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THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
GUSTAVUS FRANKLIN SWIFT ABOUT I902. A PASS 
 CARD FOR VISITORS ABOUT THAT TIME. 
 
THE YANKEE OF 
 THE YARDS 
 
 THE BIOGRAPHY OF 
 GUSTAVUS FRANKLIN SWIFT 
 
 "By 
 LOUIS F. SWIFT 
 
 IN COLLABORATION WITH 
 
 ARTHUR VAN VLISSINGEN, JR. 
 
 CHICAGO & NEW YORK 
 
 A. W. SHAW COMPANY 
 
 LONDON, A. W. SHAW AND COMPANY, LIMITED 
 
 1927 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY A. W. SHAW COMPANY 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
O 1 / *<*"-Q^< tyAA WW -«&ZAJVLr 
 
 USJ2 J 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 SHEER accident has swept many men to that 
 slight height above their fellows which the world 
 calls fame or attainment or success. At their sides 
 stand others who reached the same place by ceaseless 
 work and native shrewdness. 
 
 For this reason the life stories of most outstanding 
 men lack interest except to the unimaginative who 
 worship success for its own sake. Accidents which 
 turn out well make dull tales, toiling plodders make 
 still duller. 
 
 Rare indeed is the man who attains preeminence 
 with the steady, irresistible thrust — who leaves in 
 those who started with him a sense that his progress 
 was inevitable, that one could no more have stopped 
 him than an Alpine glacier or a Sierra cascade. Such 
 a man, to be sure, combines ability and gluttony for 
 work. But to these sober, uninteresting virtues their 
 owner has the good fortune to add being born at a 
 time and place which make his every stroke count for 
 two or ten or ten thousand times the strokes of men 
 who came before or will come after. Every circum- 
 stance from his birth to his grave seems calculated to 
 give him a lead over his fellows. Every apparent 
 misfortune turns out to be his lucky chance. 
 
 So it was with the first Vanderbilt. Rockefeller 
 and Ford are subsequent examples in the field of 
 
 iii 
 
iv THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 American industry. And had young Bonaparte been 
 born fifteen years after he was, he would have been 
 a child instead of a lieutenant when France burst into 
 fire. For all his military genius and burning ambi- 
 tion he would probably have served his country as a 
 pompous little colonel of the Guards, while the 
 world went ways far different from those history 
 records. 
 
 What created of a corporal an emperor, of these 
 other men the chief commercial figures of their 
 times? For want of a better name we call it destiny, 
 that motive power which makes life interesting — and 
 which makes interesting lives. For it smacks of des- 
 tiny when force and industry and shrewdness are 
 found in conjunction, with all the auspices favorable 
 to their most effective use. 
 
 Destiny it was which presided at the birth of a 
 boy in a Cape Cod village ninety-odd years ago. He 
 was not to change the world's maps, nor make mili- 
 tary history. Instead, he was the human instrument 
 by which destiny transformed the world's sources and 
 supplies of an essential class of foodstuffs. From a 
 start which at first glance seems inauspicious, he built 
 a knowledge and an ability that were to serve him 
 well when circumstances called them into full play. 
 
 A younger son of a large family on a sandy, unfer- 
 tile farm in the dreadful '40s, he did not have much 
 of a chance; yet — his elder brothers were butchers 
 and from them he learned the ins and outs of the 
 trade on which he built. New England was a long 
 
FOREWORD v 
 
 way from the plains which sent it cattle ; still — here 
 a trade current was first felt which lent its strength 
 to the young butcher's brawny blows on Fortune's 
 door. Chicago in the '70s was a sprawling city with 
 little to recommend it to his energies except a plenti- 
 ful supply of cattle from the western plains. The 
 Yankee left its "Yards" the undisputed meat-packing 
 center of the hungry world. 
 
 That he accomplished so much may be surprising, 
 but it is not necessarily of great interest. That he 
 gained great wealth in the process is neither surpris- 
 ing nor worth more than passing comment. That he 
 worked hard, was honest, practiced the homely copy- 
 book virtues is neither here nor there. 
 
 The salty, spicy fact is that destiny swept him on 
 to accomplishment extraordinary in any one man's 
 career, that his abilities and the world's changing 
 needs came together to produce a career as excep- 
 tional as it is interesting. His battles and his victories 
 were in the field of business. It is this, and not the 
 material success he attained, which makes the chron- 
 icle of his life a chronicle of commerce. 
 
 For destiny, that spinner of men's threads of life, 
 decreed that business should be his skein. .... 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Foreword iii 
 
 I 
 
 'A Dollar Wasted" 
 
 II 
 "We Cannot Fail!" 24 
 
 III 
 Just Right or All Wrong 46 
 
 IV 
 Taking the East 65 
 
 V 
 Many a Minute . 82 
 
 VI 
 "I Vote No!" . 102 
 
 VII 
 He Had to Spread Out 117 
 
 VIII 
 "I Raise Better Men" 138 
 
 IX 
 The Forbidden Yardstick 158 
 
 X 
 
 Fight When You Must 178 
 
 vii 
 
viii THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 XI 
 
 Never Stay Beaten 193 
 
 Index 213 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Gustavus Franklin Swift, about 1902. A pass card for 
 
 visitors about that time Frontispiece 
 
 Union Stockyards of Chicago in 1865 10 
 
 The slaughterhouse at Barnstable. In the circle, the wagon 
 that G. F. Swift drove when he sold his meats from 
 door to door 50 
 
 Longhorns came from the plains of Texas 72 
 
 Edwin C. Swift. D. M. Anthony 78 
 
 Louis F. Swift 90 
 
 The old Live Stock Exchange Building, Chicago 114 
 
 Sally Sears Crowell Swift, mother of G. F. Swift. William 
 
 Swift, father of G. F. Swift 120 
 
 Wellington Leavitt, dean of the cattle buyers, who became 
 associated with G. F. Swift about 1875, tne Prince of 
 Wales, and Louis F. Swift riding through "the Yards" 
 October 13, 1924 128 
 
 G. F. Swift, about 1885 132 
 
 Union Stockyards, Chicago, 1927 154 
 
 The farm house at Barnstable. G. F. Swift's accounts, 
 
 1859-60, recording sales of meat from his butcher cart. 174 
 
 The original windlass used by G. F. Swift for hoisting steer 
 after killing — Barnstable, 1861-1869. The original 
 bull-ring used by G. F. Swift for pulling animal down 
 for slaughter 196 
 
THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 "A DOLLAR WASTED. ..." 
 
 ANYONE whose work kept him on the bank of 
 l\ Chicago's old "Bubbly Creek back of the Yards" 
 was not to be envied his job in the 1880s and '90s. 
 The marvel was that he would hold the job. For 
 where today a boulevard is building astride a huge 
 tiled channel, thirty years ago there ran a malodor- 
 ous open sewer. 
 
 In his turn the workman had something to marvel 
 at: the regularity with which another man visited this 
 unattractive locality. The frequent visitor was a tall 
 bearded man above middle age. He invariably wore 
 a dark suit with a tail coat, and usually a stifl hat. 
 His stoop suggested desk work. His bearing sug- 
 gested authority. To the knees he had the appear- 
 ance of a business proprietor fresh from his private 
 office. 
 
 At the knees his appearance shifted abruptly. The 
 tailored trousers disappeared into a plebeian pair of 
 top-boots. The cowhide bore unmistakable traces of 
 wear outside the counting room. Plainly the visitor 
 was not one who devoted his time exclusively to 
 papers and meetings and that nebulous science called 
 management. 
 
 This man was my father, Gustavus Franklin Swift. 
 
4 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 Even after Swift & Company was well established on 
 a large scale, he would frequently visit the bank of 
 Bubbly Creek. He had, in fact, gone to the trouble 
 of finding out where the company's sewer emptied 
 into Old Bubbly; this point was his invariable objec- 
 tive. 
 
 It was not a pleasant place to visit. In those days 
 sewage disposal was more direct than scientific. One 
 might have pardoned the head of a large business for 
 avoiding it altogether. 
 
 But down to Bubbly Creek father would go, and 
 scrutinize the sewer outlet for a few minutes every 
 once in a while. He was on the lookout for waste. 
 If he saw any fat coming out, that evidenced waste 
 in the packing house. Briskly he would head for the 
 superintendent's office. And before the episode was 
 closed, someone would smart. 
 
 His long suit was keeping expenses down. Next 
 in his interest, perhaps, came developing by-prod- 
 ucts — which is another form of the same thing. Low 
 expenses and maximum return from every pound 
 of the live animal are what made G. F. Swift a 
 leader in the new industry of which he was a founder. 
 For even at the start of his career as a Chicago pack- 
 er, when margins were not narrowed down as they 
 have been since, he recognized that waste and ac- 
 complishment are incompatible. A dollar wasted is 
 gone forever — with no one the better off for its going. 
 
 It was his constant seeking after ways to save — a 
 frugality engendered and inbred by ancestors who for 
 
"A DOLLAR WASTED . . . . " 5 
 
 two hundred and fifty years had fought a none too 
 equal battle with the miserly sands of Cape Cod — 
 which led the Yankee from Massachusetts and out 
 to the stockyards of Chicago. It was his never-fail- 
 ing creed of economy which built under his leader- 
 ship a concern that today does a manufacturing 
 business second in volume only to United States Steel. 
 
 Truly it may be said, and with little room for 
 dispute, that his sharp eye for the pennies and nickels 
 and dimes founded a compact, economically efficient 
 industry to supplant a scattered assortment of ineffi- 
 cient, uneconomic small units. The proof of the 
 economic service he performed is in the large finan- 
 cial success, on the narrowest of profit margins, of 
 the business unit he built. 
 
 Through his years of working with live stock and 
 meat products and packing he had accumulated a 
 fund of experience — sometimes it seemed to a har- 
 assed department head that father's experience must 
 be principally a knowledge of where to look for 
 leaks of money or material. His watchfulness — of 
 which his frequent visits to Bubbly Creek were typi- 
 cal — taught every good man in the organization the 
 need for not wasting a penny. Few pennies, conse- 
 quently, were wasted. 
 
 First thing every morning at the office would come 
 the question, "Any hogs die during the night?" If 
 any had died, there was trouble — enough trouble so 
 that the loss did not occur again soon. He knew 
 that hogs, if they have plenty of room, do not 
 
6 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 smother. Eventually everyone who had anything to 
 do with the company's hogs knew the same thing. So 
 the hogs were kept in roomy, uncrowded pens — and 
 few were lost from this source. 
 
 It was the eye for waste which brought Gustavus 
 Swift from the East to Chicago in 1875. Glamour 
 enveloped the cattle business of fifty and sixty years 
 ago. These were the picturesque days of longhorn 
 herds plodding in fogs of dust across the Great 
 Plains. 
 
 Wide-hatted cowmen flanked the herds, yipping 
 and swinging their ropes to drive the strays back into 
 line. 
 
 Hundreds of miles the steers were herded, to the 
 end of steel where venturesome railroads pushed 
 their pioneering lines into the West. At the railroad 
 the cattle were driven aboard slatted cars and hauled 
 to the East of concentrated populations which de- 
 manded beef above the local ability to supply. 
 
 The animals were shipped to central live-stock 
 markets. One of these was at Brighton, just outside 
 Boston; another at Albany; another at Buffalo. At 
 these stockyards the animals were sold and shipped 
 to the slaughterers. 
 
 An amount of the glamour of the cattle ranges 
 surrounded even the stockyards — diluted glamour, 
 but glamour nevertheless. For here cattlemen rode 
 from pen to pen, bartered on horseback, and in tall 
 cowhide boots swaggered the streets of the cities. 
 
 But beyond the stockyards was little of the glam- 
 
"A DOLLAR WASTED . . . . " 7 
 
 ourous. Unsanitary conditions, thriftless practices, 
 unsound customs prevailed on every hand. 
 
 Each community had its little slaughterhouse. 
 Animals beyond the local supply were shipped from 
 the nearest stockyards. They were slaughtered by the 
 local butchers, who sold the meat before it had time 
 to spoil. Refrigerators for keeping meat were almost 
 unknown. 
 
 The abattoir was literally a shambles. Meat and 
 hides were the products. Livers, hearts, tongues all 
 went unweighed to the meat market man who bought 
 a whole carcass of beef. Everything else was waste, 
 or at best was used as an unwholesome ration for a 
 sty of "slaughterhouse hogs." 1 
 
 Into this hodge-podge of small, dirty, wasteful 
 local businesses came the Cape Cod Yankee who was 
 to upset practically every idea which had been ac- 
 cepted in the trade since its inception. His acquaint- 
 ance with meats and live stock had begun in 1855, 
 at the age of fourteen, when he went to work for his 
 brother, a local butcher. It had continued, and 
 grown, through the different phases of slaughterer, 
 local dealer, export cattle shipper, and wholesale 
 meat dealer until at thirty-five he was partner in two 
 large, well-established firms and sole owner of a third, 
 
 1 The improvements in sanitation and the development of inspection 
 methods constituted one of G. F. Swift's notable contributions to the prep- 
 aration of meats for human consumption. His methods, scientifically 
 worked out in the light of scientific discoveries, formed a basis for the 
 inspection and control exercised by the Bureau of Animal Industry of the 
 United States Government. This supervision is extended to over nine 
 hundred packers today, principally those engaged in interstate commerce. 
 
8 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 local and smaller enterprise. His interests had spread 
 from Cape Cod to Albany and Buffalo. His firms 
 did business in eastern Massachusetts as well as 
 abroad. He was, as they say down Cape Cod way, 
 getting on in the world. 
 
 But Gustavus Franklin Swift was never content 
 simply to get on. Always he saw opportunities ahead 
 for eliminating waste, thereby getting more business 
 and making more money for himself. 
 
 At first he saw the waste of buying cattle which 
 had passed through the hands of too many middle- 
 men and against which too many charges had ac- 
 cumulated. He went west to buy the cattle nearer 
 their source, to eliminate these extra charges. 
 
 Then he began to think about the waste of shipping 
 the whole animal east instead of shipping only the 
 parts which were needed there. It was not alone the 
 freight on the sixty per cent inedible portion — 
 though that was a tempting saving if it could be 
 attained. But also in shipping the cattle east they 
 were bruised too much. They shrank in weight too 
 much. The expense of feeding in transit was too 
 much. It was all waste — and to my father any waste 
 was too much ! 
 
 Father was the man who began to slaughter cattle 
 at Chicago, and to ship the beef east. At first this 
 was confined to the winter months. Then, through 
 the refrigerator car's development, it became an all- 
 year business. And thereby the greatest saving pos- 
 sible in producing meat from animals had become 
 
"A DOLLAR WASTED ...-." 9 
 
 a reality. This saving from that time on meant cheap- 
 er meat for the consumer, higher prices for the cat- 
 tleman — and the birth of a great industry. 
 
 It was not, of course, as simple as all that. There 
 were years of venturing, years of back-breaking, 
 heart-breaking, spirit-breaking work. There were 
 in those early years times when if G. F. Swift's debts 
 had been measured against his assets he would have 
 been unquestionably insolvent. 
 
 But his frugality in the management of his business 
 overcame these handicaps — and left him eventually 
 in command of one of the greatest businesses of the 
 world. 
 
 How the refrigerator car and the beef cooler were 
 perfected is a story in itself. Through many a sum- 
 mer's night at his plant he alternately eyed the ther- 
 mometer in his single beef cooler and ordered his 
 men to shovel more salt and ice, faster. 
 
 Through many years, before the Interstate Com- 
 merce Act was passed, he fought single-handed a rail- 
 road association which would not haul his dressed 
 beef at a rate he could pay. 
 
 How he wore down the eastern public's prejudice 
 against western dressed beef is of itself an epic of 
 selling. 
 
 With all of these major problems to handle, how- 
 ever, he never overlooked the economies of opera- 
 tion and the need to develop every possible revenue 
 from the materials passing through his hands. If 
 he had lost sight of this, then Swift & Company could 
 
io THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 hardly have survived the early years to remain in 
 business successfully today. 
 
 In the free-and-easy days of slaughtering in New 
 England, for example, the slaughterer saved, besides 
 the meat and the hide, only the head, feet, tripe, 
 heart, liver, and tongue. The head, feet, and tripe 
 constituted a "set," and a set was sold separately. If 
 the customer bought a whole carcass, he received free 
 a heart, tongue, and liver. 
 
 On the outskirts of the larger slaughterhouses, such 
 as that of Anthony, Swift & Company at Fall River, 
 there grew up the establishments of people, who, 
 while the slaughterers blindly followed the age-old 
 customs, made money out of what the meat men 
 threw away. The butchers were glad to have this 
 "rubbish" carted off, for disposing of it was difficult. 
 
 The by-products people made a good thing of it. 
 The big firm in the trade which included such prod- 
 ucts as neat's foot oil, tripe, and so on was also operat- 
 ing extensively in some of the materials which it did 
 not have to pay for because they were not included in 
 the sets which had a market value. 
 
 Shortly after my father came to Chicago and be- 
 gan operating on the larger scale which characterized 
 most of the Chicago dressed-meat establishments, he 
 was instrumental in developing paying outlets for 
 other by-products. By-products revenue is what 
 developed his business. 
 
 A man was brought on from Fall River who con- 
 tracted for sausage casings at a stipulated figure per 
 
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"A DOLLAR WASTED . . . . " n 
 
 carcass. Blood and tankage became a source of fer- 
 tilizer. We made a hobby, almost, of fertilizer and 
 a few years later of oleomargarine. In our early days 
 at Chicago, by-products people bought the sets, the 
 blood and tankage, and the shin-bones for knife han- 
 dles. Peddlers were encouraged who came to buy 
 livers and sell them from their wagons in the poorer 
 parts of town. What livers could not be disposed 
 of in more profitable ways were tanked. Nothing 
 was given away — this would have been waste. 
 
 G. F. Swift knew, by Cape Cod instinct, that no 
 enterprise can grow soundly and survive the lean 
 days which always come, unless it blocks off every 
 possible source of waste. Even though a customer 
 might be induced to buy a whole carcass instead of 
 only three quarters, by "throwing in" heart, liver, 
 and tongue, it would not increase that customer's sale 
 of meat. His retail customers could be counted on 
 to eat just the same amount of meat; and if he bought 
 the smaller quantity he would simply have to come 
 back that much sooner to replenish his stock. Hence, 
 if the heart, liver, and tongue could be sold sepa- 
 rately, and made to yield some of the money the new 
 packer needed so urgently, then certainly they must 
 yield it. 
 
 Before he had finished with the process, he was 
 using everything from the animal to produce a profit. 
 In fact, the hackneyed remark that Chicago packers 
 use every part of the hog but the squeal probably had 
 its inception in a remark my father once made, when 
 
i2 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 the by-products utilization was complete, that "Now 
 we use all of the hog except his grunt." 
 
 Not that Swift & Company was the only one to 
 do anything along the lines of by-products. All of 
 the sizable packers were at work on the problem. 
 The keen competition among them all, and especially 
 among the larger concerns, forced down prices and 
 forced down margins. Unless one kept abreast of 
 the others in by-products utilization, then that lag- 
 gard inevitably went under. 
 
 G. F. Swift was without question the aggressor in 
 this war for extra sources of revenue. He was never 
 satisfied with his business. He knew he could get 
 more if he could crowd his prices below the rest of 
 the field without sacrificing his profit. Out of this 
 continual pushing for sales by cutting his costs, he 
 built his own business to a place of preeminence. 
 
 After the stage of selling raw materials to others 
 to make products from, came the stage where our own 
 people did the jobs themselves and thus crowded 
 costs down a little more. 
 
 New lines were entered; by-products were split 
 into further by-products; and out of it all, the public 
 benefited as well as we did. 
 
 Along with the development of by-products reve- 
 nue — ahead of it, in fact, for it required no develop- 
 ment of processes — he practiced this creed of keeping 
 every expense at rock-bottom. Swift & Company 
 had a reputation wherever it was known, as a thrifty, 
 compact, well-managed business. There were no 
 
"A DOLLAR WASTED ....." 13 
 
 little cracks in the walls which permitted anything 
 to get away undetected. 
 
 One of father's especial ways to hold down expense 
 was to avoid alterations which, while desirable, were 
 not necessary. He hated to see mechanics at work 
 around any of his properties. The sight of a man 
 with a hammer or a saw or a trowel was a red flag 
 to him. 
 
 "Whenever you see a lot of mechanics at work 
 anywhere you are in charge, fire 'em," were the in- 
 structions he once gave a man whom he had placed 
 over a considerable section of the company's prop- 
 erties. 
 
 "But sometimes they are needed, Mr. Swift," pro- 
 tested the department head. 
 
 "They'll find their way back, then," he disposed 
 of this argument. "They're a luxury. We can't af- 
 ford luxuries. It isn't only the high wages you pay 
 'em — it's the lumber and nails and brick and hard- 
 ware they use, too. No, sir, when you see a gang 
 of 'em around and you don't know that you have 
 to have 'em, be on the safe side and fire 'em. That's 
 the way I always work it." 
 
 After all, there is little question that his ideas 
 were fundamentally right in regard to holding down 
 expenses. Given an enterprise which has an economic 
 reason for its existence, then if you stop every leak, 
 that enterprise is bound to be in good shape. It is 
 the leaks which ruin more basically sound businesses 
 than any other cause. For one business man who 
 
i 4 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 watches expenses carefully, there are five who are 
 careless. And of fifty who are careful, not more than 
 one really keeps his organization keyed up to the im- 
 portance of waste as did G. F. Swift. 
 
 He was visiting the St. Joseph plant back in the 
 '90s, shortly after it had been built. As he was going 
 over the plant with the manager, he noticed a place 
 where car loaders had spiked a loading runway to 
 the dock. When the runway had been removed, the 
 nails had been left sticking up from the planking. 
 
 "Nice dock you have there," he observed casually. 
 
 "Yes, fine, isn't it?" agreed the manager. 
 
 "But look at those nails" — pointing to them. "You 
 won't have a dock if you let 'em do that." 
 
 They walked along and father began looking at 
 some other parts of the plant with the superintend- 
 ent, who had been a few feet behind all the while. 
 The manager meanwhile encountered one of the 
 office boys in the yard and sent word by him to the 
 loading foreman that those nails must be removed 
 within five minutes. 
 
 On the way back, the chief led the party quite 
 casually along the loading dock. This time he was 
 with the superintendent. And while he appeared to 
 be unaware, the manager saw him looking for the 
 nails and scraping about a bit with his foot in the 
 vain effort to find them. Finally the rest of the party 
 was allowed to go on its way, while the manager was 
 taken to the cooler to look at the beef. 
 
 Together they looked over the carcasses for 
 
"A DOLLAR WASTED . . . . " 15 
 
 perhaps ten minutes without a word. Then: "Did 
 you have those nails pulled out?" 
 
 "Yes, Mr. Swift." 
 
 "Well," plaintively, "I wish you wouldn't have 
 things fixed up until after I'm off the plant. How 
 do you think I'm going to make everybody look alive 
 about these things if you get 'em fixed up before I 
 have a chance to tell the other men about them?" 
 
 When the St. Joseph plant was being built, he 
 would go there about once a month. Ostensibly his 
 visits were to check up on the general progress of 
 construction. There was a vigorous idea among some 
 of the men in charge of construction, however, that 
 he came out quite as much to see that everyone was 
 working as hard as he should. 
 
 He appeared one mid-morning at construction 
 headquarters. No one had known that he was in 
 St. Joseph. But from his comments it was apparent 
 that he had arrived early and had been on a self- 
 conducted tour of the plant. 
 
 "There's a gang of carpenters over on the hog- 
 house," was his opening shot. "Of about twenty 
 men, not more than half a dozen are really working. 
 I think you need a new foreman for them, to get 
 the work out of 'em. And something is the matter 
 with the bricklaying gang; they haven't got enough 
 hodcarriers to keep the masons busy. Somebody 
 better take care of that in a hurry. If more of the 
 bosses were out on the job instead of in the office, 
 this plant would go up for a whole lot less money." 
 
