it, no matter how poorly paid, no matter how dangerous.

- [Narrator] Tensions between workers and company owners came to a head in 1886, and not just in the stockyards.

on May 1st, workers in factories across America walked out, demanding an eight-hour day.

At first, the strike seemed like a success.

Armour and other meatpackers agreed to their workers' demands, but then came an event that shook the world.

On May 4th, Chicago Police marched on a labor demonstration near Haymarket Square.

- A bomb goes off.

(bomb booming) Panic ensues, police officers shoot wildly, blindly.

Police officers are killed.

Lots of workers are shot.

- There was a tremendous reaction against labor unions.

- [Narrator] Armour and the other meatpackers announced that employees would go back to working 10-hour days at their old wages.

Thousands walked off the job.

- (Joshua) For Armour, this was an outrage.

And what Armour does is he basically says, okay, well, you're all fired.

And the Chicago meatpackers, on trains, they bring in strikebreakers, replacements.

- [Narrator] Armour brought African-Americans up from the South on cattle cars.

- And they bring in African-Americans, and they are coming into these spaces where they're not supposed to be.

And you have violence.

- [Robert] They're not told that we have a strike that's unfolding.

They don't know that until they get here.

- [Sylvia] You're talking about competing forces of marginalized people for jobs.

- [Narrator] To keep the upper hand, the bosses brought in the Pinkertons.

- [Dominic] Pinkerton is a detective agency, supposedly, but it was also the armed goons of industrial America.

- The mall cop (chuckles) only with deadly weapons.

- Mr. Pinkerton was originally the guy who protected Lincoln, right?

Obviously, not well.

- [Narrator] Armour invited Union leaders to his downtown office to talk the situation over face-to-face.

- The workers complained about the Pinkertons.

Armour of course says, I didn't hire them, you know, but of course he did.

Armour actually tells his workers that he's in favor of the eight-hour day.

You know, "Oh, I love my workers.

I love everybody.

But you know, I'm competing with packing houses in St. Louis that are run to 10, 12-hour day.

We're competing with the packing houses in Kansas City and Sioux City, how can you compete with these people?

If I have to pay you, I'll go out of business."

- And it's an effective argument, unless you know what's really going on here.

His brothers are running those facilities that are using the 10-hour day.

- [Narrator] In the end, Union leaders told their members to halt the strike.

And Armour's workers returned to 10-hour days.

- Workers are rounded up.

Union officers are padlocked.

Union printing presses are destroyed (laughs).

And the labor movement goes into a deep freeze.

- Armour says, "Unionization is gonna mean you aren't gonna be able to afford the meat you've become accustomed to."

He's essentially ensuring the American public will side with him against any attempts to unionize.

By 1890, Armour is undoubtedly the richest of the Chicago meatpackers.

He's also one of the richest, if not the richest person in Chicago.

- [Narrator] But Armour's ascendancy was attracting unwanted attention from Washington D.C. Congress had been fielding angry complaints from some influential constituents: ranchers, butchers, the railroads.

Their businesses were all suffering under the utter dominance of Armour.

- There was a great cattle bust in the Far West and prices for cattle just collapsed, ranches went broke, people lost money.

That's what prompted these hearings, because the belief was very strong that somehow Swift, Armour, that they were organizing, colluding to set prices for cattle and for the meat.

- And so they convened a committee to investigate both the transportation and sale of meat products.

And it was led by a guy named George Vest.

Vest was a senator from Missouri.

He had actually been a Confederate during the American Civil War, but he had rehabilitated himself.

And he kind of had built a reputation as someone who wanted to investigate American business.

- [Narrator] Senator Vest subpoenaed Philip Armour to appear before his committee at the US Capitol.

- [Maureen] They're all just convinced that Phil Armour is to blame.

- [Joshua] In this very dramatic scene, he shows up.

He has a prepared statement.

- [Philip] Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I respectfully ask leave to submit a statement which gives my opinion of the causes that have brought about the depreciation of the price of cattle.

(overlapping dialog) value of hides, tallow, oleomargarine oil, fresh meat cuts, and canned-- - Armour is performatively indignant.

If you remember any of the times that CEOs are called before Congress.

- [Philip] Many foreign countries following the precedent-- - [Maureen] He spent all of his time talking about the global market, people in Europe wanted this, and people in China want that.

- [Philip] Beef from Australia, New Zealand, and South America and European countries.

- Chicago maybe is base, but the business is global.

- When asked if he colludes, he famously says that sometimes they cooperate, the meatpackers, but it's in the consumer's interest.

- [Narrator] Armour admitted setting prices, but claimed he was doing Americans a service.

