Sensing Chicago by Adam Mack

Author:Adam Mack [Mack, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252080753
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2015-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Back of the Yards Jungle

Thirty years before Sinclair arrived in Chicago, the city’s meatpacking industry undertook a major expansion around the Union Stockyards. Chicago’s packers traditionally processed pork (salted or smoked) during the colder winter months. Chilling technology, especially the perfection of refrigerated railroad cars, eventually allowed them to operate year round; to reach the urban markets of the East; and to bring a wider range of livestock to buyers. Corporate mergers in the second half of the nineteenth century concentrated the industry, paving the way for the domination of the large packinghouses Sinclair targeted in his novel (Armour, Swift, and Morris). By 1900 the six largest packers slaughtered more than 95 percent of all livestock at the stockyards. The sheer number of animals killed each day attests to the size, complexity, and speed of the production system those corporations developed. The daily volume of the stockyards in 1900 reached seventy-five thousand cattle; eighty thousand sheep; and three hundred thousand hogs.38

Handling thousands of livestock units forced the packing companies to develop a production mechanism that ran continuously and to organize it down to the last detail: the disassembly line. Long before Henry Ford perfected assembly lines for automobiles, the meatpacking industry had developed what Barrett terms the “most sophisticated production process in the United States before the turn of the century.”39 Disassembly took place on a factory floor with a seemingly incongruous organizational scheme. Within giant factory buildings, management controlled both the speed of the line and methods for the smallest tasks on it. The entire process relied on the hands of the individual workers who broke down the carcasses. One of Sinclair’s accomplishments in The Jungle is to capture the feverish sensory environment that workers on the line faced each day. His description of the gritty sights, sounds, smells, feel, and even tastes of the line is richest in the case of Jurgis himself, which we will soon consider in detail.40

The bulk of the work on the disassembly line required no special skills, so the packing companies hired corps of unskilled immigrant laborers.41 Back of the Yards housed a great deal of that workforce, growing by 75 percent in the first decade of the twentieth century, when Sinclair wrote The Jungle.42 Population growth also changed the ethnic makeup of Back of the Yards, transforming the neighborhood from an enclave of Irish and Germans to a diverse collection of immigrants that included Poles and Lithuanians.43 Sinclair’s decision to settle Jurgis and his family there reflected the diverse ethnic character of the neighborhood. The family’s initial housing, a crammed tenement, also captured the density within residences.44 In 1910 researchers found that more than half of the people it surveyed in Back of the Yards slept in rooms that exceeded the minimum standard in local code, four hundred cubic feet per person.45

Crowding also inflamed the pollution of Back of the Yards’ physical environment and bred disease. In The Jungle, Jurgis and his soon-to-be wife, Ona, are overwhelmed by the noxious sights and smells of garbage on their first tour of their neighborhood.

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