Gustavus Franklin Swift

Gustavus Franklin Swift Sr. (June 24, 1839 – March 29, 1903) was an American business executive. He founded a meat-packing empire in the Midwest during the late 19th century, over which he presided until his death. He is credited with the development of the first practical ice-cooled railroad car, which allowed his company to ship dressed meats to all parts of the country and abroad, ushering in the "era of cheap beef." Swift pioneered the use of animal by-products for the manufacture of soap, glue, fertilizer, various types of sundries, and even medical products.

Chicago and the birth of the meat-packing industry

Following the end of the American Civil War, Chicago emerged as a major railway center, making it an ideal point for the distribution of livestock raised on the Great Plains to Eastern markets. Getting the animals to market required herds to be driven distances of up to to railheads in Kansas City, Missouri, where they were loaded into stock cars and transported live (on the hoof) to regional processing centers. Driving cattle across the plains led to tremendous weight loss, and a number of animals died in transit. Upon arrival at the local processing facility, livestock were either slaughtered by wholesalers and delivered fresh to nearby butcher shops for retail sale, smoked, or packed for shipment in barrels of salt.

Certain inefficiencies were inherent in the process of transporting live animals by rail, particularly due to the fact that approximately 60% of the animal's mass is inedible. Many animals weakened by the long drive died in transit, further increasing the per-unit shipping cost. Swift's solution to these problems was to devise a method to ship dressed meats from his packing plant in Chicago to the East.

Advent of the refrigerator car

thumb|left|An early refrigerator car design, circa 1870. Hatches in the roof provided access to the ice tanks at each end of the car.

A number of attempts were made during the mid-19th century to ship agricultural products via rail car. As early as 1842 the Western Railroad of Massachusetts was reported in the June 15 edition of the Boston Traveler to be experimenting with innovative freight car designs capable of carrying all types of perishable goods without spoilage. The first known refrigerated boxcar or "reefer" entered service on the Northern Railroad (or NRNY, which became part of the Rutland Railroad) in June 1851. This "icebox on wheels" was a limited success in that it was only able to function in cold weather. That same year, the Ogdensburg and Lake Champlain Railroad (O&LC) began shipping butter to Boston in purpose-built freight cars, utilizing ice to cool the contents.

The first consignment of dressed beef to leave the Chicago stockyards was in 1857, and was carried in ordinary boxcars retrofitted with bins filled with ice. Placing the meat directly against ice resulted in discoloration and affected the taste, hence proved impractical. During the same period Swift experimented by moving cut meat using a string of ten boxcars which ran with their doors removed, and made a few test shipments to New York City during the winter months over the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR). The method proved too limited to be practical. Detroit's William Davis patented a refrigerator car that employed metal racks to suspend the carcasses above a frozen mixture of ice and salt. He sold the design in 1868 to George H. Hammond, a Detroit meat-packer, who built a set of cars to transport his products to Boston using ice from the Great Lakes for cooling. The loads had the unfortunate tendency of swinging to one side when the car entered a curve at high speed, and the use of the units was discontinued after several derailments. In 1878 Swift hired engineer Andrew Chase to design a ventilated car that was well-insulated, and positioned the ice in a compartment at the top of the car, allowing the chilled air to flow naturally downward.

The meat was packed tightly at the bottom of the car to keep the center of gravity low and to prevent the cargo from shifting. Chase's design proved to be a practical solution to providing temperature-controlled carriage of dressed meats, and allowed Swift & Company to ship their products all over the United States, and internationally. This radically altered the meat business. Swift's attempts to sell this design to the major railroads were unanimously rebuffed as the companies feared that they would jeopardize their considerable investments in stock cars and animal pens if refrigerated meat transport gained wide acceptance. In response, Swift financed the initial production run on his own, then — when the American railroads refused his business — he contracted with the GTR (a railroad that derived little income from transporting live cattle) to haul them into Michigan and then eastward through Canada. In 1880, the Peninsular Car Company (subsequently purchased by American Car & Foundry) delivered to Swift the first of these units, and the Swift Refrigerator Line (SRL) was created. Within a year the Line's roster had risen to nearly 200 units, and Swift was transporting an average of 3,000 carcasses a week to Boston. Competing firms such as Armour and Company quickly followed. By 1920 the SRL owned and operated 7,000 ice-cooled rail cars. The General American Transportation Corporation assumed ownership of the line in 1930.

