The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

MEAT PACKING.

Early leaders in Oklahoma City’s Chamber of Commerce saw the meat-packing industry as their city’s path toward employment, social development, and prosperity. While attracting packers was an important early victory for state and city boosters, a critical early economic driver, and an enduring source of civic pride, meat packing was always accompanied by social and environmental costs. In its first four decades Oklahoma City’s packers processed cattle, hogs, and sheep and produced beef, pork, and mutton products for wholesale distribution. Eventually, changes in transportation, labor, and technology, as well as economic shifts, altered how meat packers operated and where they chose to locate plants. Over time, packers withdrew from population centers such as Oklahoma City and developed plants in remote rural areas like the Panhandle.

Following 1907 statehood members of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce asked American businesses to develop a presence in their city. At that time the nation’s meat packers were centered in Chicago and Kansas City. Chamber officials succeeded in attracting the attention of Morris & Co., a Chicago-based firm, in May 1909. With only five smaller packers (each employing around thirty-seven workers) in operation in the state in 1905, the 1909 agreement represented a major victory for the state and for Oklahoma City. Under the leadership of Chamber president Sidney Brock, the Oklahoma Industrial Company raised a $300,000 cash incentive for Morris. Investors put forward money that would cover the cost of the bonus and purchase a 575-acre tract of farmland adjoining the plant’s proposed 1,000-acre site. The company subdivided the land and sold lots at a profit; investors received a return of about 12 percent. Among other concessions, Morris negotiated for connections to major railways and a five-year tax break. The company also received their preferred site southwest of downtown and close to the North Canadian River, despite the city’s concerns about wind direction and odors. The benefits of economic growth, the Chamber reasoned, would make up for any impact to downtown dwellers’ quality of life.

On the Morris plant’s opening day, October 3, 1910, thousands packed Oklahoma City’s rain-soaked streets. The celebration included visits from state and industrial dignitaries, speeches, and a ceremonial opening of the plant’s gates. Crowds of thousands pressed into the “great killing rooms” to see hogs “stabbed,” “taken down bloody,” and “slashed and sorted.” The Chamber of Commerce replicated the same incentive-laden process with another major national packer, Schwarzschild and Sulzberger (S&S), which opened a plant nearby on October 9, 1911.

During their early years of operation Morris & Co. and S&S employed 1,200 and 600 workers, respectively. Work at the plants was dirty, dangerous, and demanding. Nevertheless, some laborers in Oklahoma City considered it an attractive option. After helping to construct the Morris plant, Oklahoman Jim McBoom gave up carpentry and became a butcher, working up to sixty hours per week during shifts that lasted up to twenty-four hours a day during the plant’s busiest seasons. Packing jobs involved “knocking,” or killing animals with blunt tools, and “knife jobs” such as skinning tails and dressing carcasses. McBoom earned fifty cents an hour, comparable to his previous wage as a carpenter, but found work at the plant more reliable than construction. By the 1930s the plants’ labor force included Hispanic workers, alongside Anglo and white ethnic packers. Many settled in “Packingtown,” a residential area adjacent to the stockyards.

In addition to the people they employed directly, packing houses stimulated other parts of Oklahoma City’s economy. They contracted with an estimated two hundred local firms, including suppliers such as ironworks, machine shops, and ice makers, and consumed huge amounts of agricultural products such as cottonseed oil. Packers also produced animal skins, which supported businesses that specialized in processing hides. Morris & Co. also organized the National Stock Yards Company and developed the Oklahoma City stockyards, the physical marketplace in which livestock was bought and sold, across the street from its plant. Cattle, hogs, and sheep raised in Oklahoma and elsewhere were shipped into the yards.

Twenty-five years later, in October 1935 the Chamber of Commerce mounted a “silver jubilee” to celebrate meat packing’s role in urban development. In some ways the industry was growing and doing well. S&S had become Wilson & Co. in 1916, Morris & Co. had become part of Armour & Co. in 1923, and seven smaller packing companies had opened in the vicinity. However, in the wake of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, many people worried about the industry’s future. Packers cited hardships including New Deal–era taxes, increased freight costs, and the cost of worker pensions. By 1935 Oklahoma farmers were struggling too, and the state’s hog and cattle production had been steadily declining since 1918.

Labor unrest also put a damper on the celebrations. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) was passed in 1933 and reinvigorated the American labor movement. At the Wilson plant the workers of Local 89 of the International Union of Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America were entering the third of what would be an eight-month-long-strike. They demanded that Wilson acknowledge collective bargaining, guarantee that it would not discriminate against union members, recognize worker seniority in hiring and promotions, adhere to a minimum thirty-two-hour work week, and agree to annexation into Oklahoma City. Union members saw the Chamber of Commerce’s celebration as a ploy to sway the public’s sympathy from their cause to that of the packers. As the union staged a rival jubilee across the street, Sydney Brock, back in Oklahoma City for the Chamber-sponsored celebration, railed against “Communism, Socialism, and Radicalism,” as threats to national harmony and economic recovery. The NRA’s 1935 repeal took the legal teeth out of union recognition and led the federal mediator, Frank Bowen, to abandon the negotiations. The strike ended in 1936 without accomplishing its aims, but the strikers did regain their jobs.