1 6 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 After that, there was less chair warming! 
 
 Whenever he visited a branch house or plant, he 
 went without warning. Generally he came in the 
 back way and got his eyes full of what was going 
 on, before ever he looked up the men in charge. 
 
 Watchmen were almost a hobby with him. He 
 wanted them alert, on the job, and not to be talked 
 out of doing their duty. One story which has almost 
 become a classic among the men who knew him has 
 to do with a visit he made to the East St. Louis plant. 
 
 He appeared at the back gate one morning and 
 tried to walk past. "Here," challenged the watch- 
 man, "where are you going?" 
 
 "Isn't this Swift & Company's plant?" he inquired. 
 
 "Yes, but you can't come in this way. Have to 
 go around the front," directed the watchman. 
 
 "I'm going in this way," he declared, to see what 
 the watchman would do. 
 
 "No, you're not," the man contradicted him. 
 
 "I certainly am. It's shorter to go through than 
 to go around." 
 
 "You won't go through this gate," the watchman 
 announced flatly. "Now, get along out of here." 
 
 "Say, do you know who I am? I'm G. F. Swift." 
 
 "I don't care who you are. My orders are that 
 nobody comes through here unless it's part of his 
 job. You can't go through here, even if you are Mr. 
 Swift — and I don't think you are." 
 
 "What's your name?" 
 
 "Bateman." 
 
"A DOLLAR WASTED . . . . " 17 
 
 "All right, Bateman, you'll hear more of this." 
 And he started for the front gate. 
 
 A few minutes later he appeared at the manager's 
 desk. He apparently had something on his mind, 
 and he was not long getting it off. "You've got a 
 watchman named Bateman on the back gate?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Mighty good man. He wouldn't let me in. Bet- 
 ter raise his wages. A man like that will save us a 
 whole lot more than he costs." 
 
 There was another time when, in the sweet pickle 
 cellar at Chicago, a new watchman found him poking 
 into the barrels and examining the meats. The watch- 
 man ordered him out. 
 
 "All right," said the chief, without identifying 
 himself. But as soon as the watchman's back was 
 turned he resumed his looking. 
 
 In a minute the watchman returned. "Here, I 
 told you you can't do that. You'll have to go out, 
 right away." So, with all apparent grace, the found- 
 er of the business started out. 
 
 But on the way he saw something else which at- 
 tracted his attention. It was not thirty seconds before 
 the employee had him by the arm — a valiant thing 
 to do, since father towered well above six feet while 
 the watchman was a scant five feet six. "Look here," 
 was the man's ultimatum. "I've told you to get out 
 of here, twice. And you're still hanging around. 
 Now get out before I put you out." 
 
 Again the boss did as he was told — but this time 
 
1 8 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 he went all the way. Within the week that employee 
 was getting two dollars more in every pay envelope. 
 And father never tired of telling the story. To his 
 mind, it illustrated the very qualities of carefulness 
 and persistence which he most desired in his men. 
 
 One characteristic which seemed almost a peculi- 
 arity, though actually it was a necessity in conserving 
 his attention for the jobs that needed him most, 
 was his disinclination to talk about departments 
 which were making a profit. "I have no time to 
 talk about that," he would point out to anyone who 
 might undertake it. "I want to talk about the ones 
 that are losing. I have no time for the others." 
 
 No detail was too small to be worth watching, if 
 it bore on the subject of waste. He used to keep 
 an eye out for Swift wagons on the streets and when 
 he saw a meat wagon, one quick glance told him 
 whether the meat was properly covered. 
 
 If it was not, he was out in the street in a jump. 
 The driver was called down off his seat, then and 
 there to be shown exactly how meat should be cov- 
 ered. It is said that he never had to stop the same 
 man twice — and in later years he rarely had to stop 
 any wagons. Swift meat went out completely cov- 
 ered by the tarpaulin. Everyone who had anything 
 to do with the teaming had heard it too often to 
 forget it. 
 
 When the business was getting started, he used 
 to check over every detail himself. One plant man 
 tells of being called up to the chief's desk about the 
 
"A DOLLAR WASTED . . . . " 19 
 
 amount of beef which had been put into a car. "See 
 here," he was taken to task, "your sheets show so 
 much beef put into car number thus-and-so for this 
 branch house. The branch house sales sheets show 
 three hundred and fifty pounds more beef sold out 
 of that car than you say you put in it. That means 
 one beef went in without being tallied. We can't 
 have that sort of thing happening. It might not have 
 been shipped to one of our own branches." He 
 watched everything as closely as that. 
 
 A good many years later, when he could no longer 
 check all things himself, he still insisted on seeing 
 the facts of every claim. Always he had on his desk 
 several claim sheets with the name in each instance 
 of the employee who had made the error. And until 
 the business had grown far beyond the point where 
 anyone else might have relinquished this, he used 
 to talk personally with every man who made one of 
 these errors. The interviews were usually none too 
 pleasant — yet they were talks where the man was 
 taught rather than threatened. And anyone who was 
 called in because he made a claim error took away 
 from G. F. Swift's desk a comprehension of why 
 errors and wastes cannot be allowed, if a business is 
 to go ahead to success and profit. 
 
 Once, on a visit to a western plant, he headed 
 straight for the oil house when the superintendent 
 started out with him to go over the place. As soon 
 as he was in the oil house, he asked that the sewer 
 board be taken up. And the sewer, sure enough, 
 
20 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 revealed a loss of oil stock. He followed up the line 
 until he came to the cooler from which this sewer 
 drained. His inspection showed the tierces were 
 leaky. 
 
 The foreman was sent for. But he was not given 
 simply a general reprimand on the subject of waste. 
 He was told, besides the fact that the oil was worth 
 money, that a shipment from this plant to Rotterdam 
 had arrived with many of the tierces empty. He 
 heard about the freight, both rail and ocean. He 
 heard about the effect which a shipment of this sort 
 has on a customer who is expecting the shipment 
 for immediate use. Altogether it was a lesson in 
 business which any foreman might be glad of the 
 opportunity to receive. 
 
 An amusing sequel was that several months after- 
 wards on father's next visit to this plant word got 
 ahead of him to the foreman. So the foreman shut 
 off the sewer, had it cleaned out and then forgot to 
 open it again. 
 
 Once more the visitor came in and had the floor 
 board lifted. And to his astonishment he found the 
 sewer not only free from oil, but also free from the 
 water it should have been carrying. This time the 
 lecture was not so restrained in tone. 
 
 In his zeal for eliminating the needless expenses, 
 he would spare himself no more than anyone else. 
 In going through a hog killing department one day, 
 he had to climb up a dirty ladder. He soiled his 
 hands, and an overzealous boy who accompanied the 
 
"A DOLLAR WASTED . . . . " 21 
 
 party to carry the frocks handed the chief a piece 
 of cheesecloth to wipe his hands. 
 
 The boss examined the cloth with interest. "What 
 did it cost? How much is in it?" he demanded. 
 
 "A cent and three-quarters a yard," the superin- 
 tendent told him. "There are about four yards of it 
 in that piece." 
 
 "Thank you, I will use my own handkerchief," 
 was the instant decision. "I think you should see 
 that the company's supplies are not wasted." 
 
 He was always teaching. His aim was not to 
 make a man feel bad for something which had gone 
 to waste, but rather to avoid the possibility of repeat- 
 ing any similar loss. Whether it was a lump of coal 
 which he saw projecting from the cinders in the 
 yard, or whether it was seven cents worth of cheese- 
 cloth, he always commented because he wanted his 
 men to realize the importance of the trifles. 
 
 One result was expressed in his own words, "I 
 don't have to go out and hire very many managers. 
 I can raise better than I can hire." It is noteworthy 
 that today, twenty-odd years after his death, most 
 of the men in positions of high responsibility are men 
 who were trained directly under the founder of the 
 business. 
 
 His plan assured him soundly trained managers. 
 Another important result, from his point of view, 
 was that it avoided the tendency to five-figured sal- 
 aries, which his business could not afford in the 
 early days. 
 
22 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 A man who has been brought up from the ranks 
 through all of the different stages in one company 
 is almost certain to be a better man for that company 
 than a man who is hired from the outside. More- 
 over, such a man realizes that he has invested a great 
 deal of his time in the employing company, just as 
 it has in him. He recognizes that loyalty is mutual 
 and that there is on him an obligation to the company 
 just as the company has an obligation to him. 
 
 Such a man is a living refutation of the theory that 
 the only currency which can enter into the employee- 
 employer relation is that of cash down at the moment. 
 He recognizes that the man who has come up 
 through the ranks has a greater opportunity to be 
 worth a big salary and a big responsibility in future 
 than has the outsider. And in the long run, he is 
 right. 
 
 My father inspired this loyalty in his men. They 
 knew him as the man who had taught them what 
 they knew about the business, the man who had built 
 the business and had given them correspondingly 
 more opportunity for advancement than if the com- 
 pany had gone ahead with less phenomenal strides. 
 
 They had seen him recognize, in a material way, 
 the employer's obligation to his men. They acknowl- 
 edged their obligation to him, as well as their per- 
 sonal loyalty to him as a man. 
 
 It was well for him and for the business that they 
 did. For despite the years of unparalleled prosperity 
 which had come to the company after it had gained 
 
"A DOLLAR WASTED . . . . " 23 
 
 a bit of headway, there was coming a lean time. 
 The business had grown fast. If it had failed to 
 come through the times of trouble, the verdict must 
 be that it had grown too fast. As it is, one must say 
 that it had grown to the absolute limit of safety. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 "WE CANNOT FAIL!" 
 
 FROM his first transaction as a boy until some 
 time after the wearing days of 1893, my father 
 never had enough cash to handle his volume of busi- 
 ness comfortably. 
 
 It was not that he did not have during most of 
 this time a good deal of capital to work with. Rather, 
 his vision of the opportunities in his business ran far 
 ahead of the money which the business earned him. 
 And his daring led him to expand abreast of his 
 vision rather than abreast of his cash. 
 
 He was a born expansionist. But if he had lacked 
 this tendency, his first few years of shipping beef 
 east in refrigerator cars would have implanted it 
 in him. For, just as soon as he had succeeded in 
 delivering his Chicago-dressed beef all sweet and 
 edible in the hungry centers of the East, he was able 
 to undersell everyone else. 
 
 No one could haul live cattle east, slaughter them 
 there, and sell the meat for anything like what it was 
 costing us to lay down Chicago beef at the same 
 point. We were not paying freight on the inedible 
 portions of the animals, nor feeding them for another 
 thousand miles of railroad journey and standing a 
 heavy shrinkage in shipment to boot. 
 
 24 
 
"WE CANNOT FAIL!" 25 
 
 The first working capital which G. F. Swift had 
 was the twenty-five dollars his father gave him when 
 he was sixteen to serve the double purpose of keep- 
 ing him from going to Boston for a job and of setting 
 him up in the meat business. He got this twenty-five 
 dollars in 1855. He expanded it to a good deal more 
 by shrewd trading and hard work. 
 
 In 1873 he was "well fixed," as the New England 
 idiom has it. And despite that panic year's losses 
 to the three firms in which he had interests, he was 
 getting on in the world. 
 
 Yet within three years, so thoroughly was he con- 
 vinced of the opportunities ahead, he shifted his 
 scene of operations to Chicago from eastern Massa- 
 chusetts. Shifted his ideas from eastern slaughtering 
 to Chicago-dressed beef. And held so firmly to these 
 ideas that his Boston partner, James A. Hathaway, 
 forced a dissolution of their partnership. 
 
 Hathaway was the financial man, Gustavus Swift 
 the live-stock man, of the firm of Hathaway & 
 Swift. Its operations had been financially com- 
 fortable because Hathaway had both money and 
 belief in his younger partner's ability. 
 
 But when it came to so radical a change as my 
 father proposed, the older man would have none of 
 it. Partnership dissolved, my father received his 
 share shortly after he came to Chicago. 
 
 The proceeds to him were a little more than thirty 
 thousand dollars. It was all the money he had, and 
 it did not look to him to be very much. He had been 
 
26 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 operating three sizable businesses — and even in 
 those days live cattle cost about one thousand dollars 
 a car. 
 
 He had no illusions that he could work com- 
 fortably on this amount of money. But he did not 
 let this fact deter him. 
 
 No one saw fit to give him much competition in 
 the early days at Chicago. The general attitude 
 around the Yards was that if the Yankee newcomer 
 was allowed enough rope he would hang himself. 
 His logical competitors, the big Chicago concerns 
 engaged in pork packing and in the local fresh meat 
 business — the concerns which were his real competi- 
 tors when their owners finally saw how wholly right 
 were his ideas — let him have so much rope that 
 instead of hanging himself he obtained a substantial 
 lead. 
 
 The savings through dressing beef in Chicago 
 instead of shipping live cattle east constituted so large 
 a sum per head that Swift beef, which was better 
 than locally slaughtered beef, could be sold below 
 the market and still leave a handsome margin. Once 
 the plan was working, we made money at a great 
 rate. 
 
 Obviously he could not count on the rest of the 
 world to leave him this rich field. Some day the 
 other members of the industry would realize what 
 was going on. And forthwith they would enter into 
 competition to obtain a share of the eastern business. 
 
 Under these circumstances my father did the only 
 
"WE CANNOT FAIL!" 27 
 
 thing thinkable. He went to any length to expand 
 his business while he had the field to himself. 
 
 He borrowed every cent he could to build more 
 refrigerator cars, to extend his plant, to establish his 
 distributing machinery in the East. Every cent his 
 business yielded went back into it again. 
 
 Friends in the East, former associates and competi- 
 tors, were induced to buy shares in his enterprise. 
 And so it was that by the time the big Chicago pork 
 packers awakened to the profit for them in fresh beef 
 he was intrenched as firmly as they. Financially, 
 that is. In the beef business he had a head start 
 which was never to be lost. 
 
 But his head start was stalwartly contested. The 
 other concerns, once they entered the race, worked 
 for business. There was plenty to be had — what the 
 local slaughterers of the East had had but could no 
 longer hold against the economically invulnerable 
 competition from Chicago. 
 
 Our problem was finding the money to build the 
 equipment necessary for getting the business which 
 was to be had. Obviously, if we were first on the 
 ground in a given territory we should always be the 
 big factor there while the other concerns would be 
 merely our competitors. And father was a great one 
 for being the big factor in anything he touched. 
 
 On April 1, 1885, Swift & Company was incor- 
 porated for $300,000. On December 1, 1886, the 
 capital stock was increased to $3,000,000 — the inven- 
 tory showed that the plant was worth it. December 
 
28 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 i, 1891, saw an increase to $5,000,000. Shortly after- 
 wards still more stock was sold, for a total capitali- 
 zation of $7,500,000. 
 
 The first issue of stock had gone pretty much to 
 eastern friends and associates — wholesale meat deal- 
 ers, retail butchers, and live-stock shippers for export. 
 After a short while, Swift shares were universally 
 recognized as desirable securities. They were always 
 sold directly by the company to investors, merely by 
 announcing the new issue and giving " rights" to the 
 shareholders of record. Every share of stock ever 
 sold by the company has been sold for its par value. 
 
 When the panic of 1893 swept down upon the man 
 in charge of the business, as it swept down upon all 
 the commerce of the nation, he was not ready for it. 
 He was at the height of his last big period of expand- 
 ing the business. Swift plants were springing up 
 along the Missouri River — for if it was good to dress 
 beef at Chicago and save hauling live cattle a thou- 
 sand miles, was it not better to dress it at Kansas City 
 and save fifteen hundred? The new plants increased 
 the earnings, but also they increased the capital 
 requirements. Hence when the panic came, money 
 was tight with us. 
 
 My father had always regarded his credit, and 
 rightly so, as unquestionably his greatest asset. When 
 a loan came due, he always had the money on the 
 spot — and he usually asked for a renewal immedi- 
 ately after he had paid. 
 
 His credit was wonderfully good. No wonder. 
 
"WE CANNOT FAIL!" 29 
 
 In the first place he had been building, from his ear- 
 liest days, this unbroken record of prompt payment. 
 Then there was his history of commercial success. 
 And not least of all was his personality. 
 
 Anyone meeting Gustavus F. Swift was at once 
 impressed with the fundamental honesty of him. It 
 was in his face, in his manner, in his whole person- 
 ality. One knew, instinctively, that here was a man 
 to be trusted to any extreme. And besides his whole 
 air of honesty, there was no question that he was sub- 
 stantial. Physically, he was over six feet and weighed 
 about a hundred and ninety. There was no sugges- 
 tion of fatness about him; he was bone and muscle. 
 His whole appearance was enough to lend money on! 
 
 When he first came to the Chicago Yards, the East 
 was his source of all funds. Chiefly they were de- 
 rived from cattle and meat sources, from men who 
 knew him in the stockyards and meat centers of New 
 England. And through these people he was able to 
 get substantial lines of credit from eastern banks, both 
 through personal calls and by correspondence. Swift 
 paper was, in 1893, scattered throughout the East; 
 almost every bank in New England and New York 
 State had some. 
 
 The large banks, too, in Chicago and other centers 
 had Swift notes in more substantial amounts. Yet 
 even at this time he felt himself held back by the lack 
 of money. He was so held back; his vision raced 
 ahead so fast that the money could not keep pace. 
 His maxim was to borrow all the money anyone 
 
30 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 would lend him. He never turned down the offer 
 of a loan. The business was growing too fast for 
 that. 
 
 The business was, it may parenthetically be admit- 
 ted, growing at a rate faster than was altogether 
 conservative. As I have said, he was a natural-born 
 expansionist. And for years all of his training had 
 been for more expansion, and then still more beyond 
 that. 
 
 We went into the panic, in May of 1893, owing 
 about $10,000,000 to the banks — a tidy sum in those 
 days. Forthwith the banks evinced the greatest de- 
 sire to collect their loans and not to renew them. 
 
 Here was the test of G. F. Swift's policy. Could 
 he pay off these loans, accumulate enough new bor- 
 rowed money in hard times to carry on his business, 
 and emerge unscathed? Or would he find himself 
 in financial difficulties which must result in money 
 loss, perhaps even in loss of the management of the 
 business? These questions were very real — for in 
 1893 ten million dollars was not a sum to be bandied 
 lightly about, nor for that matter is it today. 
 
 Those who knew my father best say that in his life 
 were dozens of occasions when almost anyone else in 
 the world would have quit, but when he fought his 
 way through the difficulties by sheer grit. Of all of 
 these occasions, 1893 takes first place. 
 
 For several months then, he literally did not know 
 two days in advance just where he was going to get 
 the money with which to meet his obligations. Times 
 
"WE CANNOT FAIL!" 31 
 
 were hard, hard as ever they had been in the memory 
 of man. Collections came only through everlasting 
 persistence and even then they could not be relied on. 
 Several times the day was saved by expedients which 
 could have been devised by no one less determined 
 than was Gustavus F. Swift that his business would 
 not fail to meet its obligations, and promptly. 
 
 Off and on, rumors became current that Swift and 
 Company had failed or was about to fail. Always 
 this was the signal for another lot of creditors to 
 descend for assurances. And always they received 
 the assurances that all was well, just as they always 
 received their money on the dot. 
 
 The president of one Chicago bank heard these 
 rumors and became badly worried. So he called 
 at the office, bearing a statement showing all of Swift 
 & Company's notes in his bank with amounts and due 
 dates. The head of the business looked over the list. 
 Then he said: 
 
 "I am sorry, sir, that you put your bookkeeper to 
 the trouble of making out this long statement. Are 
 any of these notes due?" 
 
 "No, Mr. Swift. But I am worried about the 
 rumors I have heard about Swift & Company's finan- 
 cial condition." 
 
 "I have always thought it was a pretty good man 
 who could pay his debts when they came due," de- 
 clared my father. "And I have a record of always 
 having paid every debt when it came due. These 
 notes will all be paid when they come due, but I can't 
 
32 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 pay you before then. You will get your money on 
 time." And he did. 
 
 Gustavus Franklin Swift believed in the destiny 
 of his business. He sincerely believed that it could 
 not fail, for he would not let it. A dozen or more 
 times that summer the company could not have met 
 its obligations except for the superhuman efforts of 
 its founder. 
 
 Practically every department head of the company 
 had lent the company his lifetime savings on a note 
 endorsed by G. F. Swift. Many of the subordinate 
 employees had lent their money, too. Some of these 
 loans were well up into five figures; others were of 
 only a few hundreds of dollars. But every one of 
 them was made voluntarily. The men knew their 
 chief needed cash, so they brought him what they 
 could. 
 
 The aggregate of these loans by employees was 
 large. The margin of safety by which the company 
 escaped disaster was, several times, extremely nar- 
 row — much narrower than the margin given by the 
 loans of employees. If Swift people had not lent 
 their own money, the business might not have come 
 through. 
 
 Small loans were made not only by employees but 
 also by outside friends and associates. Many a live- 
 stock commission man in the yards had lent ten 
 thousand or even twenty-five thousand dollars on an 
 endorsed note. Every cent of the family's was in the 
 business then. 
 
"WE CANNOT FAIL!" 33 
 
 But my father gathered in money not only from 
 these logical sources ; he also brought in some goodly 
 sums from places of which no one else might have 
 thought. One morning, bright and early, he sent 
 for the department head in charge of ice houses and 
 icing stations. "Do you know A. S. Piper?" he de- 
 manded. 
 
 "Yes, I know him rather well." 
 
 "I see by the paper that he had a big fire in one 
 of his ice houses. The paper says it was fully in- 
 sured, and that it was worth a hundred thousand 
 dollars." 
 
 "Yes, I think the ice house was worth fully one 
 hundred thousand dollars, Mr. Swift And Mr. 
 Piper would not slip up on a question like insurance." 
 
 "Hm-m," his boss concluded. "That hundred 
 thousand is too much money for him to have." 
 
 "He can handle one hundred thousand dollars very 
 intelligently, Mr. Swift." 
 
 "He can't handle it as well as I can," was the re- 
 tort. "Can you get him to come to my office?" 
 
 Within an hour or two the department head had 
 Mr. Piper in the big front office. And then, as the 
 eyewitness has since recounted the story, was dis- 
 played an urbane, an almost ingratiating manner 
 which seldom came to the surface. 
 
 "I have heard a great deal about you, Mr. Piper," 
 he told his visitor. "Lots of people will no doubt 
 come to you about this hundred thousand dollars 
 which the fire insurance companies will pay you. 
 
34 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 The place for it is with Swift & Company, at six per 
 cent interest. I will give you a demand note, and 
 will endorse it personally. Then you can get your 
 money when you want it." 
 
 He got the money! The department head ushered 
 Mr. Piper to his carriage, and returned to his own 
 desk. An hour or two later his chief sent for him. 
 "I suppose you thought I wouldn't get that money," 
 he chuckled. 
 
 "Yes, sir, that's exactly what I thought." 
 
 "Well, I had to have it. I suppose that if you 
 needed that hundred thousand, you'd just sit around 
 and say you couldn't get it." 
 
 "I don't know, Mr. Swift. I probably would have 
 tried." 
 
 "I'll tell you, young man, you've never needed 
 money the way I needed that money. If you had, 
 you'd know just how I felt about it. You'd have got 
 it too." 
 
 Every morning during these times of stress there 
 was laid on his desk a sheet showing estimated money 
 requirements and estimated receipts. Those docu- 
 ments were the storm center of the business. 
 
 The estimated requirements were inelastic. If a 
 note came due, it came due and that was all there 
 was to it. Live stock had to be purchased, for cus- 
 tomers must be supplied with fresh meat. 
 
 Estimated receipts were, however, highly elastic. 
 Their natural elasticity consisted principally of their 
 tendency to shrink. Customers were not paying their 
 
'WE CANNOT FAIL!" 35 
 
 bills as promptly as in other times; many of them 
 were in straits which resulted in their eventual 
 failure. 
 
 To offset this natural shortage was my father's big 
 task. For only too often the estimated receipts fell 
 perilously short of the requirements, and the actual 
 receipts fell short of the estimates. Then it was that 
 he accomplished strokes such as the hundred-thou- 
 sand-dollar loan from A. S. Piper. 
 
