Contemporaries and historians have long been fascinated by the spectacle of Chicago's Union Stockyard and the associated packingtown of vast meatpacking plants. As Dominick Pacyga points out in Slaughterhouse, for almost a century this vast machine designed to turn animals into meat was one of the main tourist sites in Chicago, attracting enormous crowds of visitors. Yet surprisingly, Pacyga's is the first book-length study of this vital part of the history of Chicago and the modern world.

This book is organized around the commonsense thesis that the stockyards embodied the modern throughout their history. Pacyga deploys this idea to link the concentration of the stockyards in Chicago, the construction of extremely efficient meatpacking plants around them, the exploitation and labor struggles that eventually gave rise to both progressive reform and a powerful union, and the eventual decline of the stockyards as the industry was once again dispersed into the countryside.

Slaughterhouse is at its best in explaining how the development of the stockyards and packingtown radically transformed the relationship between the countryside and the city, and between human beings and the animals we eat. These stories extend beyond the necessary but familiar description of the disassembly line. For instance, Pacyga explains how and why the Union Stockyards sponsored the International Livestock Exposition starting in 1900. As farmers raised animals in more settled conditions, and as smaller producers replaced the cattle barons of the nineteenth century, the cost of raising cattle increased and farmers sought ways to do so more efficiently and economically. Farmers also wanted to show off their best cattle, in part as a marketing technique. The exposition met both these needs by disseminated modern breeding and cattle raising techniques across the Midwest and West. “Changes in the livestock industry itself brought about the International Livestock Exposition; the exhibit then encouraged more changes” (102). The stockyards thus served as a locus of modernization for the entire cattle raising industry, not just for the final production of meat. And as with many aspects of the stockyards, the exposition added enormously to the spectacle.

Pacyga effectively blends a discussion of impersonal large-scale forces that drove the concentration of meatpacking in Chicago with a compelling discussion of some of the businessmen responsible for this transformation, for better and worse. John B. Sherman served as director of the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company for almost thirty-three years, and he proved critical in organizing the stockyards in such a way that livestock dealers and meatpackers alike would trust the neutral operations of the yards. This required a particular type of person who could navigate various competing interests. Yet when the Union Stockyards tried to consolidate its domination of the country's livestock market in 1899 and 1900 against competition from proposed new sites in the suburbs and other stockyards further west, new corporate investors led by the Vanderbilt interests considered Sherman a “relic,” and sought managers with different skills. As a result, the man who had led the early period of stockyard modernization was himself “modernized” out of a job.

Much of the story of the stockyards’ workers will be familiar to students of Chicago's labor history, but seeing it all in one place makes the general arc come to light in a new way. Pacyga starts with the brutal conditions of the stockyards’ first seventy years and the state repression that maintained these conditions, observing after relating the defeat of one of the many strikes, “Obviously, the modern did not mean the end to barbaric conditions imposed by those with armed power on the weak” (89). In this context, the workers’ success in organizing in the 1930s and achieving dramatically better conditions after World War II seems more like a blip in a general story of exploitation, low pay, and terrible working conditions that, at heart, characterize “modern” working conditions in this entire industry. Pacyga points out that by the time organizers like Herb March succeeded in building interracial unions and forcing packers to accept them, the stockyards were already beginning their long decline—the stockyards reached their peak in the mid-1920s, more than a decade before the union drives of the 1930s.

Similarly, the period in which the stockyards provided decent paying jobs to black workers seems remarkably short in the context of this whole story. Eighty percent of the packinghouse workforce was black by 1958—but Swift had already closed its hog butchering line in 1952, Wilson shuttered its Chicago operations in 1955, Armour shut down its hog slaughtering line in 1959, and by 1971 the era of stockyards and meatpacking in Chicago was over.

Pacyga makes clear that the unions did not cause the stockyards’ decline; “it was a result of changes in transportation, manufacturing, and the raising and purchasing of livestock” (171). Yet despite his balanced discussion of the accusations against the industry in The Jungle, Pacyga's account leaves the unmistakable impression that the generally bleak picture painted by Upton Sinclair was ultimately characteristic of life for people who depended on the stockyards and packingtown for employment during most of their history. If this industry was really characteristic of the modern, then outside of a very brief and hard-won postwar exception, Pacyga's “modern” has worked relentlessly against the interests of workers.

Pacyga concludes with a surprisingly hopeful chapter on the reinvention of the stockyards as a light industrial park that has succeeded in attracting a number of food processing plants. He urges the city to embrace a “locavore” food processing future, calling for the construction of a mixed vegetable, poultry, and meat market that might promote Midwestern agriculture and once again turn the farmland that surrounds the city for hundreds of miles into Chicago's hinterland. It is true that as, Pacyga points out, many Chicagoans are ill-equipped for the “information economy,” and could use these types of manufacturing jobs. Unfortunately, I have my doubts about whether the continually evolving modern economy or its political servants will take advice from a historian.

Pacyga includes many details and images that enrich the book, but his thesis is too broad to fully encompass them. As a result, the book is somewhat dry at points. Yet because of its crucial subject and its masterful blending of labor, business, and municipal history, this book will surely and deservedly enter the canon of literature on the history of Chicago.