Packingtown, U.S.A.

Biography/Profile

Packingtown, U.S.A. was produced by William Adelman for the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1969. The film documents the events, including poor working conditions, unsanitary living conditions and ethnic tensions between immigrant workers, that lead to the Great Meat Strike of 1904 at Packingtown, the Chicago Union Stockyard neighborhood. Packingtown U.S.A. investigates the efforts made by the Executive Board of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union and the Teamsters to alleviate the suffering of the residents of Packingtown. The film also touches upon the role that contemporary social reformers, including Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, Mary McDowell and Ellen Gates Starr, played in assisting the people of the Packingtown community.

On December 25, 1865, the Union Stockyards, located between 39th and 47th Streets, Halsted St. and Racine Ave., were opened as a way of consolidating the numerous stockyards that surfaced in Chicago throughout the early-nineteenth century. While these early stockyards were typically operated on the periphery of the city by tavern keepers, they were moved closer to the railyards in the 1850s as the advent of the refrigerated railcar allowed meat products to be transported across the United States. The Union Stockyard and Transit Co., seizing this opportunity, purchased 345 acres near the Chicago Junction Railway, the site of the future Union Stockyards. During the Civil War, the Union Army relied heavily on the Chicago packing industry, making the young city the largest meatpacker in the world at the time. Between 1870 and 1900, the industry grew over 900% with the total head of calves, cattle, sheep and hogs slaughtered rising dramatically from just over 6 million to over 13 million, accounting for over a third of the total value of Chicago’s manufactured goods. By the end of the nineteenth century, the number of plants and workers also increased to thirty-nine and 25,345, respectively.

The continued growth of the Stockyards and the drastic increase in the amount of workers created a need for housing. Seeking to rectify the housing situation, Philip Armour and Benjamin Hutchinson, both prominent Chicago meatpackers, created Packingtown. Stockyard neighborhoods, including Packingtown, consisted of unpaved, dirt streets flanked on either side by wooden two-flat housing. Many, if not all, of these housing areas lacked indoor plumbing, gas and electricity. The combination of inadequate sewage disposal from both the Stockyards and the worker housing areas as well as the lack of paved roads, caused disease to spread easily through Packingtown. The children of Packingtown played in the unsanitary streets causing a high child mortality rate. By 1900, the South Park Commission sought to address this problem, hiring D.H. Burnham & Co. and the Olmstead brothers to design a series of small parks for both leisure space for works and sanitary play areas for the children of Packingtown.

Residents in Hyde Park complained about the sights, sounds and smells of Packingtown leading to multiple investigations regarding the neighborhood’s unsanitary conditions. The first of these was a study spearheaded by L.E. Cooley, Chief Engineer of Industrial Waste, in 1890 with another occurring 10 years later by Professor J.H. Long of the Illinois State Board of Health. Little relief was provided by the government, however. Social reformers like Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, Mary McDowell and Ellen Gates Starr, however, assisted Packingtown residents. Sinclair sought to incite public sympathy and outcry for the conditions in Packingtown in his 1906 book The Jungle as lackluster examinations by the Illinois government continued into the early-twentieth century. Proper sewage disposal was still a problem in 1914 as evidenced by a report from the Sanitary District of Chicago stating that, “Our investigation clearly confirms our former statement that the sewers now existing in the Stockyards and Packingtown are inadequate and need rebuilding.” Similar reports were filed well into the 1930s.

In addition to the unsanitary conditions, ethnic and racial tensions ran high in the Packingtown community. From 1880-1886, the highest concentrations of nationalities were Irish, American, German and Scottish. After the Strike of 1886, however, most American and Irish workers left the Stockyards. Polish and Bohemian immigrants then filled the new vacancies left behind, making up the greatest concentration of employees by 1894. With the strike of 1894, however, black workers were introduced as strikebreakers. Once the strike ended, black workers were removed and were replaced, again, with Polish workers as well as Lithuanian, Slovakian and Russian workers. By 1904, the nationalities represented at the Stockyards included Irish, American, Scottish, German, Polish, Bohemian, Lithuanian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Greek and Russian. Each nationality brought with them their own religion, morals and way of life, which, when coupled with the high concentration of about 113 people per square foot, created animosity and skepticism between ethnic groups. This was exacerbated with the introduction of black workers in the 1930s.

The Stockyards continued to enjoy prosperity and market domination into the first half of the twentieth century. By 1940, almost 900 million animals had moved through the complex. Changes in technology and urban industries, however, began to shake the market hold and competitiveness of the Stockyards. The physical layout of the plant no longer fit innovations in slaughterhouse processing, especially the growth of the assembly line. Additionally, refrigerated trucks allowed a decentralized location for plants to be tenable, as they were no longer dependent upon proximity to the railroads. The Union Stockyards continued to decline for the next few decades, and eventually closed their doors in August of 1971. The Union Stockyards gate, attributed to the renowned Chicago architecture firm Burnham and Root in 1879, still stands.