 His task was complicated by the thick-flying ru- 
 mors of bankruptcy. One prominent company in the 
 industry had failed. Bankers sat on the edges of 
 their chairs, awaiting the next failure. 
 
 And because Swift & Company had expanded so 
 fast and was spread out so thin, it seemed the logical 
 candidate. 
 
 G. F. Swift's handling of the whole situation re- 
 vealed to the pessimistic bankers a consummate finan- 
 cial skill of which they had never suspected him. 
 For the whole summer, while the panic raged, he 
 drove coolly along the edge of a cliff above it. Some- 
 times he had one wheel part-way over. If ever he 
 had lost his head, if ever he had become careless, he 
 must have crashed squarely into it. How he ran 
 along tranquilly, getting the money somehow on the 
 day he had to have it and meeting every obligation 
 on the dot, is one of the wonder points in business 
 history. Certainly it was the height of his accom- 
 plishment. 
 
 Tranquilly? Almost always. But there were one 
 
36 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 or two occasions when even his outward tranquility 
 was disturbed. 
 
 One of these was at the time when the ticker tape 
 from the Chicago Board of Trade carried the mes- 
 sage that Swift & Company had failed. Inside half 
 an hour he was on the floor of the board, a place he 
 had probably not been half a dozen times in his life. 
 He strode in the door, walked to a table and rapped 
 on it with that hard, heavy fist of his. Everyone 
 looked up except a few traders off in a far corner, 
 so he called, "Attention! Attention!" 
 
 By this time he had the floor. He raised his voice 
 so that everyone could hear clearly what he had to 
 say: "It is reported that Swift & Company has failed. 
 Swift & Company has not failed. Swift & Company 
 cannot fail I" He walked out in a dead silence which 
 held for thirty seconds after he was gone. 
 
 Another time he got word that a meeting of bank- 
 ers had been called to consider just what steps should 
 be taken to put an end to all this uncertainty and to 
 plan concerted demands at once so heavy he could 
 not possibly meet them. 
 
 Twenty minutes later any passer-by on Michigan 
 Avenue might have seen him whipping his carriage 
 horse through the crowded traffic as though he had 
 the street to himself. The least surprised man pres- 
 ent, he walked into the midst of the bankers' meeting 
 which had gathered to bury the business. 
 
 He opened up without wasting any time: "You 
 gentlemen think you might be better off by bringing 
 
"WE CANNOT FAIL!" 37 
 
 financial pressure to bear on us. I'm sorry, gentle- 
 men, but we have to have more money, not less. It 
 is up to you to lend it to us. If we don't get it, we 
 go down — and a good many of you go down with us." 
 
 Before he left the meeting, he had increased his 
 line of credit — and on terms which permitted of no 
 future harassment. The bankers who had met to call 
 his loans increased them! 
 
 Yet nothing can make me believe that if he had 
 failed with these men, my father would not have 
 succeeded in raising enough money somewhere or 
 other to meet any demands which could be made on 
 him. When he told the Board of Trade, "Swift & 
 Company cannot fail," he was telling what he felt 
 to be the truth. When he told the bankers, "If we 
 don't get more money, we go down," he was telling 
 what he knew they believed and what would there- 
 fore give him the greatest leverage on them for in- 
 creased loans. 
 
 Periodically, even today, one hears or reads how 
 this or that packer poured millions of dollars into 
 Swift & Company in 1893 m order to save a gigantic 
 failure. To the man who does not know the competi- 
 tive situation which existed at that time, this may 
 sound reasonable. To anyone who was in the heart 
 of the industry at that time it is ridiculous. If we 
 had gone out of existence, or had even suspended 
 operations, it would have meant millions of dollars 
 in increased annual sales to each of the large packers. 
 That statement should make the situation clear. 
 
38 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 Actually, during the whole period, Swift & Com- 
 pany had exactly one bit of assistance from another 
 packer. When he saw ahead a shortage of money 
 rather more stringent than even the regular daily 
 crisis, father arranged that Morris & Company 
 should pay for Swift & Company's purchases of live 
 stock in the Chicago stockyards for a period of not 
 exceeding one week. 
 
 As it worked out, Morris & Company paid for two 
 days' purchases by Swift & Company on the Chicago 
 market — a sum not over one hundred thousand dol- 
 lars at the most. On the third day the "estimated 
 receipts" were bettered by the actual receipts, and 
 Morris & Company was repaid in full on that day. 
 
 This was not a situation where Swift & Company 
 would have fallen by the wayside if the hundred 
 thousand dollars had not been forthcoming. A sim- 
 ple way, but less desirable, would have been to sus- 
 pend purchasing live stock for a day or two and shut 
 down the packing house. 
 
 Not only did we weather the storm, but also we 
 operated continuously throughout — though at a re- 
 duced rate of production because of the need for 
 liquidating inventories. My father insisted that he 
 had to keep the packing houses open, even though 
 money was so hard to get. He declared he would not 
 willingly be caught short of product — and he wasn't. 
 
 But there was a time in '93 when the shelves were 
 almost bare of all stock — by-products, glue, hides, 
 wool, pickled and smoked meats — everything that 
 
"WE CANNOT FAIL!" 39 
 
 could be sold for cash. The head of the business 
 kept firmly to the idea that if you needed money, 
 there was no point in holding goods in an effort to 
 avoid a loss. He needed money right then more than 
 he needed anything else ; he sold off everything which 
 would yield money. This is how he provided the 
 funds to pay off those banks which were clamoring 
 for cash. 
 
 At the beginning of the panic, in May, we owed 
 about ten million dollars to banks. By September, 
 when the worst of the storm was past, the bank loans 
 had been reduced to one million — and this was in the 
 banks which had proved themselves ready and will- 
 ing to believe in G. F. Swift. Given another month 
 of the panic, he unquestionably could have liquidated 
 every cent of bank indebtedness. As it was, the actual 
 accomplishment was a feat little short of unbeliev- 
 able. 
 
 Yet, except for the one or two occasions when any- 
 one would have lapsed from tranquility, he handled 
 the whole job quietly, comfortably, and efficiently. 
 It was World's Fair year and the house was full of 
 visitors all summer. On a Saturday morning in June 
 he called in his chief clerk in charge of banking mat- 
 ters and announced, "I am going away. I don't want 
 to see you again until Monday." And he went out 
 to his buggy. 
 
 Within half an hour the head of one of the large 
 downtown banks telephoned. He wanted to talk with 
 the chief; but after failing to get him, or one of 
 
40 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 several other people, he talked with the financial 
 clerk. "There is a rumor downtown that Swift & 
 Company has failed and I must get hold of Mr. 
 Swift very quickly," he told the employee. "Even 
 if he is away, you find him and get this word to him." 
 
 The clerk had a feeling that his boss was at the 
 World's Fair. So he set out for the Midway, and 
 walked around looking for the familiar tall figure. 
 Finally, at about 1 130, he found him. 
 
 His boss listened to his excited story. Then he 
 smiled. "I said I didn't want to see you until Mon- 
 day. I meant it. The bank is closed, isn't it, until 
 Monday? All right, we'll answer them on Monday." 
 With no more ado he continued on his way. 
 
 For while he was tremendously concerned about 
 his firm's credit, he would never allow anyone else's 
 excitement to stampede him. He personally 
 instructed the handful of employees in the banking 
 department that the duty of the department and of 
 everyone in it was to keep the company's credit good. 
 He kept his finger on all of it. 
 
 Long after he was running a large and widely ram- 
 ified business, after he had relinquished to subor- 
 dinates duties which are supremely important, he 
 still held to the details of the credit structure. He 
 signed all notes, warehouse receipts, and other docu- 
 ments of like nature. He was able to present a full 
 statement of the company's financial condition from 
 the records which he maintained. 
 
 One evening early in the panic year the president 
 
"WE CANNOT FAIL!" 41 
 
 of a large bank wrote asking for a statement of his 
 assets and liabilities — something which was a good 
 deal less freely given out by all concerns then than 
 now. The request arrived by messenger after office 
 hours. 
 
 Next morning he appeared at the bank with a 
 statement made out in his own writing. The state- 
 ment showed that while the firm owed a large sum, 
 it was a long way from insolvency. He went over 
 the statement with the bank president and left it with 
 him. 
 
 Then he went to another bank and to another, until 
 he had been to all five of the banks where he had 
 considerable amounts borrowed. To each bank presi- 
 dent, after the first, he said just about this: "You 
 did not ask for this, but another bank did. I gave it 
 a statement and I want to deal fairly. I have brought 
 you one also. I hope it will be satisfactory." 
 
 He afterwards explained to someone who ques- 
 tioned the wisdom of this move: "There's no use in 
 trying to deal with a banker and not letting him 
 know how you stand. If I had not always worked 
 that way, I would not have received as good support 
 as I did receive from the banks during the panic. 
 And if I had not submitted that statement when the 
 first bank asked for it, there probably would have 
 been a good deal harder situation a little later on than 
 actually ever developed." 
 
 Years before, when he was doing much of his own 
 cattle-buying, the market broke in the East — this was 
 
42 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 in the very early days when he was still shipping cat- 
 tle, before he was slaughtering in Chicago. He saw 
 an opportunity, with the consequent cheap prices in 
 the Chicago Yards, to get hold of a great many cat- 
 tle and start them rolling eastward while everyone 
 else at Chicago was holding off in trepidation. That 
 would mean a nice profit the next week, when the 
 cattle could be sold in a strong eastern market. 
 
 So he bought and bought and bought some more. 
 His weight tickets, which are a form of document 
 constituting a sight draft payable at the buyer's bank, 
 came rolling into the National Livestock Bank in 
 great quantities. 
 
 Levi B. Doud was president of the bank. When 
 the flood of tickets reached a disturbing height, he 
 sent a boy out to bring in G. F. Swift. But that gen- 
 tleman did not come to the bank. Instead, he kept 
 right on buying cattle. A second boy failed to bring 
 him in and a third. So Doud got on his horse and 
 hunted up the recalcitrant customer. He found him 
 on horseback, at the cattle pens. 
 
 "You're buying a lot of cattle, Mr. Swift," was his 
 greeting. 
 
 "I know it," agreed my father. "Weigh 'em," he 
 said to a live-stock commission man he was with, to 
 indicate that he was buying this lot too. 
 
 "To tell you the truth, your tickets have overdrawn 
 your credit. I'm worrying about you, Mr. Swift." 
 
 "Glad to hear it," declared his customer heartily. 
 "I was worrying a little myself until now, but there's 
 
"WE CANNOT FAIL!" 43 
 
 no use of two of us worrying. I'm not worrying any 
 more. Good-by, Mr. Doud. I've got to go over 
 and look at some cattle." And he rode away. 
 
 That was perhaps a method not to be advocated in 
 dealing with bankers generally. But he knew his 
 man. In '93, he was on the ragged edge of his credit 
 with Levi B. Doud almost every day. 
 
 A good many times during a few months his weight 
 tickets represented a large share of the money in the 
 National Livestock Bank. He would be far over- 
 drawn at night. But Doud knew him as well as he 
 knew Doud. There was a world of mutual confi- 
 dence, after all the years of dealing. 
 
 So, after 3 :oo p.m., when the day's tickets were 
 in, G. F. Swift and his chief clerk would go over to 
 see Doud. The three would sit down and figure out 
 just where they stood. Then, somehow or other, they 
 would devise a way to leave Swift's account in satis- 
 factory shape overnight. Next day, bright and early, 
 part of the morning mail receipts of money would be 
 deposited — and all was well again until three o'clock. 
 
 There were key banks of this kind to which he 
 looked for considerable sums and unusual helpful- 
 ness. But a large bulk of his financial safety lay in 
 the fact that Swift paper was scattered in small pieces 
 all through the East, which at that time was the only 
 money-lending section of the country. Hardly a bank 
 east of Ohio and north of Virginia which did not 
 have a Swift note or two — whether it was a large 
 bank with five hundred thousand dollars or a small 
 
44 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 bank with fifteen hundred. But in the widely scat- 
 tered indebtedness lay an unlikelihood of its all being 
 called at the same time. 
 
 The financial and credit-building methods all had 
 to be developed by my father from his own experi- 
 ence and common sense. He had no skilled financial 
 man until L. A. Carton, an established dealer in com- 
 mercial paper, came in as treasurer along in the latter 
 part of 1893. By that time, G. F. Swift had had about 
 all he wanted of financing for the rest of his life. So 
 he brought in L. A. Carton as a man he could depend 
 on to take over this important job. 
 
 L. A. Carton's unusual ability in financing was of 
 very real value from the start. He aided his chief 
 both by taking of! his overburdened shoulders the 
 whole responsibility of the corporation's finance and 
 by bringing to this work his specialized financial 
 skill. 
 
 There is little question that we had been expanding 
 rather faster than was altogether wise when safety is 
 considered — though this is contrary to the views of 
 Carton that my father's knowledge of every factor in 
 the industry was so great that what to others seemed 
 too fast an expansion really was not. But L. A. Car- 
 ton, with his skill in corporation finance, saw that 
 thenceforth it might be preferable to go more slowly. 
 He began to exert a conservative influence. 
 
 The bigness of his financial operations had come 
 upon father so fast that he hardly realized their 
 magnitude until the panic of 1893 struck. One of 
 
"WE CANNOT FAIL!" 45 
 
 the old-timers among the executives often tells how 
 his chief remarked to him, on the first day that the 
 business reached the new high-water mark of one 
 hundred head of cattle, "If I could only kill a hun- 
 dred cattle a day regularly, that would be about as 
 big a business as I could ask." Yet in less than six 
 months the killing gang was not allowed to start 
 work in the morning unless a hundred cattle were 
 on hand. 
 
 To this same man, G. F. Swift remarked when 
 Swift & Company was incorporated for three hun- 
 dred thousand dollars in 1885, "It seems like an 
 awful lot of money, but we may need it yet." Just 
 twenty months later the capitalization was increased 
 to three millions — because it was needed. 
 
 It was the great speed of growth which caught him 
 unawares in 1893. He knew more money was needed 
 for capital. A new issue of stock was offered to the 
 stockholders. 
 
 But it did not go. They were already feeling the 
 pinch of the approaching panic. So was begun the 
 long, hard fight which could not really be counted as 
 over until the banks opened their credit resources 
 once more and the new stock issue cleared out in a 
 hurry. 
 
 If G. F. Swift had not done everything exactly 
 right, all the way through those stormy months, he 
 must have gone under. But he did everything exactly 
 right. This was a characteristic of his — and a char- 
 acteristic of the men who made good with him. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 JUST RIGHT OR ALL WRONG 
 
 MANY a man of equal ability has left behind to 
 witness his prowess no such structure as my 
 father left. I have no doubt that many such men have 
 consciously chosen not to. As between a career of 
 undivided attention to business and a life rounded 
 out by a catholicity of interests, they have selected 
 the broader. For them it means greater contentment. 
 
 No such choice was thinkable to G. F. Swift. With 
 never a backward look of regret for those pleasures 
 of life which by his choice he perforce left untasted, 
 he unhesitatingly elected to be master of his own busi- 
 ness. The cost was more than other men might will- 
 ingly pay. His whole mind and heart and strength 
 went into building up his packing enterprise. Church 
 and family alone excepted, he had little time or incli- 
 nation left for outside interests. 
 
 Had he been less than unusually able, he could not 
 have succeeded so well in accomplishing his purpose. 
 Yet ability could not by itself have done what he did. 
 His thoroughness was the source of his magic-work- 
 ing dissatisfaction with half measures. Father could 
 not be happy if anything with which he was con- 
 nected functioned short of one hundred per cent. 
 
 Whether it was the way the beef was dressed, or 
 
 46 
 
JUST RIGHT OR ALL WRONG 47 
 
 the salt slush left on icy walks by a careless plant engi- 
 neer — he would go to the root of the trouble and do 
 his best to correct it for all time to come. On both 
 of these subjects I have heard him deliver repeated 
 lectures to employees. And I cite them not because 
 they were hobbies, but as random selections to typify 
 the range over which his attention wandered. 
 
 He was a crank on doing things right, or at least 
 some of his men thought him so. Actually, of course, 
 he had so complete a comprehension of every detail 
 from buying the cattle to running a wholesale market 
 that he saw not only the error but also the ultimate 
 consequence of it. 
 
 He recognized that no business can ever attain per- 
 fection in all of its operations. But he was determined 
 that his own should come as close to that goal as could 
 any. It is my sincere conviction that he carried his 
 determination over into the realm of accomplishment. 
 
 When he found grease in the East St. Louis plant's 
 oil-house sewer, he visualized the irate oleomargarine 
 maker in Rotterdam sputtering guttural expletives 
 because many casks of the shipment he had counted 
 on to keep his plant running had leaked themselves 
 empty in transit. When he observed an Austrian 
 bruise-trimmer doing slovenly work at Kansas City, 
 he appreciated how this must lower the customer's 
 opinion of Swift beef — and to him it made no differ- 
 ence whether that quarter of beef was destined for the 
 epicure of Beacon Hill or the Italian family of South 
 Boston. The inividual error, which to the man on 
 
48 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 the job was of tiny consequence, in his chief's mind 
 translated itself into losing a good customer — and los- 
 ing thousands of good customers if the error should 
 continue. 
 
 To the oil-house foreman or the bruise-trimmer's 
 boss, my father doubtless seemed an unreasonable old 
 gentleman who made a tremendous fuss about very 
 little. On every subsequent visit to East St. Louis 
 he lifted the sewer board of the oil-house cooler. 
 Quite as unvaryingly on each inspection in Kansas 
 City he stopped to watch the way the knife sliced out 
 the bruises. Since he continued checking up on these 
 operations several times a year for the rest of his life, 
 to many of his people they doubtless seemed like hob- 
 bies of his. 
 
 Basically, of course, he comprehended a funda- 
 mental commercial truth: If everything is done 
 right, if errors are held below the errors of competi- 
 tors, and if a business serves an economic end, then 
 it must prosper. He schooled himself to do every- 
 thing absolutely right, and to expect the same of 
 everyone else. 
 
 Perhaps the one point where he laid the most em- 
 phasis on having everything done absolutely right 
 was in cleanliness. He insisted on cleanliness both 
 because he liked it — it fitted in with his ideas of doing 
 things right — and because it cut down spoilage 
 materially. 
 
 The most noticeable improvement of the Chicago 
 packing houses over the old local slaughterhouses was 
 
JUST RIGHT OR ALL WRONG 49 
 
 in cleanliness and sanitation. And father was the 
 leader in this respect. 
 
 He had learned the lesson when he was a local 
 retail dealer in meats back East. In those days when 
 refrigeration was little employed, if at all, in the pres- 
 ervation of fresh meats, he had found out that meat 
 which is handled fastidiously and kept in well- 
 scrubbed containers does not spoil so quickly as when 
 it is handled in slovenly fashion. 
 
 The principle, of course, is universal. There is less 
 loss in handling steel or coal, just as with meat, if it is 
 kept in a clean, orderly, well-planned way. In han- 
 dling perishable foodstuffs this is outstandingly im- 
 portant. 
 
 But cleanliness cannot be obtained without eternal 
 watchfulness. Dirt will accumulate if vigilance is 
 relaxed. And the average human being seldom con- 
 siders it worth while to keep up the fight. 
 
 Proof that it pays had come to him — rather he had 
 worked it out — at Clinton, Massachusetts. After his 
 original start with twenty-five dollars, nineteen of 
 which bought a heifer and yielded a profit of ten dol- 
 lars, he had scraped together a little capital for work- 
 ing funds — it was far from a fortune. It took him 
 fourteen years from that start to save up enough 
 money to carry out any plan at all extensive. 
 
 His first ambitious enterprise was opening a large 
 retail meat market at Clinton. This was a move from 
 sandy, sparse Cape Cod to the richer, more populous 
 hinterland. 
 
So THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 There were already here two or three small meat 
 markets serving the local mill hands. They served, 
 that is, by carrying a meagre stock of meats which they 
 kept in their ice boxes — for by 1869 refrigeration was 
 coming a little more generally into use. When a cus- 
 tomer stated a desire for a given cut, the market man 
 disappeared into the murky recesses and emerged 
 either with a piece of meat from which he cut what 
 was desired, or else with the information that he did 
 not have the requested variety in stock. 
 
 There was no attractive display and no effort at 
 cleanliness beyond what common sense dictated would 
 save on meat spoilage. There was a deal of greasi- 
 ness and little of daintiness. 
 
 My father, in his trips around New England buy- 
 ing and selling cattle, had done his best to sate his 
 unquenchable inquisitiveness about anything bearing 
 on the meat trade. He had consequently noticed that 
 in the larger cities like Worcester and Providence 
 and Boston the prosperous meat dealers were those 
 who made their stores pleasant and their service nice. 
 
 So in his new Clinton market he put into effect all 
 of his ideas which seemed practical from among those 
 he had observed and he added a number of others he 
 had never seen tried. Perhaps the larger cities had 
 meat markets as attractive as his at Clinton. Cer- 
 tainly no other towns of that size had its equal, in 
 quality or size. 
 
 To Swift's Market came wives of the hungry mill 
 hands who made Bigelow Carpets and Lancaster 
 
"* 
 
 i V"— - 
 
 PC 
 
 o 
 o 
 o 
 
 o 
 h 
 
 O 
 O 
 Q 
 i— i 
 
 w o 
 
JUST RIGHT OR ALL WRONG 51 
 
 Ginghams. They liked the cleanliness of the place — 
 the clean windows, the clean floors covered with 
 clean, fresh sawdust, the neatly scrubbed butcher 
 blocks and counters. They were a bit awed by the 
 white marble trays on which cuts of meat were dis- 
 played — but not too awed to buy the meat. 
 
 For the proprietor of this store deserved his repu- 
 tation of being a finicky meat seller. He insisted 
 then, just as he insisted all of his life thereafter, that 
 "good enough" was never good enough. He wanted 
 everything right, every iota of it. If it was not, then 
 someone was in trouble. 
 
 The natives were not used to this nicety of han- 
 dling meat, nor were they used to seeing cuts of meat 
 on display. Father displayed those cuts which he 
 most needed to dispose of. People who came in 
 bought them as a matter of course. And right here 
 is where he learned some of the fundamentals which 
 were to prove of utmost value in later years when 
 Swift's Market at Clinton was but a memory and 
 Swift & Company at Chicago was taking all of his 
 attention. The fundamentals of selling which he 
 had been developing in his earlier career and which 
 had been shaping themselves in his mind came into 
 their clear-cut shapes at Clinton. How he used them 
 to develop one of the world's largest businesses must 
 be reserved for a subsequent chapter. 
 
 From the store he had men operating three meat 
 wagons which daily sold over regular routes. His 
 own experience back on Cape Cod had included 
 
52 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 driving a meat cart or two with himself as sole pro- 
 prietor. Now, however, he was hiring others to do 
 this for him. 
 
 The carts were doing a business of perhaps twenty- 
 five dollars a day apiece. The market was doing 
 about fifty a day over the counter. And if you ques- 
 tion whether thirty-five to forty thousand dollars a 
 year was a substantial volume for a small-town meat 
 dealer in those days, ask some old New England 
 housewife what her mother paid for meat about 
 1870. For fifteen cents a good-sized family could 
 have a meat meal; for twenty-five cents the table 
 could carry generous helpings of the choicest beef 
 ribs or loins. 
 
 Principally it was cleanliness and the will to do 
 things right which had made the Clinton market such 
 a success. These fundamentals are quite as important 
 today — more important, even — in any business which 
 deals with the general public. Standards have gone 
 up. The show market at Clinton would be an alto- 
 gether ordinary market in any city of the same size 
 today. Any man who wants to stand out above com- 
 petition must set new standards, just as my father set 
 new standards when he opened the Clinton market. 
 