After all, didn't they want cheap meat?

- [Senator Vest] You fix the price, both as to cut meats and as to can meats with other dealers?

- [Philip] Yes, sir.

- [Senator Vest] Now, I ask you who those dealers are.

- [Philip] I will state who is not in it.

- [Senator Vest] I do not care about knowing who is not in it.

- [Philip] I ask to be excused until I can consult my attorney.

- They ask him, has he been bankrupting these butchers?

And he says, of course not.

And then they produce evidence.

They produce a telegram from the Armour headquarters to their local agents saying, either get this guy on board or make him bankrupt.

- [Philip] I would not know what one of my clerks out of so many did.

As I explained, I do not know the details of the business.

- Competition is a great thing to talk about, and say is a great American ideal.

But in reality, if you can cut down on the competition, you can make a bigger profit.

And that's exactly what Armour and all of them did.

(indistinct chattering) - [Narrator] In 1893, millions came to Chicago from across the globe for the World's Colombian Exposition.

Many made a stop at Packingtown.

The slaughterhouses had become a must-see for tourists who wanted to witness modern industry in action.

- First tours actually, were run by kids from Canaryville.

You pay them a nickel or a quarter, they would take you into the yards and show you around and tell you stories.

The turn of the century, 500,000 people a year came to tour the stockyards and the packing houses adjacent.

Russian princes came here.

Japanese businessmen came here.

Sarah Bernhardt, the actress, came here 'cause she had to see the stockyards.

It was just a shock to the system.

There's a wonderful Japanese word Buddhists use, satori, slap in the face.

It means epiphany.

Well, this was a satori, it was a slap in the face.

This was a modern in your face.

This is what the world is gonna be like.

- [Narrator] Chicago had annexed the stockyards in 1889.

Now one of every four Chicagoans depended on the industry for their employment.

Many lived in a vast slum known as Back of the Yards.

- [Dominic] Back of the Yards was just off on the Prairie, just west of the packinghouses.

- It was an area of immigrants.

It was an area of waste.

It was an area that was used for disposal.

- [Dominic] It was very much a highly industrialized neighborhood, a pall of smoke and smell hanging over it constantly.

- It's hideous and horrifying because you have all this animal waste and blood running right behind them in this creek.

- [Dominic] Bubbly Creek had crossed Ashland Avenue right at 41st Street.

That was the northern boundary of the neighborhood.

The western boundary were the garbage dumps, west of Damen.

- Wherever you had a poor neighborhood, that's where the dumps were placed.

You're not gonna put that dump site in a Rockefeller's neighborhood.

- [Dominic] The death rate for children was three to five times higher in this neighborhood than it was in Hyde Park, which is only about 20 minutes away by a street car.

- [Sylvia] It was just a toxic situation, literally and figuratively.

- [Narrator] Philip Armour was eager to show he was doing his part to help his workers.

He created The Armour Mission, a Sunday school for South Side children.

He insisted that it be nondenominational.

- [Philip] I don't care whether the converts are baptized in the soup bowl, a dish pan, or the Chicago River.

I'm just a butcher trying to go to heaven.

- [Narrator] He donated $1 million to start the Armour Institute, where young people could get the skills they needed in an increasingly high-tech world.

It later became the Illinois Institute of Technology.

- [Philip] We wanna make some fine Americans out of rough material.

Here are some young foreigners, they are learning our language, they're studying American history.

They're having it impressed on their minds, what this country means and how it differs from others.

- There's lots of buildings that have the names of industrialists on them, who did absolutely terrible things to human beings.

And then used the wealth that they created from that exploitation to alter the public perception.

- [Narrator] The job of improving the lives of Armour's workers would fall to a woman known as the "Angel of the Stockyards."

Mary McDowell was a former Sunday school teacher who chose to live in Back of the Yards despite her social pedigree.

- When Mary McDowell came here, she said it was like going to the Wild West.

She was from Evanston, right?

And she was a little more civilized.

- She is a progressive and she feels a need to help the immigrants in the Back of the Yards.

- [Narrator] Inspired by her friend Jane Addams, McDowell opened a settlement house and started offering kindergarten, day nurseries, and classes in music, drama, and English.

- Housewives could come there to have some vegetables grow, to learn some knitting, to have their children come together to play.

- [Narrator] She also began crusading for environmental justice.

- Mary McDowell saw that the stockyard waste was not being created by the immigrant, but they were the ones suffering from it.

There is a mindset of people being responsible for themselves.

You know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps even if you're sinking in 12 feet of feces.

- [Narrator] McDowell waged a relentless campaign to clean up Bubbly Creek.

