“America made modern beef at the same time that beef made America modern,” argues Joshua Specht in his compelling new history of the beef industry, Red Meat Republic (p. 2). Exploring the entanglement of individuals, companies, technology, courts, and the national state, Specht deftly shows the variety of factors that aligned to foster the American processed-beef industry. In so doing, Specht argues that the consolidation of beef processing aligned with the emergence of a strong central government and national consumer market. The book at times promises more than it can deliver, but it is ultimately a valuable addition to American historiography that explains how industrial capitalist food production helped make the state, and vice versa.
Specht seems to use “modern” to mean large and national, and he argues that large national beef companies helped build the technological and legal infrastructure that sustain other large national companies. He makes this argument, refreshingly, with attention to both individuals and systems. Red Meat Republic is meant to deepen older works of scholarship: Specht positions it as adding people to capital-heavy classics such as William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (1991). Specht shows that the rise of beef trusts resulted from the competing interests of manufacturers, butchers, wholesalers, regulators, shippers, and ranchers—that arguments about regulating trusts relied on understandings of how best to deliver fresh, cheap food. In his capable hands, the insights of Western, environmental, and business historians come together.
As Specht introduces new historical content, then, he also argues that history is about how people tell stories. Referring to Native American dispossession on the Plains, for instance, he writes that “the stories ranchers and hunters told themselves and others were as much a tool of conquest as their rifles” (p. 23). Rancher narratives, in which replacing buffalo with cattle in the Plains made that region viable for white settlement, encouraged and seemed to justify Anglo invasions of Native land. In the same vein, the mythology of the cowboy convinced people to become cattle ranchers; it also stymied public sympathy for strikes that suggested that cowboys might be workers just like anybody else.
Much of the book's strength comes from this combination of historical content and reflections on how to tell history. Using impressive archival work that includes the records of multiple ranches, Specht argues for the importance of attention not just to narratives but also to how different levels of society interacted. “One can as easily lose the trees for the forest as the forest for the trees,” he writes (p. 216). So, he depicts the vanguard of American imperialism as national government, major railroad corporations, and also individual settlers who saw themselves as agents of civilization. Sections on the marketing of cattle, meanwhile, undermine what historians often portray as the inevitable onset of long-distance shipping of perishables after the invention of refrigeration. The story of meat-packing, Specht explains, involves “centralization of markets, changing legal environments, and the refrigerator car, but only to the extent that they were important parts of a human struggle about how food would be produced” (p. 216).
Red Meat Republic ends on meat consumption, and here it runs into issues that affect many histories of consumption. Specht's sources do not allow him to draw conclusions with as much evidence as in other sections of the book: his chapter on meat eating is half as long as the section on cattle ranches and less convincing, too. Like much of the rest of the book, this chapter would benefit from including the voices of more women. Their absence is clear throughout and seems especially detrimental in a section on food purchasing, an action that women primarily performed. In fact, this chapter on consumption quotes few consumers. Specht does include useful material: a tour of New York's Washington Market and how people shopped there, food riots over meat prices despite the ready availability of cheap chicken and fish, and the class connotations of different cuts of meat. Yet the absence of women, who not only exercised considerable power as both consumers and food experts but also served roles within many food companies at the turn of the century, leaves the reader with little information about the people most affected by changes in the meat supply. Specht also includes little aggregate data on consumption. Although he uses falling meat prices to show the “democratization of beef,” many people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expressed considerable concern about the cost of eating meat. Government statistics show a decline in per capita meat consumption after 1850 and historian Wilson J. Warren argues in Tied to the Great Packing Machine (2007) that it did not rise again until the 1930s. This last chapter, then, would be improved by adhering to Specht's own recommendations for writing history: the story of consumption must also be told at multiple scales and from varied perspectives. Exploring the tension between the power of the beef trusts and the aggregate and individual positions of consumers would deepen the analysis.
These shortcomings do not prevent Specht's book from being a fascinating read that should prove helpful to historians of business and the United States broadly. Particularly for its early chapters on the development of the beef industry in America and the accompanying social changes, Red Meat Republic is useful scholarship for anyone looking to discuss history as a discipline or the American past broadly.