 That is why he made a good profit regularly out of 
 the Clinton business. He always maintained that 
 if an operation was performed correctly, we made 
 money by it. Often after we had undertaken some 
 activity which lost money for us and kept on losing 
 money, he would say: "We lose because we haven't 
 
JUST RIGHT OR ALL WRONG 53 
 
 learned yet how to do it. When we know how to do 
 it right, we'll begin to make it pay. But you can't 
 expect to make money when you do a thing wrong." 
 
 So he was always checking up, always looking for 
 things that were not being done exactly right. When 
 he inspected a plant — and this was frequent in his 
 routine — he would not let anyone go ahead of him. 
 He did not want it known that he was on the way. 
 
 He never looked at the big, showy things for 
 cleanliness. He looked in corners, down sewers, 
 under benches, and in the least well lighted parts 
 of coolers. 
 
 When he found something wrong, sarcasm was his 
 working tool for getting it corrected. "I think you 
 ought to hang an electric light on that so you could 
 see it," he told the foreman in charge of a beef cooler 
 when he found a long, heavy cobweb swinging down 
 from the ceiling. 
 
 "Do you think tallow's going down?" he inquired 
 of his brother Nat, in charge of the mutton cooler at 
 the Chicago wholesale market. Nat's frock was very 
 greasy. 
 
 "I don't know," responded Nathaniel. 
 
 "Well, I think it's going up. If I was you, I'd 
 fry out that frock right away. It's a chance to make 
 a good bit of money." 
 
 There was another time, when a new foreman could 
 not lay his hands on a clean white frock promptly 
 after word reached him by grapevine telegraph that 
 "G. F." was on the way. So he slipped out of his 
 
54 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 dirty frock, and donned a new tan overcoat of fash- 
 ionable cut. 
 
 "Do you work here?" was the first question. 
 
 "Yes, sir; I'm the foreman." 
 
 "I guess you didn't come down to stay all day," he 
 commented. 
 
 The foreman needed no further hint. Off came his 
 new coat. He went through the department without 
 a frock. And today, risen to plant superintendent, 
 he testifies that not since then has he ever mislaid his 
 frock — nor ever worn a dirty one. That sort of 
 thing, multiplied by thousands, is a contribution 
 which father left us and which will never be out- 
 grown. For the men he trained are training others 
 in the same ways; and his lessons are thus passed on 
 direct from one business generation to the next. 
 
 It was back before the days of concrete floors that 
 he stopped, suspiciously eyed the planking, and asked 
 the foreman of the killing floor at Kansas City: 
 "How do you keep these floors clean?" 
 
 "We scrub them with soap every night, and once 
 a week with sal soda," answered the foreman. 
 
 "We advertise cleanliness," observed his chief. 
 "Use sal soda every night," he directed the plant 
 superintendent who was going through with him. 
 And the foreman, still active on a like job, remarks, 
 "G. F. was the greatest man for sal soda ever I see!" 
 
 On this same killing floor, on the same visit, he 
 called the foreman's attention to a negro cattle 
 skinner who always put his foot on the inside of the 
 
JUST RIGHT OR ALL WRONG 55 
 
 hide. No one saw anything wrong with that. "Wait 
 until they hoist the carcass," urged the president. 
 
 Sure enough, in the process the footprint from the 
 inside of the hide — harmless enough in that place — 
 "offset" onto the carcass when it was hoisted. It 
 looked for all the world as if someone had been stand- 
 ing on the carcass. And it was not a sanitary 
 practice. 
 
 No one had ever noticed this before, though the 
 negro said he had been doing it ever since he came 
 to work a year and a half before. Only a man with 
 complete grasp of every detail of a complex business 
 could have seen why this was bad practice. Father 
 saw in passing what had escaped the men who spent 
 full time right there. And with his passion for clean- 
 liness and for having everything done shipshape, he 
 corrected the situation at once. 
 
 One time back in the '90s while I was out of town, 
 he took occasion every afternoon for weeks on end 
 to call in a youngster who worked under me. Daily 
 he lectured him about the crumbs of suet on the out- 
 side of carcasses dressed in this youngster's depart- 
 ment. Finally the young man succeeded in getting 
 everyone to brush off the crumbs of suet. It was 
 years after the employee became manager of one of 
 our largest plants that he discovered for himself why 
 the old gentleman was so vehement about this. The 
 broken tissues of the crumbs of suet allow mold spores 
 to get a start, and thus to depreciate the carcass. G. F. 
 Swift probably did not know this specifically. But 
 
56 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 he knew that anything perfectly clean and orderly 
 kept longer than the same thing when mussy. The 
 suet crumbs did not belong on the carcasses, hence 
 he fussed about it until he got the beef coming 
 through right. 
 
 In the early days he fired a floorsman at Chicago 
 for having dirty arms — always a pet irritation to him. 
 But this floorsman was a skilled workman. So the 
 superintendent hired him back two years after, think- 
 ing that it had all been forgotten. 
 
 Three days afterwards father was going through 
 the plant. "Isn't that the man I fired for dirty arms 
 a year or so ago?" 
 
 "Yes, Mr. Swift." 
 
 "All right, fire him again. When I fire anybody, 
 I want him to stay fired until I vote on him." Dirti- 
 ness around the plant was an unforgivable sin. 
 
 On every loading platform of our plants stood a 
 tripe keg. The boy who swept off the platform had 
 as part of his duty to pick up any fat which might fall 
 off the carcasses and put it in the tripe keg before 
 someone crushed it under foot. Never did father 
 cross a shipping platform without looking up and 
 down for these bits of crotch fat. If one was found 
 flattened against the planking, the foreman and the 
 boy both heard of it. For when this was overlooked, 
 it crossed two of his prime ideas — it was dirty and it 
 was wasteful. Either was a misdemeanor — the com- 
 bination constituted a major crime. 
 
 Everything connected with the handling of his 
 
JUST RIGHT OR ALL WRONG 57 
 
 goods was just right or else it was all wrong. He 
 allowed no middle ground. 
 
 For example, he never failed to look over the beef 
 coolers. It was part of his routine every time he 
 visited a plant. He would don a frock and spend 
 half an hour or so squinting down the long rows of 
 beef carcasses. He paid particular attention to the 
 neck fat and how it was trimmed. It must be trimmed 
 to exactly the right conformation to look pleasing, 
 but there must not be a hair's breadth extra trimmed 
 off. Fat on the carcass was worth the carcass or quar- 
 ter price. Trimmed off, it was tankage, or, at best, 
 oleo oil. 
 
 If he saw a carcass which looked wrong somehow 
 as he squinted down the long row, he would examine 
 it closely. If he saw a dark spot on the sawdust cov- 
 ering of the floor, there was bound to be trouble. 
 Things must be clean; things must be done right 
 Anything else called for a reprimand. 
 
 When it came to the cuts, his inspection was like- 
 wise of the closest. Beef ribs are very desirable and 
 bring a high price. Chuck is not so highly thought 
 of by the American housewife and therefore is less 
 in demand. When a carcass is cut absolutely right, 
 it yields nine per cent rib and twenty-six per cent 
 chuck. If the cut is made at the wrong place, the 
 carcass will yield perhaps eight per cent rib and 
 twenty-seven per cent chuck. He never lost an 
 opportunity to point out to a foreman what it cost 
 to do this wrong. 
 
58 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 For father was a teacher, along with his insistence 
 on doing everything right. I remember when I was 
 nine or ten years old, back in Massachusetts, how he 
 used to get me up sometimes before daylight to help 
 him butcher a steer. My part was to hold the lan- 
 tern. 
 
 Boylike, I would become so interested in some side 
 line of activity that I would forget my part of the 
 job. He never used to lose his temper, even though 
 the lantern would go into eclipse just at the moment 
 when he most needed its light. Instead he would 
 say: "You'll want to know some day how to do 
 what I'm doing now. Hold the lantern so that you 
 can see. Then I can see, too." 
 
 He knew how to buy cattle and how to pick cattle 
 buyers. He knew that the only way to buy cattle 
 was by the most painstaking care and that the only 
 way to check up on the results was to look over the 
 cattle as they came to the skinning floor. 
 
 When father first came to Chicago, everyone used 
 to laugh at his habit of riding a low Texas pony 
 which left his legs dangling almost to the ground. 
 He would ride around on his low-slung steed buying 
 his cattle and caring little what anyone else might 
 think. He knew why he was doing it and he knew 
 he was right. 
 
 In the first place, he could let himself into a cattle 
 pen without bothering to get off his horse — or with- 
 out taking a boy around with him to do this job. 
 But more important still, he was down at about the 
 
JUST RIGHT OR ALL WRONG 59 
 
 level of the cattle's backs. He could reach over and 
 feel the butts of the cattle to see whether there was 
 any fat there. A great many wise jokes were made 
 about this habit of his. 
 
 Finally, however, someone inquired just why he 
 felt the rump of every beef animal he bought. "Back 
 where I ship these cattle to, they're bought that way. 
 That's how I sell 'em, and how I buy 'em." He was 
 simply applying at Chicago the test which he knew 
 each animal would have to meet when it reached 
 Brighton or Albany. And when his cattle brought a 
 better price in those markets than did other shippers' 
 cattle, this was the reason. He always tried to find 
 out the right way to do a thing, and then he followed 
 out this right procedure unfailingly. 
 
 There were dozens, yes hundreds, of points which 
 he had settled as the best way of doing a thing, and 
 on which he checked up by personal observation at 
 every opportunity. Sometimes he could not demon- 
 strate the right way. Nevertheless he knew what the 
 wrong way was and what the right. 
 
 He stopped one day in the Chicago packing house 
 to show one of his old-time New England butchers 
 how to split a bullock. It was years since he had per- 
 sonally wielded a cleaver and his hand had lost its 
 cunning. He did it clumsily and made a poor job 
 of it. "Now, then, that's not how to do it," he 
 explained to the old-timer, "but you know how it 
 should be done. Do it the right way. If a thing's 
 worth doing at all, it's worth doing right." 
 
6o THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing 
 right. This was father's creed and pretty nearly the 
 whole set of rules he ran by. He repeated that copy- 
 book maxim thousands of times, to thousands of dif- 
 ferent people who worked for him. And he said it 
 each time with the simple faith and conviction which 
 made the other man appreciate the basic truth in the 
 hackneyed words. 
 
 Every detail of the business was at his finger tips. 
 He knew cattle-dressing, for example, as well as any 
 one I have ever encountered. He insisted on prompt 
 sticking to prevent dark meat. He always looked 
 into the carcass to see that no skirt meat had been cut 
 away with the viscera — for it is easy to lose a quarter- 
 pound of meat per animal in this way, which really 
 means something in the course of a day. 
 
 At St. Joseph a new method had been devised for 
 performing an operation in splitting a hog — it con- 
 sisted of using shears instead of a knife to split the 
 aitch-bone, and is nowadays standard procedure. But 
 at that time it had just been devised and was to be 
 tested out at Chicago in my father's presence. 
 
 So at the appointed time he walked to the spot in 
 the plant where the test was to be conducted. The 
 hogs were in improper shape. Someone had scalded 
 them and had left the hair on. Without a word he 
 picked up a knife and began taking off the hair. 
 Everybody else turned to and inside a few minutes 
 the hogs were scraped. 
 
 Then he walked back to the place where he could 
 
JUST RIGHT OR ALL WRONG 61 
 
 see best and the others prepared for the test. The 
 plant functionaries were all there. They showed him 
 the new operation, explained to him its advantages, 
 and awaited his verdict. 
 
 Not a word had he said from the time he saw the 
 hogs hanging there. He had simply worked and 
 listened. 
 
 Now when the others had finished talking and 
 hung on his decision as to whether the new method 
 should be considered standard henceforth, he said, 
 to their surprise: 
 
 "You know, when you're dressing hogs you ought 
 to take the hair off; you ought, ought to take the hair 
 off. Never ought to leave a hog like that." And he 
 walked back to his office without a word about the 
 new method of cutting the aitch-bone. 
 
 He was much more concerned about maintaining 
 a right method than about adopting a new method. 
 Therein he showed that common sense which distin- 
 guished his ways of working from those of so many 
 men of greater apparent brilliance. Once he had 
 a good method established he never allowed anyone, 
 himself included, to overlook it. He was ready to 
 supplant it at any time if a better method came his 
 way. But he avoided that common failing of being 
 so busy with new-hatched plans that he overlooked 
 the old, tested, profitable methods. 
 
 His everlasting desire that things be done right 
 was in no sense confined to his business. He felt 
 exactly the same way in everything he came in 
 
62 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 contact with and used to go out of his way to see that 
 things were done as they should be. 
 
 Father was not at all averse to doing them, if need 
 be. He went to church regularly. I do not believe 
 that he ever arose less than half a dozen times during 
 a service to raise or lower a window or two. He 
 wanted the ventilation of the church just right, just 
 as he wanted every one of his refrigerator cars 
 scrubbed out and cleaned with live steam between 
 trips. It was not that he wanted to be officious — 
 though I dare say a good many people thought him 
 so in this respect. Rather it was his desire that the 
 ventilation be right. Since the church could employ 
 no corps of workmen to do the job, he was willing to 
 do it himself. 
 
 He was always inveighing against a style which 
 was current for several years of wearing black hats 
 in the summer time. "You ought not to wear a black 
 hat in the summer," he would tell his employees — 
 or a caller from outside, perhaps someone he had 
 never seen before that day. "Black draws the sun. 
 You ought to wear a light hat." Again, it was not 
 his desire to be meddlesome but rather his feeling 
 that everything ought to be absolutely right all of 
 the time. If it was not, if he saw anything which 
 was not as it should be, it made him so uncomfortable 
 that he tried to set it right. 
 
 At Omaha those men who drove their own horses 
 to work (this was in the late '90s) maintained a 
 horse shed with a boy in charge of their horses. My 
 
JUST RIGHT OR ALL WRONG 63 
 
 father's natural inquisitiveness led him thither one 
 day and he did not think that everything was as it 
 should be. "Your horses aren't looking very good. 
 Better give 'em a bran mash once in a while," he 
 directed. 
 
 It was almost a year later that he made his next 
 visit to the Omaha plant. As soon as he was through 
 in the office and on the plant he headed for the 
 horse shed. The same boy was on the job. "Your 
 horses look better than last time I saw them," was 
 his comment. "Guess those bran mashes helped 'em 
 along." He had trained himself never to forget any- 
 thing until he had seen it to a successful conclusion. 
 Even when he was running one of the world's largest 
 businesses he could not overlook the condition of the 
 horses he had noticed a year before. 
 
 It was the same way whether he was checking up 
 on the loss of horse blankets at one of the Chicago 
 wholesale markets or making sure that the standard 
 shade of paint was being used on all Swift proper- 
 ties. In both instances he was interested in having 
 things exactly right and also in saving money. But 
 he was even more concerned with the Tightness than 
 he was with the saving. 
 
 In overseas selling, especially in England, he ran 
 into trade abuses which could not be tolerated by his 
 standards. He made, altogether, more than twenty 
 trips across to get them cleared up. 
 
 When he started at it, American-dressed meats had 
 no show to be sold either attractively or economically. 
 
64 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 Before he had finished with the job, American meats 
 were going to Great Britain by the shipload and he 
 was realizing the real value of his products. More- 
 over, a great deal more of his beef was being sold 
 there than of locally raised beef. 
 
 He used to get up at three o'clock every morning 
 in London to go over into Smithfield Market and 
 check up on what was being done with his product. 
 He would row with any marketman who tried to 
 perpetuate a trade abuse. And eventually he cleaned 
 the situation up. He was quite as interested in accom- 
 plishing this because it was right as because it gave 
 him another profitable market — though he did not 
 discount the market, at that. 
 
 Father's knowledge of every part of the business 
 and his attention to the most minute details was one 
 of the secrets of his operating success. While the 
 microscopic eye was his for scrutinizing little things, 
 he had the telescopic eye for surveying big things. 
 And he never put on the wrong lens! 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 TAKING THE EAST 
 
 YOU never made any money on business you 
 didn't do." 
 
 This was the idea which governed my father's 
 whole activity. If you did a good job of selling, you 
 had a chance to make money — you made money, 
 assuming your business was competently managed. 
 But if you did not sell, then you stood no chance to 
 make it. 
 
 "You don't make a profit on shortages," was 
 another of his maxims. Every morning he carefully 
 looked over the previous day's orders which could 
 not be filled completely because we hadn't the goods 
 in stock to ship. 
 
 I still follow this custom. Shortages may readily 
 cut two per cent or even more off the total sales. And 
 when we are working every day to build up our vol- 
 ume at a profit, I see little sense in throwing away 
 trade. 
 
 As long as a manager sold plenty, G. F. Swift stood 
 by him — even if he made no money. Failure to make 
 money on a big enough trade simply showed that a 
 condition existed which could with thought be cor- 
 rected. 
 
 But failure to sell put the man in a hole. If he did 
 
 65 
 
66 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 not sell when his job was selling, then someone soon 
 replaced him. 
 
 Whenever he faced the job of breaking in where 
 he had had no trade, father was a plunger. He 
 would quickly take a chance to lose a lot of money 
 if that was the key to getting a big trade quickly. 
 
 When he decided to sell Chicago-dressed beef in 
 New York City, he hired a man there — and forth- 
 with shipped him a car of beef, followed by another 
 a week later. Then in a few days he went to New 
 York. 
 
 "How are you making out?" was the first question 
 he shot at the salesman. 
 
 "Awfully bad, Mr. Swift. I lost you a thousand 
 dollars on each of those two cars." 
 
 In these early days two thousand dollars was a 
 whole lot of money to father. But he never blinked 
 an eye. "All right. You'll do better next week, won't 
 you?" 
 
 "I hope so, Mr. Swift. I hate to promise." The 
 salesman was a conscientious, hard-working fellow. 
 
 "Well, I'm going to ship you three cars next week. 
 Sell it somehow." 
 
 With the knowledge that he could count on a boss 
 determined to sell beef in New York regardless, the 
 man succeeded in disposing of those three cars at a 
 smaller loss than his previous record. The week 
 after, he just about broke even. 
 
 Very soon he was making a little money on each 
 car he handled; he was handling a goodly number of 
 
TAKING THE EAST 67 
 
 cars each week. His trade grew so that it wiped out 
 the red-ink figures within a few weeks more. In less 
 than six months we were an important factor in the 
 New York market — at a profit. 
 
 "If you're going to lose money, lose it. But don't 
 let 'em nose you out." This was my father's standard 
 policy and his standard advice: to the pioneer New 
 York man; to the man in charge of our British beef 
 business ; to his brother Edwin, who handled the east- 
 ern sales after a few years ; to me when I was starting 
 the pork and provision ends of the business a few 
 years later. 
 
 "Don't let 'em nose you out." It is about as good 
 advice as can be given to any man anywhere. 
 
 After the first two or three cars of Chicago-dressed 
 beef had been quickly and profitably sold in Lowell, 
 Massachusetts, the local market men agreed to buy 
 no more Swift beef — and bound their bargain by 
 posting cash forfeits. So the next car we shipped ran 
 against a figurative stone wall. 
 
 The evening of the first day a telegram came from 
 the Lowell agent: "Local butchers combined agree- 
 ing buy no Chicago beef. No sale for beef in Lowell. 
 Shall I ship the car to Lawrence or where?" 
 
 "Sell it in Lowell," his chief wired laconically. 
 
 Next evening came another telegram: "No sales 
 today. Where shall I sell it?" 
 
 Again the answer: "Sell it in Lowell." 
 
 The Lowell experience was by no means unique. 
 Our agents in the East were having none too easy a 
 
68 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 time of it in many instances. They met with opposi- 
 tion, frequently well-organized opposition. 
 
 Nearly every agent was applying from time to time 
 for permission to ship his beef elsewhere. Chicago- 
 dressed beef was never going to be established any- 
 where if the agents were allowed to give up. My 
 father put a stop to it, nor permitted any exceptions. 
 
 Next day anyone in Lowell could buy Swift beef 
 at the price he offered. That day the car was sold 
 out. 
 
 Within less than a week the chief arrived in 
 Lowell. In rapid succession he bought a lot, obtained 
 a switch track, and had lumber delivered to the site. 
 Next day a branch-house market was being erected. 
 
 Before the market was opened, one of the outstand- 
 ing local dealers called on him. "I was in the com- 
 bination against you," the native began. "But I'd 
 like to handle Swift beef as your local agent." 
 
 "We lost five hundred dollars on a car of beef 
 because of your boycott," he was told. "If you assume 
 that loss, I'll be glad to have you as my partner in 
 this market." The deal was closed right then. G. F. 
 Swift would not be nosed out, but he thought no less 
 of the man who tried it. 
 
 That was typical — except for the boycott — of how 
 he broke into many an eastern town. Usually he 
 began by having his beef sold out of the car, or from 
 the platform on a switch track. Then, if he could, 
 he would get local wholesale dealers to handle the 
 beef. Sometimes he had to put in salaried men 
 
TAKING THE EAST 69 
 
 because he could not find the sort of local dealer to 
 whom he would entrust the job. 
 
 When Chicago-dressed beef began coming on the 
 market, the East had a real prejudice against it. To 
 be sure, it had better edible qualities, by reason of 
 hanging in refrigeration for several days after 
 slaughter, than had the fresh-killed beef the east- 
 erners had been eating. 
 
 But the idea of eating meat a week or more after it 
 had been killed met with a nasty-nice horror. There 
 was about as much sense in avoiding Chicago-dressed 
 beef as there would have been if the reformers a few 
 years before had succeeded in doing away with sani- 
 tary plumbing in residences. Each was a marked 
 improvement over the old order. Yet each was guilty 
 of the original sin of newness. 
 
 While he had hard situations to meet in some 
 places, in many others he was able to get the most 
 desirable agents merely for the asking. His reputa- 
 tion as a business man and as a meat man was enviable 
 throughout New England. Even though he had been 
 away several years, his reputation held its old gleam. 
 G. F. Swift's word that his product was good and 
 marketable was enough for most of his friends. 
 
 He always went to the best possible local man. If 
 this man could not be obtained as agent, then an em- 
 ployee got the job. 
 
 "There's no use handling poor stuff or dealing with 
 the wrong sort of people," father used to explain. 
 "There are enough people who want good stuff and 
 
70 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 who will deal honestly, to give us all the business we 
 can handle." This was his guiding principle in pick- 
 ing men or live stock. 
 
 He simply wore off the prejudice against western 
 beef — where he could, by diplomacy. Where diplo- 
 macy proved inadequate, he resorted to open warfare. 
 
 In Fitchburg, for example, Lowe & Sons was the 
 leading firm of meat dealers. As soon as he was able 
 to furnish Chicago-dressed beef in winter — this was 
 eighteen months before the first successful warm- 
 weather shipment was delivered at Fall River — 
 father called on the elder Lowe. 
 
 Lowe not only refused the agency, he was down- 
 right unpleasant about it. "I wouldn't sell a pound 
 of your beef if Fitchburg was starving," he vehe- 
 mently declared. 
 
 "All right, I'll feed Fitchburg myself," was the 
 retort. 
 
 So my eldest uncle, William Swift, went to Fitch- 
 burg as our agent. "G. F." was a natural trader; but 
 William had trading, old-fashioned Yankee trading, 
 down to a fine art. His original keenness in this direc- 
 tion had been sharpened up by infinite practice and 
 observation. He would swap horses or jack-knives — 
 and never to my knowledge did he get the worse of a 
 trade. 
 
 If a market man would let William Swift supply a 
 quarter or a side or a carcass of western beef, he 
 would trade for a calf or a sheep or a barrel of pork 
 — then sell the swapped stuff for cash. If a customer 
 
TAKING THE EAST 71 
 
 who had bought on credit showed signs of weaken- 
 ing, he would back up a wagon and load up enough 
 pork or any other portable assets there might be to 
 square accounts. 
 
 William Swift supplied competition which was 
 real competition. He cleaned up the local business at 
 a profit, nor left much for the Lowes. It was not 
 long before the old established firm of Lowe & Sons 
 had retired from business, leaving the field pretty 
 much to Swift beef. 
 