She fought to build parks for the neighborhood children.

And she engaged in a year's long battle to close the local garbage dump.

- Mary McDowell's like, children are continuing to get ill 'cause you got these dumps.

Your children are continuing to get ill because you got this methane gas and this is what that means.

- [Narrator] McDowell's social class gave her an advantage.

She had the power to hold the likes of Philip Armour accountable.

- You understand your father is that person of power, your uncle, your brother is that person of power.

She understood their mindset and she knew how to work the system.

- [Narrator] In time, McDowell forced the city not only to close the dump, but to create a modern citywide garbage system.

Thanks to her protests, a park did open in Back of the Yards.

And though it took three decades of complaints, the city finally filled in the most polluted section of Bubbly Creek.

- She's the mother of environmental justice, because it was complete injustice for them to live there and suffer from that, become ill and die from it.

(air whooshing) (footsteps plodding) - [Narrator] On a cold, snowy day in 1901, Philip Armour got into a snowball fight with his grandchildren and soon, he fell ill with pneumonia.

- [Philip] I know I am very sick and I'm ready for death when it comes.

- [Narrator] Philip Armour died at his Prairie Avenue home at the age of 68.

National headlines mourned the loss of a self-made man who had become a millionaire packer and noted philanthropist.

Two years later, Gustavus Swift followed Armour to the grave.

With the founding fathers of Packingtown gone, their sons inherited businesses that looked increasingly vulnerable.

- When they took over, it was their job to try to keep the companies alive and protect them from the force of the law.

And it was just constant lawsuits, there was just constant investigations, constant bad news.

(cows mooing) - [Narrator] In the fall of 1904, a reporter from a socialist newspaper made his way through Packingtown.

He took particular interest in sanitation in the slaughterhouses, and the horrors of workers' day-to-day lives.

His name was Upton Sinclair.

- [Maureen] He was a wannabe socialist.

His father was a drunk and he died and he left the family impoverished.

And Upton Sinclair never got over that, and he embraced socialism.

- He wanted to write a book that would inspire people to overthrow this entire system of industrial beef and industrial food and perhaps American capitalism.

- [Narrator] Sinclair set up shop at Mary McDowell's settlement house.

- He talked to a lot of people in taverns.

- [Giedrius] With workers, with policemen, with saloon owners, with doctors, with priests.

- Sinclair visited the packing houses, I think actually three times.

- So he had this pail like a simple worker, with his lunch.

He was observing and then he describe.

His idea was to show the brutality of life and to force people feel compassionate for these workers.

- [Narrator] Sinclair turned his reporting into a novel.

He called it The Jungle.

- [Joshua] He tells us the story of a family of Lithuanian immigrants, trying to make it in America, working in the stockyards.

- Terrible things happen to the entire family, death and rape and people injured.

- Final resolution of it, it's the strike.

And the final words of course is, "Chicago will be ours."

It means for socialists.

- [Narrator] Philip Armour's son tried to kill the book.

- The thing that Armour wanted to not let it be printed in Europe.

Doubleday and Page gave rights to everyone who wants to translate the book.

There were 17 translations published around the globe.

- [Narrator] The Jungle was an instant best seller when it hit bookstore shelves in 1906.

- Largely because of the gore and the guts.

- [Movie Narrator] It told of conditions of filth and carelessness in the handling of meat, which were exposing the people of the United States to all manner of deadly disease.

- It's an outrage.

- A man isn't safe even at his own dinner table.

- There's stories in The Jungle of rat feces getting into sausage.

There's stories of workers being injured and falling into things while meat is cooking, contaminating with their blood or their sweat, or their body parts, a finger goes into the sausage.

- People start thinking of this, oh my goodness, I will be vegetarian.

- Teddy Roosevelt latched on to this, he came into the White House determined to bust all of the trusts.

He didn't wanna destroy corporations, but what he thought was there needed to be some rules for the corporate capitalists.

This might be the way to break the meatpackers kneecaps.

And it worked better than anything else he had done.

- [Narrator] Roosevelt invited Upton Sinclair to the White House.

- [Dominic] He's a socialist invited by Teddy Roosevelt to the White House.

- Oh, it's nice.

I'm a writer of 27, the president invites me for lunch, I would go of course.

And Roosevelt said, I have one question for you, is The Jungle true?

- Teddy Roosevelt says, okay, we need to investigate this.

It leads to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, as well as the Federal Meat Inspection Act.

Both measures intended to restore the public's faith in the safety and the sanitary qualities of their meat and their food.

But what's telling about that is he doesn't do anything to address the conditions of the American worker or what's happening to cattle ranchers or what's happening to traditional wholesale butchers.