Meat packers positioned their industry as modern, efficient, and hygienic, but their impacts on air and water quality were difficult to ignore. Reporters commented on the awful stench, but water quality was the more contentious issue. As part of its original deal with the packers Oklahoma City used public funds to construct connections from the plants to the city’s sewer lines. The sewers dumped plant and city waste alike into the North Canadian River. As the plants and the city grew, water quality deteriorated. City leaders first went to war with the packers over their sewage in the 1920s and threatened to sever the packers’ sewer lines. By the 1930s Oklahoma City had built a water treatment plant and treated the plants’ wastewater, apparently free of charge. In 1935 city manager Orval Mosier raised the sewage issue again and proposed taxing the plants $27,000 a year for water treatment. The packers and their allies within the Chamber protested, claiming they needed the city’s support to survive. Workers chimed in on the city’s behalf and retorted that the packers were moochers and tax-dodgers.

The packers and the city came to terms over the sewage, but in the decades that followed, a series of changes transformed the meat-packing industry and Oklahoma’s packers along with it. American packers found themselves competing within a global market and responded by consolidating and cutting operating costs. In 1967 Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) created ready-to-sell “boxed beef” and transformed meat packing into a rural, rather than urban, industry that relied on less skilled, non-union labor. The development of an all-weather system of interstate highways, refrigerated trucking and warehousing, and the relocation of packing plants next to feedlots increased efficiency, reduced freight costs, and prevented animal weight loss (“shrinkage”) during shipping. On top of these changes Oklahoma City’s meat packers struggled with their aging facilities. In 1960 Armour closed rather than renovate. At Wilson, an ice machine crashed through the floor and caused an explosion, killing six people and injuring twenty more. Wilson tore down its damaged plant and rebuilt in 1963, but its days were numbered. Following a sale to Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV) in 1967, cattle slaughter at the plant ceased in 1979, followed by hogs in 1981. Two years later, Wilson declared bankruptcy, repudiated its union contract, and slashed wages before finally closing the plant in 1992. New packers operating in Oklahoma followed national trends out of the city and into the countryside.

Although packers also set up operations in other sparsely populated counties of Oklahoma, they saw the Panhandle as a prime location for pig farms and pork plants. Guymon, in Texas County, was typical of the smaller towns the meat processing industry had come to prefer. Attracted by the area’s newly constructed cattle feedlots and auction house, Swift and Company opened a beef-packing plant in Guymon in 1967. In the early twentieth century beef had been an expensive luxury and status symbol. Although generous federal subsidies “democratized” beef over the decades that followed, it remained among the more costly proteins on most peoples’ plates. Pork, which yielded the most meat of any large livestock animal, offered meat-craving consumers a middle ground between beef and poultry at an attractive price point. Oklahoma’s hog population skyrocketed from 200,000 to 1.3 million animals between 1991 and 1997. Meat packing was nothing new for this part of Oklahoma, but the concentration and scale of the contemporary hog industry was.

The region also offered hog producers important environmental amenities. Guymon’s location far from major cities, together with its access to the Ogallala Aquifer, reduced the cost of water needed to grow feed, water hogs, flush animal waste from facilities, and process meat. The Panhandle’s economy had benefited from an oil boom from the 1950s into the 1970s, but production tapered in the 1980s and 1990s. The town’s economy was facing decline and needed an alternative driver; it found it in pork production. Locals were divided, but in the end the town’s leaders courted the Seaboard Corporation with tax abatements (paid for with an increase to the sales tax). In 1992 Seaboard announced it planned to buy and reopen the vacant Swift plant. By 2013 it had opened a second plant.

Large-scale pork feeding and packing brought with it social changes, economic benefits, and environmental costs. While packing had always been physically demanding labor, the “disassembly line” developed by IBP and adopted throughout the meat-packing industry meant workers performed dangerous butchery work much more quickly; many workers suffered repetitive-motion injuries after making the same cuts thousands of times. Unsurprisingly, local emergency room visits and surgeries soared. Along with the changes it wrought on workers’ bodies, packing changed Guymon’s demographics and brought with it an influx of multinational workers. Since statehood the Panhandle had been almost completely white. Anglo locals were skeptical of the newcomers and found new language barriers difficult to surmount. However, over time Guymon became home to immigrants from roughly fifteen different Latin American and African countries; workers settled there with their families, enrolled their children in local schools, and engaged themselves in the local community. Restaurants, stores that sold Mexican music and rented Spanish-language videos, and other new businesses reflected the cultural influence of Guymon’s growing Hispanic population. Locals adjusted, and they ultimately accepted and accommodated their new neighbors.

The plants’ economic benefits came at the cost of increased water use from a dwindling, nonrenewable aquifer, as well as air and water pollution. Farmers as well as national and state agencies had particularly pressing concerns about Seaboard’s impact on water quality. Hog operations “recycled” their wastewater by pumping it from storage ponds onto nearby fields. When more waste was spread on land than the soil could degrade, the effluent polluted ground and surface water. In 2001 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suspected that Seaboard’s mixture of water and animal waste was leaching into the region’s sandy soils. Water containing nitrates at 10 parts per million was undrinkable; wells near the hog farms were testing at 90 parts per million. The EPA fined Seaboard and ordered the company to provide drinking water to four families living next to its hog farms in Kingfisher County, in central Oklahoma.

When it arrived in places like Guymon and elsewhere in the Panhandle, the meat-packing industry seemed to replay much of Oklahoma City’s story, almost a century later. While packing appeared to offer communities the same mix of benefits and costs, the historic changes in the industry and its massive increase in scale fundamentally altered the balance of these tradeoffs. The direct advantages meat packing offered its workers diminished, and its benefits to communities grew murkier. While packing plants brought jobs to places that needed them, the industry’s low wages tended to increase local poverty rates. However, these jobs, and more specifically the people who performed them, stabilized Guymon’s population and were the source of the economic activity the town needed to survive. Meanwhile, the industry’s environmental costs had only deepened.

Ariel Schnee