 But here, once more, father joined forces with the 
 enemy after the defeat. Three of the Lowe boys came 
 to Chicago and went to work for him. After a few 
 years they went back home to Fitchburg and started 
 in again, handling Swift products exclusively. Until 
 about fifty years after the historic encounter between 
 G. F. Swift and the elder Lowe, a Lowe was manag- 
 ing Swift & Company's Fitchburg branch house. 
 
 G. F. Swift when he was going after trade would 
 always give a competitor a chance to join with him. 
 "If you'll handle my beef, we'll be partners. If you 
 won't handle my beef, I'll put it in against you." This 
 was the squarest kind of competition. And if it came 
 to competition, my father always won. He had the 
 mighty advantage of economics on his side. 
 
 Beyond even his ability as a packer was his ability 
 as a trader. He was, to be sure, a superlative manu- 
 facturer in his chosen field. But it was as a trader 
 that he excelled. 
 
 "The best cattle always sell first," was one of his 
 
72 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 maxims. Another was, "Sell of! the odds and ends 
 first. You can always sell the top pieces." 
 
 He believed a good man sold what was hard to sell. 
 He emphasized on every occasion that anyone can sell 
 beef tenderloins and rib roasts if his customer has the 
 money — but it takes real ability to sell a chuck pot- 
 roast to a customer who wants to buy porterhouse 
 steak. "See that row of houses over there?" he 
 inquired of one of his managers with whom he was 
 in 1900 revisiting Sandwich, the Cape Cod home 
 town of his youth. "That's where I used to peddle 
 meat. Many a time the women came out of those 
 houses to buy — and usually I sold 'em what I had the 
 most of," he ended with a chuckle. 
 
 When Texas longhorns were coming into the stock- 
 yards in quantity, they were not in high esteem. 
 Texas beef was not the most easily salable. Yet we of 
 course slaughtered our share. 
 
 My father visited the Cleveland branch house once 
 and saw perhaps two hundred Texas cattle in the 
 cooler. "You needn't say a word about those cattle," 
 he told the manager. "I can tell all about 'em. 
 They're on your mind, aren't they?" 
 
 "You bet they are." 
 
 "If I had those cattle on my mind, I wouldn't have 
 'em there by tonight. I'd have 'em on somebody else's 
 mind by tonight." 
 
 "I'd have to sell them at a ridiculous price, Mr. 
 Swift." 
 
 "I'd have 'em off my mind." 
 
TAKING THE EAST 73 
 
 Next day he wired from Buffalo: "How many of 
 those cattle are left?" 
 
 "No cattle left," the Cleveland manager tele- 
 graphed back. His men were seldom slow to take 
 his hints. 
 
 G. F. Swift never believed in holding to a thing 
 because selling it might bring a loss. For one thing, 
 fresh meat is perishable. And again, he believed that 
 the best way to make money is to keep turning over 
 goods and capital. He developed a technique which 
 kept his goods moving at a rate far faster than was 
 needed to avoid spoilage. I doubt whether he could 
 have built up his tremendous business in so short a 
 time otherwise. As it was, he was kept scratching 
 for funds to run his business. Because he made every 
 dollar do the work of ten, he expanded much faster 
 than he otherwise could have. 
 
 Yet with all of his desire to sell and then sell some 
 more, he kept warning his people not to overload a 
 customer : "Never try to sell a customer more of any- 
 thing than he can get rid of quickly. Try to sell him 
 what he needs, and then he'll come back. He'll be a 
 better customer in the end." 
 
 Similarly he held that smaller customers should not 
 be discriminated against in price. "It isn't wise to 
 make extra low prices to big customers on large quan- 
 tities," was the way he told it. "Encourage the small 
 customer. Maybe some day he'll be a big customer." 
 
 And when he made a price, it stuck. Whether he 
 was selling or buying, he stood by his price. 
 
74 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 It was based on worth as he saw it. Father would 
 not change his price unless conditions changed. And 
 often it angered him to have someone come back to 
 him with another offer. 
 
 One of his fundamentals of selling he proved out 
 in his retail market at Clinton, back before he came 
 to Chicago. He had driven a retail cart on Cape 
 Cod, selling to housewives meat which he had slaugh- 
 tered. Then he had come to Brighton market, near 
 Boston, to buy his cattle and drive them to Barnstable 
 for slaughtering. Next he devised the plan of doing 
 his slaughtering at Brighton, selling the meat along 
 the way as he drove home to Barnstable. 
 
 He saw the chance to branch out as a cattle buyer. 
 He would buy cattle from the farmers who raised a 
 cow or two for market, drive them to Brighton, and 
 sell them there. 
 
 By the time he had developed through fourteen or 
 fifteen years of these varying but related experiences, 
 he opened his market at Clinton. The success of this 
 market has already been described, but one phase of 
 it deserves more than casual attention. For one of 
 the methods he devised there to sell meat to house- 
 wives who entered the shop was carried over into 
 selling meat at wholesale when we had wholesale 
 markets stretched from coast to coast. 
 
 The meat-market men who had the Clinton trade 
 before father opened his store there used to keep their 
 meat in the ice box. Nothing was on display. 
 
 Father had learned, years before, that he had to sell 
 
TAKING THE EAST 75 
 
 off the plate and chuck and round if he was to make 
 his profits from the animal. And he had developed 
 the knack of convincing his retail customers that these 
 were the parts they should buy — if at the time it was 
 the sort of meat he had the most of. He knew that 
 the ribs and loins take care of selling themselves. 
 
 So when he opened his Clinton market he dis- 
 played tempting cuts of meat where customers could 
 not fail to see them. His store was clean in every 
 detail, no one could take exception to having the 
 meats outside the cooler. 
 
 He made a point of displaying most prominently 
 those cuts which he needed to sell. The sirloin-steak 
 customer could be depended upon to insist on getting 
 sirloin steak. But a woman who came in undecided, 
 and whose pocketbook was thin, would profit both 
 herself and the store by buying one of the less popular 
 cuts. 
 
 The plan worked — worked beautifully. Not only 
 did customers buy the meat he wanted to sell, but also 
 six times out of ten they bought more than they had 
 intended buying. It was exactly the principle of 
 store display which has subsequently been employed 
 by progressive retail merchants. The five- and ten- 
 cent store chains are the prominent examples of using 
 this plan. Store display is the mainspring of their 
 success. 
 
 In pursuing his idea of store display, father dis- 
 covered that if you cut them up, you sell more cattle 
 in a day. (The same thing applies, of course, to 
 
76 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 every other kind of animal. But in the early days at 
 Chicago he dealt only in beef. Mutton and pork 
 came later.) 
 
 When a retail meat dealer enters our wholesale 
 market to buy something, he is probably aware that 
 he has a good-sized stock of meats in his ice box. If 
 he sees in the wholesale cooler row upon row of 
 whole carcasses, or even of quarters, he simply 
 remembers the general condition of his stock and 
 buys nothing beyond what he came in to get. 
 
 But if he sees instead a large assortment of cuts in 
 the foreground, with the larger pieces in the back- 
 ground, he begins to particularize in his mind. "I've 
 got too many rounds left," he may think. "But I'm 
 getting pretty low on ribs. Better buy some, so I 
 won't be running out." We make the additional sale, 
 which likewise helps him to keep his stock better bal- 
 anced and his customers satisfied because they find at 
 his store exactly what they want. 
 
 "Cut it up and scatter the pieces," the chief would 
 direct the manager of a branch house where a cooler 
 of beef was not moving well. "The more you cut, the 
 more you sell." The advantage of the small sale now 
 instead of the large sale later is obvious. And there is 
 the benefit to the dealer who is better able to turn his 
 stock when he buys cuts instead of quarters. "If they 
 won't buy a whole carcass," father would tell a man 
 whose sales were slow, "maybe they'll buy a cut." 
 
 Inertia militates against doing things this way. It 
 is hard work to cut up beef carcasses into cuts for 
 
TAKING THE EAST 77 
 
 display. The unambitious manager hated to go to all 
 this trouble. But after his chief had jumped him for 
 it a few times and he had seen for himself how rap- 
 idly meat sold in cuts when the carcasses from which 
 the cuts came had not been selling, even the laziest 
 manager learned the wisdom of the plan. 
 
 Once father dropped in to see a man who had 
 recently left us to take charge of another packer's 
 St. Louis wholesale market. There was a big selec- 
 tion of cuts on hand in the cooler, well displayed 
 and thoroughly attractive. 
 
 "Nice lot of cuts youVe got here, Halloway," com- 
 mented his former boss. "Don't know when I've ever 
 seen a better line of cuts in a cooler." 
 
 "I don't think you ever did, Mr. Swift," replied 
 Halloway. "But it's your idea, and it's doing just 
 what you always said it would. You told me once, 
 years ago, that you literally cut your way into the 
 beef business any place you opened a market. I'm 
 trying to cut my way into it for these people here 
 in St. Louis. You taught me that, Mr. Swift. And 
 I'll tell you, we're cutting our way in." 
 
 "Cut it up and scatter it out." This was one of the 
 principles which made sales for my father and which 
 worked quite as well for him in other lines of activity. 
 I have already told how he placed Swift financial 
 paper in the hands of every small bank which wanted 
 it. This was an application of the same theory, one 
 of the best ideas which was ever devised in our 
 financing. The country banks got accustomed to 
 
78 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 having Swift paper, in small pieces. They learned 
 it was safe stuff to have, and when a pinch came they 
 held to it as if it were government bonds. 
 
 His financial policies and his sales policies touched 
 in at least one other important point. He inter- 
 meshed so completely the financial interests of many 
 important distributors with the interests of Swift & 
 Company that there was no question that we had 
 adequate, enthusiastic sales representation. 
 
 His chief assistance in this whole field of develop- 
 ing and insuring thorough distribution was his broth- 
 er Edwin C. Swift. "E. C." was ten years younger 
 and had been father's first lieutenant before father 
 came to Chicago. He had managed the Clinton 
 retail market after his elder brother's interests had 
 ramified, when the larger affairs of Hathaway & 
 Swift, and Anthony, Swift & Company, were claim- 
 ing G. F. Swift's attention. After the Clinton retail 
 market was sold, E. C. continued to run the whole- 
 sale business at Clinton. 
 
 But when G. F. Swift's whole interest was trans- 
 ferred to the Chicago business and its development 
 through the early stages of slaughtering in the West 
 and shipping to the East, E. C. and he had parted. 
 E. C. wanted to see the country. He had gone to the 
 Pacific Coast, and what had become of him there 
 no one in the family knew. Letters sent to his last 
 address at San Francisco came back unclaimed. 
 
 Once the technical problems of the young enter- 
 prise had been met at Chicago, there came the need 
 
EDWIN C. SWIFT 
 
 D. M. ANTHONY 
 
TAKING THE EAST 79 
 
 for developing eastern trade just as fast as was 
 humanly possible. Father could not carry the whole 
 load; he could not be both in Chicago running his 
 company and in New England building up its trade. 
 He spent as much time in the East as he could, but 
 it was not enough, and he knew it. 
 
 So he naturally thought of his brother Edwin. 
 Edwin knew father's ways of working, was trust- 
 worthy and energetic, was a good mixer. In short, 
 Edwin was exactly the man to take charge of eastern 
 affairs. 
 
 But where was E. C? No one knew. G. F. 
 determined to find him, for he never let any ordinary 
 difficulties stop him. 
 
 So he sent for a relative who was working at Chi- 
 cago and who knew Edwin well. He gave him a 
 comparatively large sum of money and directed: "I 
 want you to find Edwin. Here is the last address 
 we had for him, in San Francisco. You'll have to 
 trace him from there. But you must find him. And 
 when you find him, bring him to me at once. I must 
 have him come here to see me." 
 
 After a good deal of amateur detective work in 
 San Francisco, the relative found Edwin C. Swift's 
 name on the pay roll of a railroad contractor. The 
 gang was engineering a railroad eastward across the 
 mountains, several hundred miles from San Fran- 
 cisco. The messenger set out to find the gang, and 
 succeeded after several weeks of hard travel. 
 
 "What does Stave want of me?" was the first 
 
80 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 question Edwin asked after the messenger had told 
 him he was wanted. 
 
 "I don't know, Bub. But I know he told me to 
 bring you without fail, that he had to see you in 
 Chicago. You know he wouldn't have gone to all 
 this length to hunt you up if he hadn't meant it." 
 
 "But I'm bound here by a contract," protested 
 E. C. "I can't leave this job. And I like it here, 
 anyhow." 
 
 The messenger stuck to it. He kept after E. C. 
 for two weeks or so, and finally persuaded him to 
 make the change. It took a while longer to find 
 a man to replace him, but eventually they started 
 eastward. Sharing one horse to Ogden, two hundred 
 miles away from their start, they there boarded a 
 train and came to Chicago in comparative comfort. 
 
 When the brothers had talked, E. C. saw that the 
 opportunity in the East was just his sort of job. So 
 he took it on and became a partner. He was then 
 twenty-nine, my father thirty-nine. Between them 
 they developed trade at a rate which actually sur- 
 prised them both. 
 
 When E. C. Swift joined us at this time the parent 
 concern was known as G. F. Swift & Company. In 
 the East it was selling as Swift Brothers. And it 
 was not so long afterwards that the whole business 
 was incorporated as Swift & Company, with three 
 hundred thousand dollars capital stock — in less than 
 two years to be increased to three millions. 
 
 Father had personally gone into partnership with 
 
TAKING THE EAST 81 
 
 many of the eastern dealers who became his local 
 agents. He and Edwin C. Swift sold a good deal of 
 the stock to many of the eastern dealers who became 
 his local agents, key men in the East. Thus with part 
 of the agency owned by G. F. Swift and with the 
 more important agents heavy stockholders in the com- 
 pany, there were built up outlets which gave unques- 
 tioned loyalty and enthusiasm. 
 
 This solidarity of interest meant that our sales went 
 up at an almost unbelievable rate. The important 
 men at the yards had not believed it possible for 
 father to succeed in dressing his meat at Chicago and 
 selling it in the great consuming centers. They had 
 been content to go ahead with their own affairs of 
 smoking and salting pork, or of selling dressed beef 
 locally around Chicago. 
 
 While they were waiting for their Yankee competi- 
 tion to fail, G. F. and E. C. built up a fresh meat busi- 
 ness such as no one had ever dreamed of. The broth- 
 ers put their whole minds, hearts, and strength into its 
 development. By the time the other packers realized 
 what was taking place, our slaughtering and ship- 
 ping fresh beef and mutton had reached a point 
 which gave us a tremendous lead. In this chosen 
 field, the others could never catch up. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 MANY A MINUTE .... 
 
 BY HIS last-minute, hair-breadth methods of 
 doing, he saved more time than most men have 
 altogether." This statement was made by a man who 
 worked closely with my father for a long term of 
 years. 
 
 It brings out, as well as can be brought out, one of 
 his personal working methods which accounts for a 
 great share of what G. F. Swift accomplished. It 
 was largely through applying his energies without a 
 waste motion or minute that he built up a large and 
 profitable business in a comparatively short time. 
 
 I have known rather closely a good many business 
 men who have made large successes. Most of them 
 have been personally efficient. 
 
 They have applied their energies in ways that 
 brought large results. 
 
 But I have yet to see anyone whose methods of 
 working could compare with my father's. He made 
 every minute, every idea count. He centered his 
 thought and his time on his work. Swift & Com- 
 pany was the almost inevitable result. 
 
 Not a business man of his day or this day but could 
 profit by adopting bodily many of G. F. Swift's work- 
 ing methods. They were sound and fundamentally 
 
 82 
 
MANY A MINUTE .... S3 
 
 simple. Literally, he saved more time than any other 
 man I have ever known. 
 
 Out of this characteristic has grown a whole fund 
 of stories — most of them true — about how he saved 
 a minute here and five minutes there. Any old-timer 
 in the Chicago stockyards can reel them off and can 
 usually testify that he personally witnessed part of 
 them. 
 
 Every Swift employee during G. F. Swift's life- 
 time knew, for instance, that if he ever saw the chief's 
 horse and buggy pulled up at a railroad crossing, de- 
 serted, it was his duty to get in and drive to the barn 
 with it. And almost every employee whose duties 
 took him outside performed this task on one occasion 
 or another. 
 
 The reason was that thus the boss saved time. 
 Then, as now, long freight trains poked through the 
 yards — and showed that perverse tendency of freight 
 trains to stop on crossings. When a freight train 
 halted G. F. Swift at a crossing, he looked to see 
 whether the caboose was about to pass. If it was not, 
 and he was near where he was going, out he jumped, 
 climbed through the freight train, and left his horse 
 beside the track to be put away by the first of his em- 
 ployees who happened along. 
 
 If, on the other hand, he was a long way from his 
 destination and a long train was passing, he some- 
 times managed to signal the engineer to stop the train. 
 He would step between the cars on the crossing, un- 
 couple them and signal the engineer to pull up a few 
 
84 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 feet. Then he would drive through, couple up the 
 train again, and be on his way. He would spend a 
 minute or two at hard work any time in order to save 
 a five-minute wait. 
 
 He never started for a destination until the elev- 
 enth hour. But he always got there on time. His 
 chases after the "dummy," the train which used to 
 be the only fast transportation between the Yards 
 and the Loop, have yielded a crop of stories which 
 might make a minor epic. 
 
 One man tells of an occasion when G. F. sum- 
 moned him to Chicago from a Missouri city. Their 
 talk was to start on the train which father had to 
 take to a downtown meeting. And the visitor occu- 
 pied a chair in the private office until they should 
 be ready to start. 
 
 At ten minutes before train time the man from 
 the information desk walked into the office and said, 
 "Dummy leaves in ten minutes, Mr. Swift." There 
 was no sign from the busy man at the desk. In one 
 minute the clerk entered and said, "Only nine min- 
 utes now for the dummy." Thereafter he entered 
 every minute with his reminder. Finally he said, 
 "Only four minutes now, Mr. Swift. You'll miss 
 the dummy." 
 
 "I'll miss no dummy," retorted his chief, leaping 
 into action. With two or three motions he had gath- 
 ered up his hat, his coat, the papers he needed. 
 "Come on," he shouted to the astonished visitor — and 
 down the stairs they fled three steps at a time. The 
 
MANY A MINUTE .... 85 
 
 buggy was waiting at the door, with a boy holding 
 the horse's bridle. As G. F. Swift came out the 
 door the horse, experienced at these affairs, started 
 off at a run with the two men swinging into their 
 seats as best they could. 
 
 "I never want such a wild ride again," declares 
 the man who was the unwilling participant. "We 
 went through all that traffic without even slowing 
 up. Mr. Swift never picked up the reins, just left 
 them on the dash. As we swung up to the station, 
 the conductor was starting the train. 'Come on,' 
 Mr. Swift cried, and jumped to the ground before 
 the horse had even slowed up. I scrambled after, 
 and somehow we managed to catch the train which 
 by this time was a few yards down the track. Well, 
 I didn't miss the dummy, did I?' the chief remarked 
 triumphantly, and we settled down to our business. 
 With him it was apparently all in the day's work." 
 
 On one such occasion the horse swung the buggy 
 into a telegraph pole and wrecked it. Father had 
 a dozen close shaves in his wild rides to catch the 
 dummy. Yet he never missed it. And since he did 
 not allow himself to become in the least ruffled by 
 his hurry, he lost nothing to offset the time that he 
 saved in this way. 
 
 When he went to catch a street car, his driver was 
 never allowed to stop for the first car. Instead, the 
 horse was speeded up and the next street car ahead 
 overtaken. Then the car was stopped and the pas- 
 senger got aboard — one car ahead of where he would 
 
86 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 have been if he had followed the conventional prac- 
 tice. 
 
 His time saving was not always spectacular, but 
 it was always at work. He never used two minutes 
 for any job if one would suffice. He never idled 
 away the minute he had saved. In handling mail, 
 for instance, he plowed through prodigious quanti- 
 ties by methods which would serve as well for almost 
 any man in a position where he could plan his own 
 office arrangements. 
 
 He was the best correspondent in our offices. His 
 letters said everything that needed to be said on the 
 subject at hand. Yet they contained never a useless 
 phrase. And particularly if they were concerned 
 with other than business affairs, as some of them must 
 inevitably be, he cut off all the fringe and trimmings. 
 He went terribly to the point. 
 
 I recall a letter written him by a friend who took 
 perhaps a page and a half to weigh the pros and cons 
 of the candidates in the pending presidential election. 
 He ended by asking father's opinion as to who would 
 be elected. The answer has stuck in my mind as 
 a masterpiece of brevity in letter writing. It went: 
 
 "I am guessing that Mr. McKinley will be elected. 
 You have the same privilege." 
 
 Time was the great element in his life. There 
 was nowhere near enough of it to let him do all the 
 things he wanted to do. He had no patience with 
 anyone or anything which wasted time, his time in 
 particular. His files, for example, had to be in 
 
MANY A MINUTE .... 87 
 
 charge of a mature man. It was no job for an office 
 boy in those days when boys commonly handled files. 
 His files had to give up to him anything he wanted, 
 and at once. Let thirty seconds elapse between the 
 time he called for a letter or document and the time 
 it was placed on his desk — someone heard from it, 
 heard from it strongly enough so that the crime was 
 not repeated. 
 
 This was not captiousness. It was common sense. 
 He had no overdeveloped sense of personal dignity. 
 He required no kow-towing. But when he wanted 
 something he wanted it without wasting any of the 
 fleeting minutes of his busy day. 
 
 He wrote his letters on a half sheet of paper. He 
 wanted others to be as considerate in writing to him. 
 He abhorred receiving long letters. Going through 
 his morning mail he would come to a long letter. 
 Some few of his managers used to write voluminous 
 letters, despite his best efforts to break them of the 
 habit. "What does it say, what does it say?" he 
 would demand impatiently, tossing the letter to his 
 secretary. The secretary as a regular part of his 
 duties boiled down long letters and returned them 
 to his chief with a one- or two-paragraph summary. 
 Father never read the original unless the summary 
 indicated some point on which he wanted the fullest 
 information. 
 
 He did not care about having things fixed up to 
 look nice at the expense of his time. Once, at the 
 height of his money troubles of 1893, he called for 
 
88 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 a list of the notes outstanding. He wanted it right 
 away and could do nothing until he had it. So he 
 stood watching the employee who was making out 
 the list. Halfway through, a credit slip was placed 
 on the clerk's desk as notification that one of the 
 notes had been paid. It happened to be a note which 
 had already been listed. So the clerk got out an 
 eraser and began to correct the report. 
 
 'Tut down the net, put down the net," father 
 almost shouted when he saw what the clerk was 
 doing. "I want the net, I don't want it pretty." He 
 heartily disliked any duplication of work for appear- 
 ances' sake. 
 
 Certainly he was right about it. Time is one asset 
 which cannot be increased. And most of us waste 
 tremendous quantities of it without getting a com- 
 mensurate return. Nearly every business man de- 
 votes an inordinate amount of time to "keeping up 
 appearances" and to idle talk which has no reason 
 for taking up his minutes. The man who puts to 
 one side all of the useless frills of the business day 
 and keeps himself to the essential affairs quickly finds 
 he has performed in one day not only that day's work 
 but also a lot of back work which he has been in- 
 tending for weeks to get at, but "hasn't had time for." 
 The time is there, but we waste it. 
 
 "When I realize the proportion of my time that 
 I used to waste, it makes me feel as though I have 
 misspent half my life," an acquaintance told me not 
 long ago. He has in the course of twenty years or 
 
MANY A MINUTE .... 89 
 
 so built up one of the great manufacturing companies 
 of the country. But he declares regretfully, "If I 
 hadn't wasted time so lavishly all my life — excepting 
 only the years when I was getting this business of 
 mine started — I'd have had it ten years further along 
 than it is right now." His situation differs from most 
 men's only in that he recognizes his loss. 
 
 Using time to good advantage involves principally 
 setting standards of what is worth taking time for 
 and what is not — then holding up these self-imposed 
 regulations. G. F. Swift believed that he did his 
 best work only when he had had adequate sleep. So 
 he left word, once the worst times of stress in the 
 business were past, that he must not be awakened at 
 night for any calls whatever. 
 