- Sinclair famously says, "I wrote this book and I was aiming for the hearts of Americans, but I missed (chuckles), I hit their stomach."

- [Narrator] But the meatpackers' reputation had suffered a blow that left them open to attack.

The federal government launched yet another investigation during World War I.

Meat prices had suddenly spiked spurring riots in New York City, Boston and Philadelphia.

- Why are these prices going up so high?

What's going on here?

- And what they find is not just that the Chicago meatpackers have their finger in a lot of pies, they pretty much have their finger in all the pies.

They start to have interest in stockyards around the country.

They control the distribution of fresh fruits and vegetables.

They find that they're heavily invested in grain futures.

- [ Maureen] The attorney general of the US said that he was going to take them to court yet again.

Rather than face another lawsuit, the packers decided to sign this consent decree.

- The Packers and Stockyards Act, which says essentially that the Chicago meatpackers and these packing companies, they have to focus only on the meat processing side of their business.

- They were never ever again the cultural and economic powerhouses that they had been before 1921.

That way of making meat was over and done with.

(cows mooing) - [Narrator] With the bosses up against the ropes, workers saw an opening.

In the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations successfully unionized thousands of workers in Armour's and Swift's Chicago meatpacking plants.

- They start to transform the nature of work in a slaughterhouse in Chicago.

It doesn't become any easier, but it becomes a route to some kind of middle-class life.

It becomes better paid.

- Every year, when new cars came out, everybody had it.

Everybody had the newest Impala (chuckles) or Chevy.

- We owe our well-being into the union and the union people that negotiated those benefits for us.

I was able then to move up in the ranks of the union.

I'm proud to say, when the kids see me, they are able to, to yell to me, hey papa (speaks in foreign language) which means, "Yes, we can."

- [Narrator] It had been technologies like refrigerated train cars that ensured the dominance of Chicago's meatpackers.

And now new technologies would prove to be the final nail in their coffins.

- [Dominic] When refrigerated trucks came in, you could bring meat anywhere quickly.

- [Joshua] And once you have highways, you can move where you process meat.

It doesn't need to be in a place like Chicago, you can move it to the rural places where cattle are raised.

- World War II kept the old packers going because of demand.

But just a few years after World War II, what was left of Swift and Armour quickly got gobbled up by other big corporations.

- [Narrator] Armour and Swift both shut down their Chicago meatpacking operations by the early 1960s.

The Union Stockyards days were numbered.

- There simply were not enough livestock coming in to justify the maintenance of large processing facilities.

- [Dominic] The last year the stockyards opened, I think there's three quarters of a million herd of cattle.

That's all.

We don't do hogs or sheep at that point.

Suddenly, the land becomes more valuable to sell off to other industries than to maintain a livestock market in Chicago.

- [Narrator] 105 Years after it opened, Chicago's Union Stockyards closed for good on July 30th, 1971.

- That eliminate a lot of companies around here, a lot of jobs in the Chicago area.

- Many families where probably kids grew up thinking they would go to work in the packing plant, there would have to be other ways to get a living.

- [Dominic] And there still are some buildings that are standing.

There's the old Swift building on Packers Avenue.

There's various Armour buildings closer to Ashland Avenue.

There's quite a few, actually small meatpacking plants left but not slaughterhouses.

There's only one slaughterhouse left.

(vehicles moving) - [Narrator] And yet the world that Philip Armour imagined is still very much alive and well.

(cows mooing) - The big thing in the new wave of packing plants was that they were launched by people who hated unions and built the plants intentionally to avoid the need for unions.

- And they go back to the same tactics that people like Armour used.

Armour employed vulnerable recent immigrants.

- This migrant and immigrant population that doesn't have the political power and the protections that they need.

- [Dominic] Vietnamese and Hmong and Indian, Pakistani.

- This story is never gonna end.

- The industrial system really supplies extremely cheap meat products for the average American consumer.

I can't compete with the big guys, the big packers.

- [Maureen] There is a very high cost to cheap food, a very high cost.

- When people raised criticisms of how Armour produced beef he said, "If you want me to change my business practices, the common laborer won't be able to afford their beef steak."

Today, the meatpackers say, "If you want us to change your business practices, you're not gonna be able to afford your hamburger."

(meat sizzling) Armour's world is back with us and remains with us today.

(cows mooing) - [Philip] We shall see other fortunes made, like mine has been, out of the things we now waste.

The boys who get out all there is in that last breath will have a bigger business than mine.

(cows mooing) We're at the beginning of things, not at the ending.

(cows mooing) (blade cutting) (bright upbeat music)