| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Tied to the Great Packing Machine: The Midwest and Meatpacking. By Wilson J. Warren. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007. xiv, 317 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-58729-536-2.)

Since at least 1906, when the muckraking author Upton Sinclair exposed the horrors of meatpacking in The Jungle, Americans have typically associated that industry with Chicago. Wilson J. Warren's incisive book, however, reminds us that meatpacking had a profound impact far beyond that city's Packingtown. Warren begins by tracing the economic growth of the industry in the nineteenth century. Early on, wholesale merchants in Cincinnati and other Ohio River valley towns that enjoyed easy access to eastern and southern markets largely dominated American packing. In the nineteenth century, the rise of the railroad rewrote the rules of the game and shifted control of the industry to Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, and other emerging western metropolises that were well situated for rail transit. Although those cities remained important packing hubs well into the twentieth century, companies also extended their operations into smaller rural communities such as Ottumwa, Iowa; Austin, Minnesota; and Dodge City, Kansas, where they could purchase cattle and pigs directly from farmers. Meatpacking thus wove an economic web that tied together midwesterners and transformed their commercial lives in startling and profound ways.

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