 A friend tells a story that one night continued 
 telephone ringing awakened a servant. After she 
 heard the message, she rapped on father's door until 
 he responded. "They want to tell you that your 
 packing house is burning down," the maid said. 
 
 "Tell them they can tell me about it at seven 
 o'clock in the morning," was his reply, and back he 
 went to sleep. He knew that nothing he could do 
 would impede the fire. If it really was a serious 
 fire, it might take serious planning next morning to 
 meet the emergency. Very well. He would be in 
 better condition to meet the emergency after a good 
 night's sleep. So he got the sleep. 
 
 Another time, lightning struck the barn back of 
 the house and it began to burn brightly. This was 
 
90 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 perhaps at ten o'clock, just before he was ready to 
 go to bed. The barn was not far from his bedroom 
 window. 
 
 With his superintendent, who lived down the street 
 a way, he stood in the street and watched the firemen 
 at work. They had the fire stopped, it was making 
 no progress. He yawned, looked at his watch, and 
 turned to the superintendent. "It's half past ten and 
 I guess I'll go to bed," he remarked. "You and the 
 firemen can get that fire put out, Foster. There's 
 no reason why I should stay up." And with the 
 flames still crackling, he went to bed and to sleep 
 at once. 
 
 He was all for business all of the time. He kept 
 long hours when there was occasion for them. In 
 the early days when it was a struggle to make ex- 
 penses and income balance he left the house at five 
 o'clock every morning for the stockyards. At that 
 time he bought all of the cattle we handled. He 
 didn't need any help, nor could he afford the expense 
 of hiring a cattle buyer. By the time he had to spend 
 his full time in the office and the packing house, he 
 had trained me into the cattle buying. For some 
 time I did all of it. Then as I went on to other duties 
 my five brothers followed me. It was some time 
 before finally he brought on Wellington Leavitt from 
 Brighton to be our head cattle buyer. By then the 
 business had expanded to many times its original size. 
 
 Even after the business was well established and 
 making good profits father did not altogether give 
 
MANY A MINUTE .... 91 
 
 up his early morning habits. We had a good deal 
 of trouble with the treatment accorded our products 
 by the English butchers during the first few years 
 we were in the British markets. He made several 
 trips to England to correct this difficulty. 
 
 During all of his time in London, three o'clock 
 every morning saw him at Smithfield Market, the 
 focus of the troubles. The rest of the day, after the 
 Smithfield business was done, by nine or ten o'clock, 
 he devoted to the more routine matters of our British 
 agencies. His efforts cleared up a bad situation 
 which might never have been cleared up without his 
 early rising. 
 
 It was not only early in the morning but also late 
 in the evening when we were getting a start in Chi- 
 cago. He was not alone in this, the whole family 
 worked with him. Mother was for many years the 
 only bookkeeper he had. He and she used every 
 night to make out the beef sheets, the shipping direc- 
 tions for next day's work. A little later the boys 
 had the same job. The whole family, or that part 
 of it which was sufficiently grown up to do so, worked 
 every evening until ten or eleven o'clock. 
 
 "What time is it, Mr. Swift?" a workman in- 
 quired of him as he strode through a workroom in 
 the days when a hundred men or so constituted the 
 whole force. 
 
 "You'll know when the whistle blows!" snapped 
 the boss, always in a hurry and in no temper to waste 
 time to relieve a clock watcher's mind. 
 
92 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 "When a clerk says he must leave the office because 
 it is five o'clock, you'll never see his name over a 
 front door," he has been quoted as saying. No won- 
 der he had so little patience with the clock watcher. 
 
 His own life had shown him how necessary is hard 
 work in getting a start. If it had not been for the 
 terrific hours he put in, I doubt whether G. F. Swift 
 could ever have got the start he did. He came to 
 Chicago with thirty thousand dollars, which even 
 then was altogether inadequate as capital for the 
 smallest packing business. And broad as had been 
 his experience in every side of the live-stock and meat 
 business, he lacked first-hand knowledge of how to 
 manage a large and complex organization. 
 
 The principal figures in Chicago packing on his 
 arrival were Nelson Morris and Philip D. Armour. 
 Armour, to be sure, arrived in Chicago the same 
 year as did G. F. Swift. But he moved from Mil- 
 waukee, which had been his headquarters, because 
 the Chicago branch of his business was rapidly be- 
 coming of more importance than the parent house at 
 Milwaukee. 
 
 Both Armour and Morris had their organizations 
 built and functioning. Behind them were records of 
 successfully operating their large businesses. So 
 their credit was ample. 
 
 This was a hard situation for the young Yankee 
 to face in the yards. He never could have overcome 
 the handicap if his entrenched competitors had real- 
 ized from the start just how serious a problem he was 
 
MANY A MINUTE .... 93 
 
 bound to make for them. But even though he was 
 allowed unmolested to continue on his way, he could 
 never have accomplished what he did if it had not 
 been for the long hours he worked and the intensive 
 use to which he put those hours. 
 
 His taste was not at all for society. His church 
 alone excepted, his entire interest was in his family 
 and his business. For a good many years the two 
 pretty much overlapped. His whole energy and 
 most of his family's energy went into the business. 
 
 Long into the evenings, even after he no longer 
 had routine work to do at home, he lived with it. 
 He was a great man for continuing his day's occupa- 
 tion after dinner, unquestionably one of the things 
 which wore him out. 
 
 No doubt there is a great difference between the 
 types of man required to build a great business and 
 to carry it on. He had to work as he did to build 
 Swift & Company. After he had built it to a large 
 and profitable institution, the habit of work was so 
 strongly fastened on him that he could not shake 
 it off. ' 
 
 The rest of us were fortunate. The period of 
 worst struggle, once over, found us young enough 
 to change our working methods to what accorded 
 better with the requirements of the job. I have never 
 since those early days yearned to live all my waking 
 hours with the business. I have been willing to 
 stay at the office as late as anything held me, of course. 
 
 But once a man gets away from his office, it strikes 
 
94 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 me that he does better to get away from its worries. 
 His free hours can set his mind off far enough so 
 that when it comes back to work next morning it 
 has gained some perspective on the job. 
 
 This applies to the established institution. The 
 owner of an enterprise which is struggling up from 
 a tiny start to attain its place in the economic scheme 
 of things can seldom free himself of worries. A 
 young business requires extra attention just as a child 
 needs more care than an adult. But when it has come 
 up to a sturdy youth, then it gets along better with 
 less than excessive hours of attention. If the owner 
 has broken off the overwork habit soon enough, he 
 is of course a whole lot happier. 
 
 My father was self-reliant, as are practically all 
 commercial pioneers. Moreover he wanted every- 
 one around him to be self-reliant. He had little use 
 for the employee who had to have instructions for 
 every step in his day's work, or who did not know 
 how to proceed in an emergency. 
 
 He believed in helping those who helped them- 
 selves. He used to urge along those of his children 
 who showed any tendency to turn the other cheek. 
 "Go after him; don't let him do that to you!" he 
 would exhort one of the boys and stand by to see 
 that his advice was taken. 
 
 The employee who required a lot of attention and 
 waiting on did not interest him much. He carried 
 the same feeling throughout. One morning as he 
 was driving to the stockyards his horse slipped and 
 
MANY A MINUTE .... 95 
 
 fell on an icy corner. Half a dozen of horse dealers 
 standing on the corner rushed to the rescue, intending 
 to lift the horse to his feet. 
 
 "Let him alone, let him alone," my father pro- 
 tested. "If he can't get himself up, I don't want 
 him." Presently the horse got up — a better horse 
 for having taken care of himself. 
 
 Absolute honesty like G. F. Swift's is exceptional. 
 Not only did he know that he was honest in all of 
 his dealings, everyone who dealt with him experi- 
 enced his honesty and felt perfect assurance in it as 
 an unvarying characteristic. The extent to which 
 some people with whom he did business relied on his 
 honesty and fairness is almost unbelievable. 
 
 Consider one incident. In the days when great 
 quantities of dressed beef were going from North 
 American ports to Europe, we and a steamship com- 
 pany became involved in a dispute involving some- 
 where above one million dollars. Settled one way, 
 the transaction would net the steamship line a million 
 dollars less, Swift & Company a million dollars more. 
 The individuals negotiating it were so far apart in 
 their ideas that they simply could not agree on any- 
 thing pointing toward a settlement. 
 
 It had all the ingredients of a fine lawsuit which 
 would drag through the courts for years, yielding 
 tremendous fees to the attorneys. And word of this 
 went to the steamship line's principals in England. 
 
 These shipping men knew my father. They cabled 
 back: "We will submit this to the personal 
 
g6 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 arbitration of G. F. Swift." It was one of the most 
 startling tributes to character that has ever come to 
 my attention. His decision, granting some things to 
 the steamship company and some to his own company 
 and arriving at an award somewhere on middle 
 ground, was the basis on which the ship owners 
 settled without a question. 
 
 G. F. Swift's honesty was not of the sort which 
 took advantage of excuses for not paying over some- 
 thing which belonged to somebody else. To a new 
 employee who had brought him a question of refund- 
 ing some money to a customer who did not even know 
 it was owed him, father once said: "It isn't mine. 
 I find when it's decided that money isn't mine, I 
 don't have a very hard time finding whose it is." 
 There's a whole practical sermon on honesty in that 
 statement. 
 
 Let a Swift employee make a bad trade for the 
 company — he heard from it strongly, from the chief 
 in person. But once the trade was made, it had to 
 be carried through. There was no trying to wriggle 
 out of it. "Lord help you if you tried to get him 
 out of a bad trade by short weight or lower quality!" 
 remarked an old-timer in talking over this charac- 
 teristic of his chief. 
 
 There was in charge of an important department 
 a man who made an especially bad trade for the com- 
 pany on a tremendous contract. Then, some days 
 after he had been told a few things about his chief's 
 opinion of his business ability, he came around with 
 
MANY A MINUTE .... 97 
 
 the news that the contract had been canceled by the 
 purchaser, a governmental institution. 
 
 We were never able to get to the bottom of just 
 what had happened. It had all the earmarks of 
 someone having cut a sharp corner to get us out of 
 that contract, and there was just one person likely to 
 want to do it. Not long after, this man was let go. 
 But before he was fired, father had warned me about 
 him. "You want to watch that fellow," he declared. 
 "The kind of fellow that'll do that sort of thing for 
 you will do it against you when it suits him to." 
 Anything of a dishonest sort made him distrustful. 
 That the man would cheat for us made him all the 
 worse. Cheating has never been a Swift policy. 
 
 Father detested sham and "front." Anything 
 savoring of lying was distinctly on his bad book. He 
 used to spend evenings on end visiting with managers 
 of branch houses and branch packing houses and with 
 executives within the organization. The visit con- 
 sisted usually of G. F. Swift's asking questions — ■ 
 innumerable questions — and of the visitor's trying 
 to answer them. He would go back and forth over 
 the same ground, coming to it from different direc- 
 tions and checking one set of answers against the 
 others. If anyone attempted to temporize, or to 
 blufl it out, the boss was after him. "Say you don't 
 know, say you don't know," he would impatiently 
 urge the victim of his inquisition. Once he had 
 proved to his own satisfaction that the other man 
 was not a liar, then he eased up on the questioning. 
 
98 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 If he found the man was a liar, out of the company 
 he went at the first good opportunity. 
 
 He would ask all manner of questions, many of 
 them so technical that no man not an expert on the 
 particular point could answer it. "What percentage 
 of casings are you saving?" he asked one branch plant 
 manager one night. 
 
 "I don't know." 
 
 "How many hogs does it take to make a bundle 
 of casings?" 
 
 "I don't know." (No one not specializing on cas- 
 ings in a plant could possibly know, for it varies with 
 the hogs.) 
 
 "Well, I think I'd know that if I were managing 
 a packing house," he would admonish the honest man 
 who said "I don't know." Probably G. F. Swift, 
 with his passion for knowing everything about the 
 business, would have known such statistics as those 
 on casings. But no plant manager could be expected 
 to know them. 
 
 "You never felt at ease with G. F. unless you knew 
 him extremely well," is the way one plant manager 
 expresses it. "He was always trying to pick you up. 
 He would ask you questions he knew the answer to, 
 to see if you knew. When he finally made up his 
 mind that you knew a good deal, and wouldn't try 
 to bluff him on the things you didn't know, he took 
 you into his confidence. After that he let you alone 
 with his questions." 
 
 His questions always had a definite point, how- 
 
MANY A MINUTE .... 99 
 
 ever. He was always digging for something he felt 
 he needed to know. "There's no use fooling our- 
 selves," he would declare to a manager who might 
 protest at the work involved in finding out some fact 
 on which he had been keeping no record. "We 
 might as well find out, then we'll know — and we 
 can't fool ourselves." 
 
 "G. F. is the best auditor I ever saw," declared his 
 brother Edwin C. Swift after a long trip with him 
 through a number of branch houses neither of them 
 had ever seen before. "He can get at the facts with 
 questions quicker than anybody I ever knew. And 
 after he gets through asking questions in a branch 
 house, there's no need of going over the books. G. F. 
 knows as much about it after an hour's questioning 
 as an auditor could find out by checking the books 
 for a week." 
 
 He was a great man for detail, despite his grasp 
 of the big things in his line. He checked up on lit- 
 erally hundreds of things every time he visited a 
 packing house or office of Swift & Company. One 
 of his pet items was working temperature in the 
 office. 
 
 On his way to the manager's office he always man- 
 aged a look at the thermometer. Coming into the 
 packing-house office in Kansas City one winter morn- 
 ing when the steam was hissing, he saw that the tem- 
 perature was eighty. "It's a wonder your brains 
 ain't cooked," was his greeting to the manager. 
 
 Another time he came into the South Omaha office 
 
ioo THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 with the remark: "Good morning. Too hot in here." 
 
 "It's seventy in here, Mr. Swift." 
 
 "On what?" 
 
 "This" — holding up a thermometer on his desk. 
 
 "Is it reliable?" 
 
 "Yes, absolutely." 
 
 "These others out in the office say seventy-three, 
 seventy-four, seventy-five." 
 
 "I know, but this one is right." 
 
 "Then what do you have 'em around for?" he 
 protested. 
 
 "And you know," the man insists who had the 
 inaccurate thermometers, "that's the first time it had 
 occurred to me that I was not saving money by keep- 
 ing those things in use!" 
 
 A summary of G. F. Swift's personal working 
 methods would not be complete without reference to 
 his thrifty Yankee ways — "his Cape Cod ways," as 
 his managers jocularly called them. Two little inci- 
 dents, showing opposite sides of his character as it 
 could be seen in a straight business affair and in one 
 tempered by sympathy for those in need, may help 
 to sum up some of the reasons why he was able to 
 build what he built. 
 
 His carriage boy usually went with him to hold 
 his horse when he had to go to a meeting. Then at 
 night father drove home, to have the horse available 
 for coming to work next morning. When he dis- 
 missed the boy during the working day, he handed 
 over a nickel for carfare to take the lad back to the 
 
MANY A MINUTE .... 101 
 
 plant. But when it was after hours he asked, "Going 
 home or to the Yards?" 
 
 If the boy said, "Yards," then he got a nickel. 
 If he said, "Home," he got none. Why? Because 
 it would have cost him a nickel to get home from 
 work anyhow. That was the frugal side of G. F. 
 Swift. 
 
 Beef for export was shipped in muslin bags. These 
 bags were always made by people who needed the 
 money the work brought in. Chiefly they were made 
 at home on ordinary sewing machines by widows 
 of workmen from the stockyards. Father, because 
 of his intimate knowledge of the circumstances of a 
 great many back-of-the-Yards families, always in- 
 sisted that he approve the list of those who were to 
 get the work. 
 
 One day a man in the purchasing department came 
 to the front office with a proposal that beef bags be 
 made by concerns equipped for doing this sort of 
 thing most economically. We could, it developed, 
 save a good many thousands of dollars a year on beef 
 bags and on the related jobs — which went to the same 
 class of workers — of stringing tags for beef quarters. 
 
 "You keep out of this bag and tag business," father 
 directed the employee. "That's something I'm 
 running." 
 
 And until export of dressed meat shifted from 
 North American to South American sources, the beef 
 bags were made and the beef quarter tags strung by 
 the widows back of the Yards. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 "I VOTE NO!" 
 
 MY FATHER doted on frequent reports from 
 weak departments of his business. Not that 
 he found actual pleasure in records which showed he 
 was losing money. But the problems of turning a 
 loser into a money maker involved activity and em- 
 ploying his best abilities. And above all else he pre- 
 ferred action. 
 
 He had been brought up on it. He would rather 
 be on his horse buying cattle in the yards than sitting 
 quietly at his desk. But when his business grew be- 
 yond the size which permitted him to buy the cattle 
 and boss the skinners, he had to become a manager 
 despite his preference. 
 
 His training had been where such things as re- 
 ports were scarcely known. His beginnings had been 
 small, his development had been through individual 
 enterprises which were almost subvisible when com- 
 pared to Swift & Company within five years of its 
 start at Chicago. His inclinations naturally held to 
 spreading his time over just as much as possible of 
 the physical equipment of the business, in the idea 
 that only thus could we hope to know what was 
 going on. 
 
 But he quickly realized as the business sprang 
 
 102 
 
"I VOTE NO!" 103 
 
 up to unthought-of heights that he must work out 
 other ways to keep a finger on and in its every 
 activity. 
 
 So he became a devotee of reports — weekly re- 
 ports. "You've got to know how you stand every 
 week," he used to explain. "If you wait a month, 
 maybe you're broke." So he doted on reports, de- 
 tailed weekly and brought right up to the minute. 
 
 His reports came to him weekly as a matter of 
 routine. They were never disposed of as routine, 
 however. A report which can be treated by the 
 executive as routine is a nonessential routine, and 
 probably is better discontinued. 
 
 Above all else his favorite statistical diet was the 
 reports of weak departments. His whole being en- 
 joyed the sheer difficulty of going into a seat of 
 trouble, digging out the facts, aligning them, and 
 putting things right. So any losing department had 
 to submit more frequent and more complete figures 
 than did the rest of the business. 
 
 The man responsible for the loss had little rest 
 while this persisted. G. F. Swift believed in frequent 
 reminders and in prompt corrective measures. If a 
 loss was not stopped quickly, then something drastic 
 happened. 
 
 Once, for example, all the meat in pickle at the 
 Kansas City plant went sour. This meant that we 
 lost the money value of the meat and also the profits 
 on orders we could not fill because of the curtailed 
 supply. 
 
104 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 The meat spoiled, of course, because a faulty cure 
 was in use at this plant. Most packers under similar 
 circumstances would have reprimanded the manager 
 and the man in charge of curing so that the trouble 
 would not recur. 
 
 Fundamentally, however, the trouble lay deeper 
 than carelessness. The weakness was in the manage- 
 ment for allowing to continue a condition which at 
 the time was universal in the industry. 
 
 The cures for pork were all secret. The head man 
 at each plant had his secret formula. By paying him 
 a large salary, we obtained his services. These in- 
 cluded supervising the curing and personally mixing 
 the pickle. And of course the product of every plant 
 was different. A Swift ham from Omaha was 
 slightly different from a Swift ham from Chicago or 
 St. Joseph or St. Paul or Kansas City. 
 
 The unfortunate happening at Kansas City brought 
 sharply to father's mind the fundamental unsound- 
 ness of operating this way. So he called a meeting 
 at Chicago of the principal men in the operating end 
 of the business — managers, general superintendents, 
 and so on. 
 
 When he had stated the problem, he asked for 
 a vote. The problem was essentially that if we de- 
 manded that the formulas be given to the company 
 the men who had the formulas would quit, leaving 
 us in difficulties. Should we demand that they give 
 up their formulas, or should we continue at the old 
 way of doing? 
 
"I VOTE NO!" ios 
 
 Decidedly the men in that meeting were opposed 
 to taking the bull by the horns. "No," voted each 
 man. Then the chief spoke. 
 
 "You've all voted no, because you're afraid to face 
 a little possible trouble. There's no use dodging 
 trouble, if you've got to do things the wrong way 
 to dodge it. You're wrong on this. I'm going to 
 vote yes and it will be yes." 
 
 The meeting had, so it seemed to many of the men 
 who gathered there, been called for no purpose. 
 They thought the new rule might better have been 
 promulgated by a general order from Chicago. But 
 in this, too, they were wrong. 
 
 Father wanted to hear at first hand just what they 
 thought about the proposed plan. He wanted them 
 to convince him if they were right. Failing this he 
 decreed that the cure used at each plant should be 
 forwarded to Chicago, the best of the formulas 
 selected and made standard for all plants. And by 
 deciding this in the meeting he let those men who 
 believed sincerely in his judgment see for themselves 
 that he was basing his decision on a principle rather 
 than on caprice. 
 
 It went through without a ripple. The men in 
 charge of curing at each plant sent in their formulas, 
 despite their many and lusty threats of quitting. The 
 formulas were almost alike in ingredients and pro- 
 portions. The standard formula was worked out from 
 these. Only slightly modified through the experience 
 of the years this formula is used today as the standard 
 
106 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 cure in preparing our pork products for market, 
 including our Premium Brand of hams and bacon. 
 
 The meeting about secret formulas was not the 
 only one which father ended by voting yes, when 
 the rest of the meeting had voted unanimously no. 
 Because he was dominant in the business, because 
 his ideas generally prevailed — of this, more later — 
 his people from time to time fell into the habit of 
 voting on a business question as they believed he was 
 going to vote. 
 
 I recall one meeting where everyone gathered, 
 from his whole attitude, that the chief was in favor 
 of the plan which was up for discussion. So, despite 
 some transparent weaknesses in the idea, they voted 
 yes. After everyone had voted — the votes were 
 always polled singly — the chairman made his an- 
 nouncement: 
 
 "I vote no, and the noes have it. You men voted 
 yes because you thought I would. I pay you for 
 your real opinions, not to say what you think I think." 
 It was a good object lesson. It ended the yessing for 
 a good many months. 
 
 He was not arbitrary in making these decisions. 
 He had confidence in himself bred of his conduct of 
 the business. He knew the right turn of the road 
 where most of his men must guess on a far less com- 
 plete knowledge. No wonder he generally arrived 
 at the destination while the rest were wondering 
 what it was all about! 
 
 An old plant which had been purchased was to be 
 
"I VOTE NO!" 107 
 
 extended by adding a large unit. The manager came 
 to Chicago with the plans. 
 
 One feature of the blueprints, an open floor for 
 hanging freshly dressed hogs, attracted the unfavor- 
 able attention of practically everyone in the meeting. 
 It seemed a needless expense, if not a positive impedi- 
 ment to economical operation. Father listened to the 
 attacks for a while, then leaned back in his chair. 
 
 "What've you got to say to that, Johnny?" he in- 
 quired of the manager, the son of a Yankee who had 
 come to the Chicago Yards with the original butcher 
 gang from Assonet. 
 
 "We can use this open hanging floor for refrigera- 
 tion three months a year," the manager pointed out — 
 the plant was our farthest north to date. "And it has 
 other technical advantages." He proceeded to enu- 
 merate them. 
 
 Before he had got well started on the advantages, 
 his chief held up a hand to stop him. "Of course 
 you're right," he decided. The meeting closed right 
 then with the plans approved. 
 
 It was not that he wanted his own way regardless. 
 His knowledge was so great that when a practical 
 man was enumerating practical reasons, he absolutely 
 knew. There was no use, therefore, in submitting 
 the plan to further discussion by a number of others 
 even though these others were, after himself, best 
 fitted to judge. 
 
 A good deal may be said in favor of this type of 
 meeting after all. It measures up to the ordinary 
 
108 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 conference as a means of bringing out opinions and 
 information from everyone. And then it leaves the 
 decision to the man best qualified to make it. It puts 
 an automatic stop to buck passing and time wasting, 
 which no business man of experience will deny are 
 the principal products of many meetings. If the top 
 man makes his decision the moment he has the facts 
 at his disposal and then dismisses the meeting, it 
 stops the time wasting before it has a chance to get 
 started. The plan has not been wholly disregarded 
 in our organization since father's time. 
 