Live cattle and dressed beef deliveries to New York (tons):

{| class="toccolours"

|align=center | (Stock Cars)

|align=center | (Refrigerator Cars)

|align=center |   Year  

|align=center | Live Cattle  

|align=center | Dressed Beef

|  1882

|align=center | 366,487

|align=center | 2,633

|  1883

|align=center | 392,095

|align=center | 16,365

|  1884

|align=center | 328,220

|align=center | 34,956

|  1885

|align=center | 337,820

|align=center | 53,344

|  1886

|align=center | 280,184

|align=center | 69,769

<small>The subject cars travelled on the Erie, Lackawanna, New York Central, and Pennsylvania railroads.</small>

<small>Source: Railway Review, January 29, 1887, p. 62.</small>

"Everything but the squeal"

In response to public outcries to reduce the amount of pollutants generated by his packing plants, Swift sought innovative ways to use previously discarded portions of the animals his company butchered. This practice led to the wide scale commercial production of such diverse products as oleomargarine, soap, glue, fertilizer, hairbrushes, buttons, knife handles, and pharmaceutical preparations such as pepsin and insulin. Low-grade meats were canned in products like pork and beans.

The absence of any federal inspection led to many abuses in the packing plants. Spoiled meat, dead rats, sawdust and practically anything else might have been mixed with fresh meat and ground up into sausages. Rancid, rejected and unsold meat was frequently repackaged and resold. (Swift once bragged that his slaughterhouses had become so sophisticated that they used "everything but the squeal.") Transgressions such as these were first documented in Upton Sinclair's fictional novel The Jungle, the publication of which shocked the nation and led to the passing of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Vertical integration

thumb|A view of the Swift Brands [[Sioux City, Iowa, meat-packing plant, circa 1917. All but one of the refrigerator cars in the photo bear the markings of the Swift Refrigerator Line.]]

The meat packing plants of Chicago were among the first to utilize assembly line (or in this case, disassembly-line) production techniques. Henry Ford states in his autobiography My Life and Work that it was a visit to a Chicago slaughterhouse which opened his eyes to the virtues of employing a moving conveyor system and fixed work stations in industrial applications. These practices symbolize the concept of "rationalized organization of work" to this day.

Swift adapted the methods of the industrial revolution to meat packing operations, which resulted in huge efficiency by allowing his plants to produce on a massive scale. The work was divided into myriad specific sub-tasks, which were carried out under the direction of supervisory personnel. Swift & Co. was broken down organizationally into various divisions, each one responsible for conducting a different aspect of the business of "bringing meat from the ranch to the consumer". By developing a vertically integrated company, Swift was able to control the sale of his meats from the slaughterhouse to the local butcher shop.

Swift devoted a great deal of time to indoctrinating employees and teaching them the company's methods and policies. His employees also had fair wages, whether it was man or women. He also motivated his employees to focus on the company's profit goals by adhering to a strict policy of promotion from within. The innovations that Swift championed not only revolutionized the meat packing industry, but also played a vital role in establishing the modern American business system, with an emphasis on mass production, functional specialization, managerial expertise, national distribution networks, and adaptation to technological innovation.

Notes

References

Boyle, Elizabeth and Rodolfo Estrada. (1994) "Development of the U.S. Meat Industry" — Kansas State University Department of Animal Sciences and Industry
Buenker, John D. (2000) "Swift, Gustavus Franklin" — American National Biography Online
Chandler, Alfred D. (1959), Integration and Diversification as Business Strategies — An Historical Analysis (PDF) — Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Kutner, Jon Jr. "Swift and Company" — The Handbook of Texas Online
Swift & Company (1920). The Meat Packing Industry in America. Swift & Company, Chicago.
White, John H. (1986) The Great Yellow Fleet. Golden West Books, San Marino, California.

External links

Annie May Swift Hall at Northwestern University.
Scheduled To Close: Swift & Co. Plant Was a Boon to SSF from City of South San Francisco official website
Gustavus Franklin Swift — American National Business Hall of Fame (2002).
Swift & Company official website