 Knowledge of every detail of the business was the 
 taproot of his way of managing. His technical 
 knowledge was exhaustive, perhaps as great as that 
 of any man the packing industry has known even to 
 this day. His grasp of the facts of distribution, of 
 transporting the products, of the current standing 
 of company finances — in everything from buying cat- 
 tle and icing cars all the way through where he would 
 get another ten millions of capital and how he would 
 use it — made him completely the master. 
 
 One reason for his mastery of the facts was the 
 time he devoted to business, at the office, at the plants, 
 and at home. Never have I known anyone gifted 
 with such a quick mind who would put in such long 
 hours at his job. 
 
 You can rarely talk with anyone who held a place 
 of responsibility under G. F. Swift without there 
 coming out: "I remember one evening G. F. had 
 me over at his house and he asked me — " Hardly 
 
"I VOTE NO!" 109 
 
 an evening that he did not have some of his people 
 at the house talking business and cramming into his 
 already exhaustive knowledge an added store on this 
 point or that — and incidentally giving the employees 
 the benefit of his knowledge and experience. 
 
 Talking business was his principal out-of-hours 
 recreation, if it could be called out-of-hours — for he 
 had no hours as working time is generally recog- 
 nized. The waking day constituted his working hours 
 and he worked at top speed all the while. 
 
 One old-timer, a plant man, tells how for weeks 
 on end his chief had him at the house every evening 
 until bedtime. This was in the early days, when the 
 packing house developed new and difficult problems 
 every few hours. Right after supper the plant man 
 would arrive and for perhaps an hour they talked of 
 the day's experience in workrooms and coolers. 
 
 Then, the subject temporarily exhausted, father 
 would begin to talk about the export business which 
 was at the time beginning to take shape in a small 
 way but with infinite promise for the future. At 
 least two or three hours he would talk exports to 
 this man who knew slaughtering and dressing and 
 shipping but who had not an ounce of first-hand 
 knowledge on selling overseas. 
 
 "I suppose you think it's funny that I get you over 
 here and tell you about all this export business and 
 its troubles," was the explanation which came one 
 night when the practical packer was almost drowsing 
 in his chair from an overdose of exporting. "I'll tell 
 
no THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 you, I've got it on my mind. I've got to tell it to 
 somebody, and it's got to be somebody I can trust. 
 That's why you get it every night." 
 
 For many years we all lived on Emerald Avenue 
 or a block or two away. And "we all" meant the 
 Swifts and the whole management. If a man held 
 a place of responsibility, he lived within easy reach. 
 
 The Emerald Avenue location was a neighborhood 
 of better homes than now, of course. But it was never, 
 at best, an especially attractive residence district. 
 When finally G. F. Swift moved to Ellis Avenue, 
 every man of the lot joyfully moved across town to 
 that neighborhood. 
 
 A manager or superintendent was supposed to 
 come to the house when he was sent for, no matter 
 what the hour of day or night. And while father 
 aimed to be a considerate man in all ways, he had 
 no respect for idle time. If he wanted a superintend- 
 ent at 9 130 of an evening for an hour's talk, he sent 
 for him. It would not occur to him that the super- 
 intendent would have to be on the plant at 6 130 next 
 morning and that the evening's talk would cut into 
 the night's rest. To any one of his people a night's 
 rest was of no consequence in comparison with sup- 
 plying information to the chief. 
 
 On the evening after the big stockyards strike of 
 1884 had been broken, principally by father's stub- 
 born stand against the strikers' demands, he called all 
 his foremen to the house. "How many men stayed 
 with you through the strike?" he asked each one. He 
 
"I VOTE NO!" in 
 
 kept them there until late in the evening discussing 
 their records in holding their men. When he had 
 finished, they had a new comprehension of the value 
 of working with men in the way that wins loyalty. 
 
 He was always known as a pusher of men, but 
 never as an inconsiderate driver by the men who re- 
 mained with him long enough to get really acquainted 
 with his ways. He worked hard himself, harder than 
 he asked anyone else to work. The men who worked 
 with him liked his pushing. 
 
 "Don't go to work there, they'll work you to death," 
 a youngster was advised back in Clinton, Massachu- 
 setts, when he told some of the villagers he was going 
 to work in G. F. Swift's meat market there in the 
 early '70s. But the boy took the job regardless. He 
 came to Chicago in the slaughterhouse gang which 
 killed and dressed the first Swift beef at the stock- 
 yards. He grew up in the harness, became an impor- 
 tant man in the company. 
 
 "G. F. worked me hard, but he never worked me to 
 death," chuckles the veteran, today retired on his 
 farm from which he frequently comes to visit in the 
 office. 
 
 No man ever quit whom father wanted to keep. 
 Probably the chief reason was that if he believed in 
 a man, he would back up that man to the limit. 
 Loyal support from the head of a business makes 
 loyal men beneath the head. And if G. F. Swift did 
 not believe in a man enough to back him up, then 
 he wanted nothing to do with the man. 
 
ii2 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 Certainly in the early days he did not hold his men 
 by paying excessive wages and salaries. He paid 
 small salaries for a good many years. The business 
 was operating on so small a capital and clamoring so 
 insistently for funds that he had to hold down the 
 outgo. He would have been much more liberal if the 
 needs of the business had permitted it. He was more 
 liberal, by far, after the years of greatest expansion 
 were past. But he held his men and kept them work- 
 ing for him loyally and intelligently by the force of 
 his character and the high standards he set them. No 
 one ever attained greater results from his men than he 
 did, principally by the simple expedient of expecting 
 them to deliver more than did other managers. 
 
 "No dead lines," was a saying he strongly favored 
 — a dead line was what kept anyone from taking an 
 interest in some activity with which his daily work 
 did not bring him into contact. Everything was con- 
 sidered the concern of everybody. He would not 
 accept the excuse "It wasn't in my department" or 
 "I have nothing to do with the sales department." He 
 wanted no tattling. But he wanted every one of his 
 men to think of himself as a Swift man rather than 
 as a lard department man or a hide cellar foreman 
 or whatever his job. 
 
 Because father was the most important individual 
 in the company, every Swift man must recognize a 
 duty to him. That was why a Swift man who 
 found G. F.'s buggy deserted beside a railroad cross- 
 ing in the Yards was supposed to drive it to the barn. 
 
"I VOTE NO!" 113 
 
 It was important that the buggy be in the barn ready 
 for the chief's call — and it was the lookout of any 
 employee that it get there. 
 
 How deeply this idea was ingrained in father's 
 mind was brought out several times by incidents 
 which in the light of today's attitude toward em- 
 ployees are downright startling. One was a time 
 when his horse, left unhitched before the old Live 
 Stock Exchange Building, took it into his head to 
 run away just as his owner was coming out the door. 
 
 Down the crowded street ran the horse, the buggy 
 swaying dangerously through the crowded traffic. 
 Then out from the sidewalk dashed a workman, 
 seized the horse's head, and, after being dragged a 
 few feet, brought the rig to a stop. 
 
 Father had been only a few feet behind, on the 
 dead run. He came panting up and addressed the 
 man who had done the risky job : 
 
 "What's your name?" 
 
 "John Brown, sir." 
 
 "Who do you work for?" 
 
 With a world of pride in his voice and the realiza- 
 tion that he had done a job for which he would doubt- 
 less he praised, the man answered: "I work for you, 
 Mr. Swift." 
 
 "All right," declared his employer, by now in com- 
 plete command of the situation. "Be about your 
 business." 
 
 Chop-fallen, the workman went back to his job — 
 doubtless believing that he worked for a curmudgeon 
 
ii 4 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 with not an idea of gratitude in his head. Meanwhile 
 that employer returned to the office, had the man 
 given an increase in pay, called in the superintend- 
 ent under whom Brown worked, and said, "Here's a 
 man worth keeping an eye on. He just did so-and-so. 
 He thinks quickly and acts quickly. Chances are he'd 
 make a good foreman, first time there's an opening." 
 
 As for praising the man for bravery, it never 
 entered his mind. The buggy careening down the 
 street belonged to him, and hence was the particular 
 lookout of any employee. Why shouldn't any man 
 have tried to stop it? The point was that, by stop- 
 ping it, Brown had shown himself a better man than 
 the mass and hence deserved his advancement. The 
 raise and the recommendation were not, be it noted, 
 any tokens of gratitude for stopping the horse. They 
 were for having the qualities which he showed when 
 he stopped the runaway. 
 
 Another man, a clerk in father's own office, was 
 blocked in a street-car tangle on Clark Street one 
 evening. So he got out to walk. As he reached the 
 sidewalk he saw his chief striding along in a great 
 rush perhaps two blocks behind him. 
 
 He recognized immediately that his boss had been 
 delayed by the car blockade in getting to his Kansas 
 City train. The clerk knew he had an important 
 appointment in Kansas City early next morning and 
 that he must catch the train. So the youngster ran at 
 top speed for the cab stand of the old Grand Pacific 
 Hotel, several blocks up Clark Street. Then 
 
''I VOTE NO!" 115 
 
 jumping in the cab he ordered the driver to make 
 fast time south. 
 
 Sure enough, he soon saw the tall figure of his 
 chief striding along, at every step looking eagerly 
 for a cab — and with very little chance of catching 
 one in that latitude. The clerk pulled the cab up to 
 the curb with a flourish. "Jump in, Mr. Swift," he 
 directed. "Get to the Union Station in three min- 
 utes," he ordered the driver. 
 
 "Mr. Swift never said anything to me about that," 
 says this man, who today occupies a place of large 
 importance with us. "I knew it was regarded as a 
 good piece of work, and I suspect it was behind a 
 promotion which came to me soon after. But as far 
 as G. F.'s attitude toward me was shown, he expected 
 that sort of service from his people. Of course he 
 knew he didn't get it from all of them, so when he 
 got it he marked the man responsible as worth watch- 
 ing in future. But as for thanking the employees — 
 that would have placed the whole transaction on a 
 false basis." 
 
 He was, in his relations with the people under him, 
 as in all his relationships, absolutely and meticulously 
 fair. But he was never guilty of letting anyone be- 
 lieve that he expected from an employee anything 
 less than the utmost. That would not have been good 
 management. 
 
 Just as he did not believe in praising a man, so he 
 did not believe in bestowing large titles on employees. 
 He was so much and so thoroughly concerned with 
 
n6 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 the realities of earning profits that the surface froth 
 did not enter into his calculations. One of the surest 
 ways to arouse his irritability was by going to him 
 with such a question as, "What shall we call Mr. 
 So-and-So's new assistant?" 
 
 "I've got no use for them titles," he would exclaim 
 in some wrath, waving the interrupter out of the 
 office with gestures of impatience. 
 
 Very few indeed were the titles bestowed. 
 
 Father harbored another deep conviction. "Swift 
 & Company can get along without any man, myself 
 included," he remarked a few times in my hearing. 
 "This business will be bigger after I'm gone — that's 
 what I'm building for." 
 
 It is bigger since he is gone. 
 
 But I know that it could not have become so big 
 and so successful without the impetus it received from 
 his management. Nor could its growth have been so 
 steady and healthy, lacking the heritage of sound 
 management methods and management policies 
 which he built and gathered for it. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 HE HAD TO SPREAD OUT 
 
 WHETHER right or wrong, father would 
 expand his business at every opportunity. He 
 was a born expansionist. 
 
 But he was not a plunger. He knew his business, 
 knew it intimately and in great detail. Because he 
 could see where others could only grope, his vision 
 was steadily ahead of his time. 
 
 "That crazy man Swift," the wiseacres called him 
 when he came to the Yards from the East and set his 
 whole energy and twenty years' saving to accomplish- 
 ing something at which everyone else had failed. No 
 one had succeeded in shipping dressed meat east and 
 disposing of it at a profit. It was one of those things 
 which everyone knew couldn't be done. 
 
 His partner Hathaway, of the Boston firm of 
 Hathaway & Swift, could see no chance for success 
 — and Hathaway had been in the live-stock business 
 a good many years longer than had his younger 
 partner. 
 
 Hathaway knew, as did everyone else, a thousand 
 reasons why nobody could sell Chicago-dressed beef 
 in the East, and why the East would continue to eat 
 meat from cattle shipped alive for slaughter at the 
 point of consumption. So vehemently did each feel 
 
 117 
 
u8 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 himself right that the partnership had to be dissolved, 
 though with no break in the friendship. 
 
 So the younger Yankee was left to build himself 
 a business, to build it on his dream and his accumu- 
 lated capital of thirty thousand dollars — which was 
 not enough even in 1875 t0 operate the smallest con- 
 ceivable packing plant for thirty days. He started 
 under the handicap of inadequate capital. He was 
 not willing as so many men are willing to give his 
 capital a chance to catch up with the size of his busi- 
 ness. He could have done this in the first very few 
 years after he succeeded in accomplishing "the impos- 
 sible." But he would keep spreading out. 
 
 Always his vision ran ahead of his fellows, of his 
 competition, and of his capital. Always he had under 
 way some enterprise which strained almost to the 
 breaking point the supply of working funds he could 
 command. And despite this ability of his somehow 
 to keep ahead of financial difficulties, his mind ran 
 ahead of his financing ability — he felt himself held 
 back because he had not enough money to do this 
 or that. It was always so. 
 
 Even if he had lacked his insistent urge to expand, 
 he would unquestionably have become a successful 
 packer. His other abilities were too great for him 
 to have made anything short of a success. It was his 
 creed of "Expand, and then some more," which kept 
 him from using his $30,000 to build one of the 
 smaller packing establishments, one of the scores do- 
 ing a profitable business in tens of millions of dollars. 
 
HE HAD TO SPREAD OUT 119 
 
 This creed it was which built him one of the very few 
 transacting a volume in the hundred millions. 
 
 He always had an eye for business beyond the ken 
 of others similarly situated. He was only nine years 
 old, as a relative tells the story, when he walked into 
 his grandfather's house and said, "Grandpa, I'll give 
 you forty cents for the old white hen." 
 
 "All right," agreed his grandfather — and with no 
 more ado the boy paid his money and went to catch 
 his hen. 
 
 "Isn't that new business for Stave, buying hens?" 
 inquired an older cousin who had been completely 
 ignored by the nine-year-old intent on his job. 
 
 "Why," the grandfather answered, "he is here 
 almost every day after one. He finds a customer 
 somewhere. Seems to get enough out of it to pay." 
 
 There had to be some way for the boy to make 
 money, if he was to have any for himself. Certainly 
 there was no surplus for distribution among the 
 twelve children on his father's sandy, unfertile Cape 
 Cod farm. The best paying crop on Cape Cod today 
 — almost the only paying crop — is summer boarders. 
 For a good many years after Gustavus F. Swift's 
 birth in 1839 the summer boarders had not begun 
 their annual migration. 
 
 The boy saw little that was promising in life as a 
 butcher's helper in a Cape Cod village. He had gone 
 to work for his older brother Noble at fourteen and 
 by his sixteenth birthday was making — be sure that 
 he was earning — three dollars a week. 
 
120 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 Even in those days of 1855 the golden goal of ambi- 
 tious Cape Cod lads was Boston. He began to lay 
 his plans for a move to Boston and the West. 
 
 His father objected. He saw for his son no great 
 future in the big city, equipped as he was with no 
 fund of education, of business experience, or of dem- 
 onstrated ability. He held that strong sixteen-year 
 old country lads were a drug on the Boston market. 
 To back up his ideas he was willing to do a fair share 
 — more than a fair share, perhaps, when one con- 
 siders the value of a cash dollar in his circumstances 
 of life. 
 
 "You really want to be in the meat business, don't 
 you?" he questioned his son. "All right, Stave, I'll 
 give you twenty-five dollars to start up in the meat 
 business around home. That way you can get your 
 start right here, instead of going away to the city." 
 
 With this twenty-five dollars was started the busi- 
 ness which is today Swift & Company. The lineage 
 is straight as an arrow. For, twenty-five dollars in 
 his pocket, the boy of sixteen set forth to enter the 
 meat business. 
 
 He made a neighbor an offer for a good fat heifer 
 he thought he might butcher to advantage. It is 
 characteristic of his shrewdness as a trader — shrewd- 
 ness as far above his age as was his shrewdness above 
 other business men's thirty years later — that he did 
 not, boylike, offer his whole twenty-five dollars. 
 Whatever his original offer, he actually purchased 
 the heifer for nineteen dollars, as he told the story in 
 
SALLY SEARS CROWELL 
 
 SWIFT, MOTHER OF 
 
 G. F. SWIFT. 
 
 WILLIAM SWIFT, FATHER 
 OF G. F. SWIFT. 
 
HE HAD TO SPREAD OUT 121 
 
 later life. He drove her home and slaughtered her 
 in a shed. Now he was embarked in the retail meat 
 business. 
 
 He cut up the beef, loaded the cuts into a wagon 
 of his father's and set out to sell the meat in the neigh- 
 borhood. Fortune favored the enterprise, another 
 way of saying that he had used good judgment in 
 buying the heifer, ample skill in cutting up the car- 
 cass, and sales ability in disposing of the cuts. He 
 netted ten dollars out of the transaction for his time 
 and trouble. Forthwith he went out to repeat the 
 operation and the resultant profit. 
 
 For a few weeks or months he had ample capital — 
 the only time in his business career when he had, 
 except for the last two or three years of his life. But 
 soon that active mind of his began to see larger oppor- 
 tunities which called for more working funds than 
 he had been able to acquire by selling pot-roasts and 
 steaks and ribs. He could always see the chance to 
 make more money by doing on a larger scale. 
 
 The first occasion of this sort has been told by a 
 cousin of my father's, E. W. Ellis, sixty-five years 
 later. Thomas W. Goodspeed set it down 1 as fol- 
 lows: 
 
 "He called on Uncle Paul Crowell (son of Grand- 
 father Crowell and village storekeeper). I obtained 
 this information a few days after from Uncle Paul 
 himself. Stave said, 'I want to borrow some money. 
 Will you lend it to me?' 
 
 1 The University of Chicago Biographical Sketches, Vol. I, p. 176. 
 
i22 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 " 'Oh,' said Uncle Paul, 'how much do you want?' 
 
 " 'Four hundred dollars,' said Stave. 
 
 " 'Whew,' said Uncle Paul, 'what you going to do 
 with it?' 
 
 " 'I want to go to Brighton stockyards and buy 
 some pigs.' 
 
 " 'Why, that will be quite an undertaking for a 
 boy.' 
 
 " 'Yet,' said Uncle Paul to me, 'I could but admire 
 his ambition.' 
 
 "Brighton yards, located northwest of Boston, sixty 
 miles distant! Just imagine it! The worst kind of 
 
 sandy, crooked roads Well, in about ten days, 
 
 he, with his drove, hove in sight at my father's home. 
 He had sold some, but about thirty-five shoats were 
 still with him. I looked over his outfit, which con- 
 sisted of an old horse and a democrat wagon in which 
 a few tired or lame pigs were enjoying a ride and a 
 rest with their legs tied together. With him was an- 
 other lad as helper, who was trying keep the shoats 
 from straying. There was Stave, a tall, lank youth, 
 with a rope and steelyards on his shoulder, also a 
 short pole he carried in his hand that might do duty 
 to suspend the squealers and steelyards between his 
 shoulders and those of his customer. Father said: 
 'There is a good exhibition of ambition. Gustavus 
 Swift will make a success in whatever business he 
 undertakes. For he has the right make-up.' Gus- 
 tavus made several such trips to Brighton for pigs, 
 spring and fall, for two or three years." 
 
HE HAD TO SPREAD OUT 123 
 
 The occupation of drover under these conditions 
 was at best highly seasonal. Outside the spring and 
 fall months, he might have lacked occupation. In- 
 stead, he worked out a procedure which gave him a 
 business. He arranged for quarters at Brighton 
 stockyards where he could slaughter his animals. 
 
 Each Friday he bought a steer on the market there 
 and slaughtered it on Saturday. The quarters he 
 hung over Sunday. Monday morning bright and 
 early saw him in his democrat wagon with the meat, 
 bound for Cape Cod. By Friday he had sold his beef 
 and was back at Brighton once more, making his 
 weekly purchase of one animal. 
 
 From his repeated Monday-to-Friday trips the 
 young man accumulated a little money — a very little, 
 no doubt, but enough to give him a foothold as a 
 retail meat dealer instead of a wagon peddler. So 
 he opened a market at Eastham, which shortly after- 
 ward he turned over to his brother Nathaniel. Then 
 he opened a meat market at Barnstable and settled 
 down as the meat dealer for this town of five hundred. 
 
 Father and mother, Annie Maria Higgins, had 
 been married during the short career at Eastham. At 
 Barnstable they and their growing family— there 
 were four of us children by then — remained some 
 eight years. But it was not the retail business which 
 held G. F. Swift. Rather it was a broad business 
 he had developed, leaving the market to be run by 
 a clerk. Once more he was at his habit of expanding. 
 
 Beginning as he had at sixteen and continuing 
 
124 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 without interruption as a cattle buyer, by the time 
 he moved to Barnstable he had become an extremely 
 good judge of cattle. There is no way to check up 
 on the accuracy of a cattle buyer's judgment except 
 to see how his purchases dress into beef. Even though 
 his career had been active for only six or seven years, 
 father had been seeing how each one of his cattle 
 dressed — not only seeing it but also feeling with his 
 own pocketbook the results of his judgment. In a 
 man of his shrewdness the only possible result was 
 that he became a remarkably good cattle buyer. 
 
 With his knack of seeing the opportunity for 
 broadening out his activities, he had no sooner been 
 set down in Barnstable than he began to wonder if 
 he could not market Cape-Cod-raised cattle at a 
 profit. The average farmer had only one or two head 
 for sale in a season. The nearest market, besides the 
 small local butchers like himself, was at Brighton 
 beyond Boston. And it didn't pay to drive just one 
 or two head to Brighton, even as low as the farmer 
 valued his time. 
 
 So once more G. F. Swift ramified his business. 
 To be sure, he kept the meat market, but this was 
 now a side issue. He became a cattle dealer, buying 
 on Cape Cod and selling at Brighton. 
 
 It is noticeable that, however he might expand or 
 diversify his interests, he never deviated by a hair's 
 thickness from the original direction of his work. 
 Ever broader, ever making a little better living, ever 
 building up his capital but spreading it just as thin 
 
HE HAD TO SPREAD OUT 125 
 
 as he safely could, he was on his way to founding the 
 modern dressed meat industry! 
 
 By 1869, when he was thirty years old, he had 
 accumulated enough to take his first step of any size. 
 His capital was far from a fortune; it had taken him 
 fourteen years to expand his original capital of twen- 
 ty-five dollars into a sum sufficient for anything at all 
 extensive. With this capital which he had sweated 
 out by working sixteen hours a day father opened 
 the meat market at Clinton, Massachusetts. 
 
 This enterprise has been described earlier in this 
 book. It was a large store, for that time and place 
 a pretentious, ambitious store. It developed quickly 
 into a large and profitable retail business doing an 
 annual volume of thirty-five or forty thousand dol- 
 lars. It yielded him an income which in those days 
 was unusually good for a small town. 
 
 But hardly had he attained for his store the mo- 
 mentum he had planned when his mind grasped other 
 opportunities. Being a retail meat dealer involved 
 pretty much killing his own meat animals and selling 
 the cuts a few pounds at a time. But there were grow- 
 ing up, in some of the more thickly populated districts 
 such as that around Boston, wholesale slaughterers 
 and wholesale meat dealers who supplied neighbor- 
 ing retailers fresh dressed meats, thus saving the 
 storekeeper the job of slaughtering. 
 
 Father was not unaware of this development, and 
 of the related development which involved a shift 
 of source of meat animals from local raisers to the 
 
126 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 grazing districts of the West. The ratio of cattle 
 population to human population of the New England 
 states had declined far below the point of domestic 
 supply. The cattle to make up this deficiency were 
 coming in from the West, which meant that someone 
 was making a profit in handling them. 
 
 Never did a significant trend of any sort within 
 the live-stock or meat industries escape G. F. Swift's 
 alert mind. He saw a chance to become the slaught- 
 erer and wholesale supplier to his neighboring retail 
 meat markets. Soon he was doing a considerable 
 business in selling to the trade. 
 
 But even this development, with its improvement 
 of a business already to be counted good, did not 
 hold him for long. He had attracted the attention 
 of two of the prominent figures in the New England 
 live-stock and meat businesses. One was D. M. An- 
 thony, a large wholesale slaughterer and meat dealer 
 of Fall River. The other was J. A. Hathaway, a 
 cattle dealer most of whose animals found their way 
 aboard cattle ships bound for England from Boston. 
 
 Anthony wanted young Gustavus Swift in with 
 him. So did Hathaway. The upshot was that the 
 Clinton business was turned over to Edwin C. Swift 
 to manage. And two new firms came into existence : 
 Anthony, Swift & Company, of Fall River; Hatha- 
 way & Swift, of Brighton. 
 
 Shortly thereafter we went to Brighton to live. 
 Father sold his retail market at Clinton to a man 
 named Pope, while my uncle continued to manage 
 
HE HAD TO SPREAD OUT 127 
 
 the Clinton wholesale business. All of the Clinton 
 butchers who were not needed for the wholesale busi- 
 ness were now transferred to Anthony, Swift & Com- 
 pany's slaughterhouse at Assonet, just outside Fall 
 River. 
 
 "Well enough'' was never satisfactory to Gustavus 
 Swift. He had been at Brighton only a year or two, 
 buying cattle for Hathaway to ship and for Anthony 
 to slaughter, when he decided that the advantageous 
 way to buy cattle was near the source of supply. A 
 big stockyards had been established at Albany. So 
 he moved us to Albany, a peg nearer the source of 
 supply. 
 
 However good Albany had looked to him as the 
 primary market when he was doing business in east- 
 ern Massachusetts, it looked nowhere nearly so fine 
 after he was on the ground. To be sure, cattle were 
 there to be dealt in in great quantity. But to his 
 analytical mind it was not right as a primary market. 
 
 He followed the railroad back to Buffalo, where 
 another large stockyards was running. He kept tak- 
 ing short trips there to look over the market and to 
 buy a few cattle. Buffalo was better than Albany, 
 because it was nearer where the cattle came from. 
 It left a good deal to be desired, though. Chicago 
 was yet to be inspected. 
 
 The more father thought about Chicago, the more 
 logical it sounded. The cattle on their way from the 
 farms and the ranches and the plains made Chicago 
 their first stop. Then why was not Chicago the place 
 
128 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 where, inevitably, cattle could be purchased to the 
 best advantage? At Chicago must be the greatest 
 selection, with the minimum of commissions and 
 handling charges accrued against the animals. 
 
 So in 1875 he came to Chicago. Here he bought 
 cattle for Hathaway to resell, for the Anthonys and 
 Edwin C. Swift to slaughter and sell at wholesale. 
 He also purchased cattle in Chicago on commission 
 for Calvin Leavitt & Son, of Brighton, which sold 
 these cattle to the Brighton butchers. 
 
 Wellington Leavitt, who is now and for a great 
 many years has been Swift & Company's head cattle 
 buyer, was the "Son" in the firm of Calvin Leavitt 
 & Son. When Wellington Leavitt was still in busi- 
 ness at Brighton with his father, he helped sell cattle 
 sent down by my father from Chicago. 
 
 What cattle G. F. Swift purchased at Chicago 
 that summer of 1876 all went east in cattle cars. But 
 he conceived the idea of slaughtering the cattle at 
 Chicago and shipping only the edible parts. Why 
 pay freight on a thousand-pound steer? That steer 
 would dress down to six hundred pounds of beef. 
 Most of the remaining four hundred pounds were 
 thrown away or were even an expense because some- 
 one had to be paid to cart them off. 
 
 Father tried it experimentally the next winter. He 
 shipped box cars of dressed beef. Some of the cars 
 were heated by stoves to prevent too hard freezing 
 and accompanied by a man to tend the fires. Other 
 cars were shipped with no stoves, completely 
 

 
 
 
 
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HE HAD TO SPREAD OUT 129 
 
 dependent on the weather. All of the cars came 
 through in good condition, with the beef all the bet- 
 ter for hanging several days in transit. 
 
 From this the step to refrigerator cars was, in time, 
 short. In difficulties it was long and wearying, too 
 long for discussion at this point. 
 
 Every step of it, however, involved expanding, 
 involved spending more money, involved a larger 
 volume to make possible the savings or the profits or 
 whatever the objective was for which at the moment 
 he was striving. He had to lay all of the ground- 
 work himself. No one else could obtain the funds 
 he needed. No one else could improvise the thous- 
 and and one successful expedients which kept his 
 business going upward. 
 
 For he kept the business climbing. Rather he 
 raised it to ever higher points by projecting his crea- 
 tive imagination upward from one stage to the next, 
 then taking the leap and carrying the business with 
 him. 
 
 And he held absolutely to his own business. This 
 is a basic reason why he succeeded in building up his 
 business so fast. He went, everyone knows, at a rate 
 considerably faster than a conservative man would 
 have thought either possible or safe. He held abso- 
 lutely to his own line. He knew what he was doing 
 and why. His decisions were based on a meticulous 
 knowledge of his own affairs and of the whole in- 
 dustry. He built in his own way and didn't wait 
 until the time when he would have the money. 
 
i 3 o THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 Each step of expansion was a definite progress 
 along a charted road. Father had no idea at the 
 outset that his business would or could become as 
 large as eventually it did. But he was heading it 
 always in its given direction. 
 
 He developed the idea of shipping beef instead of 
 cattle. Right there he unquestionably selected his 
 goal. He determined to head those who purveyed 
 meat to the public. 
 
 He set his heart on being the leader, he set his mind 
 to becoming the leader. This would have seemed a 
 preposterous dream to anyone but himself, consider- 
 ing his lack of money and backing. No wonder they 
 called him "that crazy man Swift." But if to others 
 it seemed overreaching, to father it seemed so wholly 
 reasonable that he attained leadership by a route 
 straight as an arrow. He went that route, he reached 
 his goal by strength of will and determination. 
 
 All circumstances were with him — particularly 
 the times. If he had not exploited the refrigerator 
 car, someone else no doubt would have succeeded 
 with it in at least a few years. Others had already 
 had some success with refrigerator cars without at- 
 taining leadership in the industry. With his early 
 control of large-scale use of the refrigerator car and 
 his remarkable combination of ability and energy, 
 father had an advantage which he crowded to the 
 limit. This limit was the leadership of his field. 
 
 How he pushed for sales outlets has already been 
 described. His personal working methods by which 
 
HE HAD TO SPREAD OUT 131 
 
 during the early days he concentrated sixteen or 
 eighteen or occasionally twenty-four hours a day on 
 overwhelming problems which harassed him — these 
 have been told in a previous chapter. The summer 
 of 1875 na d seen tne thirty- five-year-old Yankee come 
 to Chicago's Yards as a late entrant in a race which 
 seemed already settled. Fifteen years later he had 
 sales branches or dealers in every strategic city of 
 the United States. He was shipping great quanti- 
 ties of meat abroad in refrigerator ships. He had 
 outlets all through the British Isles and in many Con- 
 tinental cities. 
 
 No longer was his enterprise confined to beef. He 
 had put the company into mutton, into pork and pro- 
 visions, into all of the by-product lines which had 
 been an essential outgrowth. Swift refrigerator cars 
 rolled by the thousands over every railroad in the 
 country. 
 
 It was toward the close of the '8os that he raised 
 the question of building branch plants still nearer 
 the source of supply than Chicago. Beef cattle were 
 coming principally from the West and Southwest. 
 Why not slaughter them near their points of origin 
 and thus effect savings comparable to the savings 
 which had been attained when beef was dressed at 
 Chicago instead of at Fall River? 
 
 At Kansas City, Kansas, was a stockyards of con- 
 siderable size. Several concerns were operating 
 packing plants there, one or two of them on a reason- 
 ably large scale. It was selected as the site of our 
 
i 3 2 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 first western branch. In 1888 the Kansas City plant 
 went up. 
 
 It provided an excellent market for southwestern 
 cattle. But Kansas City was not the most economical 
 point for stock from the plains of western Nebraska 
 and Colorado and the country farther north. So the 
 Kansas City plant had been operated for only a few 
 months when an identical plant was built at Omaha. 
 The Omaha plant was completed in 1890. The plant 
 at East St. Louis, Illinois, was finished in 1892. 
 
 The panic year 1893 gave the building program a 
 set-back. But after a few months to recover his 
 wind, father was once more aggressively at his plans 
 for expansion. His next step was the St. Joseph, 
 Missouri, plant, finished in 1896. Its start and its 
 subsequent history well illustrate his way of tackling 
 a problem when it presented itself to him. 
 
 St. Joseph is between Kansas City and Omaha. 
 It is far less important as a railroad center than 
 either of these larger cities. 
 
 An earlier effort had established the packing in- 
 dustry at St. Joseph, but while it had managed to 
 struggle along it had not thriven. Kansas City with 
 its large live-stock market offered stockmen a better 
 chance to sell their animals. At Kansas City, buyers 
 were actively competing and huge numbers of ani- 
 mals were dealt in daily. 
 
 At St. Joseph, only sixty-five miles away, there 
 was little activity. Grass was literally growing in 
 the yards there. The local business men earnestly 
 
iiiiitt 
 
 W$, .%:.:^mM:"' 
 
 %. 
 
 G. F. SWIFT, ABOUT 1885, 
 
HE HAD TO SPREAD OUT 133 
 
 wished to bring in one of the larger packers with a 
 large plant. And they approached the head of Swift 
 & Company. 
 
 He did not want his information or opinions at 
 second hand. He went to St. Joseph, taking with 
 him a few of his lieutenants, and was feted and 
 argued at. But all of that rolled off his mind like 
 so much water. 
 
 It was at a banquet given him in St. Joseph that 
 he made one remark from which has echoed many 
 a chuckle. Frogs' legs were part of one course, but 
 the guest of honor refused them. 
 
 "You'd better have some, Mr. Swift," urged one 
 of the local hosts. "They're very tender." 
 
 "They ought to be," the partisan of beef came back 
 at him with some heat. "All a frog does is sit on the 
 bank and sing!" 
 
 Not the entertainments, but the personal investi- 
 gations of himself and of his men, finally induced his 
 decision. He studied the town, the people, the char- 
 acter of the country. For several days he drove 
 around the surrounding country by himself or ac- 
 companied by that one of his own men who could 
 contribute the most expert knowledge of whatever 
 point he was studying. 
 
 The character of the soil. The local crops. The 
 number of bushels to the acre. The kind of roads. 
 The kind of farmers. The way the railroad layout 
 would permit shipping stock to St. Joseph. All these 
 points he studied until he probably knew a good deal 
 
i 3 4 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 more about them than did any local banker or other 
 man around St. Joseph. 
 
 His investigations showed him that, even though 
 it was within sixty-five miles of Kansas City, a good 
 market at St. Joseph would divide the Kansas City 
 and Omaha hog supply. He could buy the St. Joseph 
 stockyards, which would give him an advantage here. 
 
 Everybody considered it a wild enterprise, even 
 most of the men most closely associated with him. 
 But the chief had made up his mind. "Folks think 
 we're a little bit crazy," he told the meeting which 
 had gathered to consider the purchase. "But there's 
 lots of live stock down that way. They haven't got 
 a real market there, so they don't get the animals. 
 
 "If we set out to make a market there, we'll make 
 a market. We'll buy the stockyards and put up a 
 plant." 
 
 It looked like a foolish move. The St. Joseph 
 plant was built over the objections of a large share 
 of his organization. But it paid — paid well. Like 
 many of his most profitable expansions, in advance it 
 seemed to almost everyone else absolutely wrong. 
 He was simply ahead of the rest of us. He grasped 
 all the facts and correlated them into a plan which 
 brought dollars into his stockholders' pockets. 
 
 Immediately after the St. Joseph plant came the 
 plant at South St. Paul. Here was a defunct pack- 
 ing plant which he bought because he saw something 
 that others could not see. 
 
 People thought hogs could be raised only where 
 
HE HAD TO SPREAD OUT 13 s 
 
 corn was grown — and the country around St. Paul 
 was not then notable for corn. But father never did 
 much loose thinking. He had a scientist's passion for 
 indisputable facts. He checked up and learned that 
 the farmers there had screenings and other small 
 grains which did not grade up well. Consequently 
 a farmer could more profitably turn this into pork 
 than he could sell it as grain. 
 
 He was right. Almost invariably he was right in 
 anything bearing on his affairs. Now South St. Paul 
 kills more hogs than any other Swift plant except 
 Chicago, which has of course remained the largest 
 plant in every respect. 
 
 G. F. Swift could see further into the packing in- 
 dustry's future than any man I have ever known. He 
 was very much the expansionist all of the time. He 
 saw cheap live stock and he could not keep his hands 
 off it. He had to expand to get facilities he felt he 
 had to have — and he expanded so intelligently that 
 he reached exactly the point he was aiming for. 
 
 Nothing was too big for him if it looked to show 
 a profit. Sioux City stockyards offer an illustration. 
 There had been a top-heavy boom at Sioux City, 
 financed by eastern money. In every direction the 
 plans had been laid along most ambitious lines — and 
 eventually it blew up, of course. 
 
 Father wanted the stockyards. The creditors would 
 not sell the stockyards separately. They would sell 
 everything to one buyer or they would sell nothing. 
 So he bought the whole thing, paying a large sum 
 
136 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 of money and taking along with his stockyards a 
 number of enterprises he had no use for. 
 
 Here once more nobody would vote with him. 
 Everyone knew he was wrong. But his vision showed 
 him that the stockyards alone were a good buy at the 
 price he had to pay for the whole — even if he had 
 to throw away everything else about the property. 
 As it was, the facilities which were not needed were 
 gradually sold off, the last parcel years after his 
 death. But as he had foreseen, this was an excellent 
 buy. Today the stockyards are worth considerably 
 more than he paid for the whole property. What he 
 and subsequently his estate sold the rest for was clear 
 profit on an already profitable deal. 
 
 Always he kept his affairs ahead of his finances 
 and his plans ahead of his affairs. One reason, the 
 principal reason he managed to carry the thing off, 
 was that he knew his business and held to it exclu- 
 sively. He had no interests outside live stock, pack- 
 ing, and closely related enterprises. A secondary 
 reason why he succeeded where most men must have 
 failed was that he knew the measure of everyone from 
 whom he borrowed money in any considerable 
 amount. The lender acted as the borrower counted 
 on him to do every time. 
 
 When father started at Chicago in 1875, those in 
 a position to size him up swore he would fail. When 
 he began to expand, the dire prophecies were quite 
 as confident. But he made every enterprise success- 
 ful with which he was connected. 
 
HE HAD TO SPREAD OUT 137 
 
 At the outset, he had about thirty thousand dollars 
 from his share of the partnership of Hathaway & 
 Swift. In 1885 m s firm was incorporated as Swift 
 & Company, with three hundred thousand dollars 
 capitalization. Within two years he had to recap- 
 italize for three millions, so rapid had been the 
 young company's expansion. 
 
 By 1896 the capital stock was fifteen millions. By 
 1903, the year of his death, the capital was twenty- 
 five millions. And every cent of the capital had come 
 either from earnings or from subscriptions at par 
 by existing stockholders whenever a new issue was 
 made. The company's total sales in 1903 exceeded 
 one hundred and sixty million dollars. Its president 
 had seven thousand employees under him by that 
 time. 
 
 For Gustavus Franklin Swift, while a dreamer 
 and a visionary, based his dreams and his visions 
 of expansion very much on the practical facts of 
 life. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 "I RAISE BETTER MEN" 
 
 THERE'S an ice house down at Beardstown 
 might be a good buy for us," G. F. Swift in- 
 structed one of his young men some thirty-five years 
 ago. I want you to go down there and look it over 
 carefully. Get the facts on its dimensions, ice capac- 
 ity, construction, and everything else important." 
 
 So the youngster journeyed to Beardstown, spent 
 the better part of a day there, and next day presented 
 himself at his chief's desk. He reported a great as- 
 sortment of facts. 
 
 Finally the boss interrupted him to inquire, "What 
 kind of drainage is there off the roof?" 
 
 "Drainage?" 
 
 "Yes, drainage. What kind of spouts, gutters, 
 and so on?" 
 
 The ice-house expert got red in the face. He did 
 not answer. 
 
 "All right, now, you don't know, you don't know, 
 do you? You get right on the next train and have 
 another look at that ice house. When you come back, 
 you be able to tell me all about that roof drainage 
 and anything else you think maybe I ought to know 
 that you don't know now." 
 
 So back to Beardstown the young man traveled. 
 
 138 
 
"I RAISE BETTER MEN" 139 
 
 He spent a day going over the ice house a second 
 time. Half the day he spent on the roof. Next day 
 he was back to report once more. 
 
 "You went up on the roof this time, didn't you?" 
 inquired his chief after listening to a detailed de- 
 scription of every foot of tinsmithing about the 
 premises. 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "I wanted to get you up on that roof," he declared 
 with a dry chuckle. "I wanted to get you up some- 
 where near the top of this business. There's only 
 one way a fellow like you can get to the top. If you 
 don't do your job any better than you did first time 
 I sent you, the only way you'll get to the top is by 
 running the elevator." 
 
 Another time father was coming from the East 
 to Chicago on a train arriving at night. At Cleve- 
 land the manager of one of our wholesale markets 
 got on the car, going to some town near by. His 
 chief joyously cornered him at once and began ask- 
 ing questions, as was his habit with any manager he 
 ever succeeded in getting off by himself. 
 
 All went smoothly for a while. Then the boss 
 asked, "How many windows on the west side of your 
 cooler?" 
 
 "I don't know, Mr. Swift." 
 
 "Don't know! I never heard of a branch-house 
 manager who didn't know how many windows he 
 had in his cooler! You get off this train, go back to 
 Cleveland and find out all about those windows. I'll 
 
140 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 expect you in my office at Chicago tomorrow morning 
 to tell me how many windows there are and anything 
 else I ask you. I guess we're slowing up now. See 
 you in the morning." And he blandly waved the 
 bewildered manager off at Sandusky. 
 
 Next day the man appeared at Chicago and under- 
 went a rigid examination on all of the details of his 
 cooler and its peculiarities. What's more, word of 
 the episode spread through every Swift channel in 
 the country. Managers who valued their peace of 
 mind knew, thereafter, how many windows their 
 coolers had. Moreover, they knew a whole lot more 
 about their physical equipment than ever before. 
 
 At handling men, at selecting them, at training 
 them to places of real responsibility — at all of these 
 duties father's ability was superlative. His methods 
 were in large measure unconventional. By their very 
 lack of resemblance to the time-honored and time- 
 worn they were the more effective. 
 
 When he sent a man back to have a second look 
 at the roof drainage of an out-of-town ice house the 
 employee learned for all time that on any assigned 
 job he must do just as well as any man could. What 
 is more, this lesson made him into a first-rate head 
 of the ice department — a position into which the 
 man developed and which he filled creditably for 
 many years. 
 
 At one stroke G. F. Swift taught this lesson to a 
 good many people besides the particular man who 
 had to make the second trip. Because the punish- 
 
"I RAISE BETTER MEN" 141 
 
 merit was so picturesque and at the same time was 
 both laughable and appropriate, the story was passed 
 along from employee to employee. It was something 
 to chuckle about — and while he chuckled, every 
 Swift man worth his salt applied to himself the 
 standard of performance toward which the parable 
 pointed. 
 
 The branch-house manager who returned home to 
 count the cooler windows went for a parallel reason: 
 a manager ought to know all about the equipment 
 he is in charge of. The method the chief used here 
 was almost exactly the same as that applying to the 
 ice-house roof. Yet I dare say no thought of it came 
 into his mind when he ordered the manager off at 
 Sandusky. His mind worked so directly on a specific 
 problem in handling men that he arrived forthwith 
 at the proper answer. That the problem was similar 
 accounts for the similar solution. 
 
 Father frequently asserted, "I can raise better 
 men than I can hire." The proof of the assertion is 
 in the present-day proportion of men trained under 
 him who are in positions of high responsibility with 
 Swift & Company more than twenty years after his 
 death. He trained his men — "raised 'em," as he 
 used to say — by methods which are as sound in prin- 
 ciple now as they were then. Obviously some of 
 the details would not fit this generation, which stub- 
 bornly believes that the boss is not invariably right. 
 
 A man who later had charge of one of our most 
 important activities recently told of an experience 
 
i 4 2 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 with his chief forty-odd years ago. He had come to 
 work just before Christmas of 1884, at a weekly wage 
 of fifteen dollars. He had made a strong effort to 
 get seventeen when he was hired, and failed. So 
 after a year he asked for the two-dollar raise. 
 
 "G. F. took me out in the hall," he tells the story, 
 "and walked me around a corner to a window. I can 
 see him yet, as he put his cowhide boot up on the 
 window sill and looked down his nose at me. 'You 
 think you're worth more money'n you're gettin', do 
 you?' he inquired rather savagely. 
 
 " 'Yes, sir/ I assured him. 
 
 " 'Well, you're not,' he told me. And then he 
 started in to tell what he thought of me as an em- 
 ployee. It took him a long while. I had felt pretty 
 sure of myself before I tackled him for the raise and 
 I had a lot of good reasons why I deserved it. But 
 I never got a chance to use them. He told me what 
 was wrong with my attitude toward my work and 
 he illustrated the general statements with specific 
 examples out of my short career with him. He used 
 the examples liberally, yet managed to give me the 
 impression he had a lot more in mind which he 
 wasn't citing because of the short time at his disposal 
 for so insignificant a task. 
 
 "He literally took my hide off and nailed it to the 
 door. When he got through with me, I felt real 
 gratitude that he still tolerated my unwholesome 
 presence in the office and was willing to let me con- 
 tinue drawing the same old fifteen dollars a week. 
 
"I RAISE BETTER MEN" 143 
 
 When he had finished the job, after an hour and a 
 half or perhaps two hours, I went back to my desk 
 and went to work. I was full of the idea that I was 
 next to useless. But G. F. had left a ray of hope 
 in parting. He let me believe I might have a chance 
 to become a productive member of the community 
 if I really buckled down to the job of putting into 
 use some of the advice I had just received! 
 
 "A year afterward, I got my two-dollar raise 
 without asking for it. After that I steadily went 
 along, taking on more responsibility and drawing 
 bigger pay. It was some time after G. F. had raised 
 me to ten thousand that he inquired very casually 
 one day, 'Remember that time I took you out in the 
 hall over in the old Exchange Building and told you 
 what I thought of you?' 
 
 "I had supposed he had forgotten it years before. 
 'Yes,' I admitted — and I could feel myself getting 
 red around the ears with the memory of it. 
 
 " 'Do you know why I did it?' he asked me. 
 
 " 'The only reason I know is that you were mad at 
 me because I had been doing such a poor job,' I told 
 him honestly. 
 
 " 'Why, no. That wasn't it at all,' he explained 
 in some astonishment that I had not comprehended 
 it long before. 'You were doing right well for a 
 young fellow. Not bad at all. But I thought you 
 had the makings of something better than an ordinary 
 clerk and I wanted to see. I jumped on you that 
 day just to put your feet on the ground. It made 
 
144 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 a man of you, that talk did. I could see it by next 
 morning.' You know, I think he was right!" 
 
 Father did not believe in sparing overmuch the 
 feelings of the man who needed correction or guid- 
 ance or reproof. He felt that if a man needed talking 
 to, the talk had better be strong and to the point. 
 In these days employees were less sensitive, their 
 sensibilities had not been so assiduously cultivated. 
 Consequently his specific ways of going at such a job 
 roughshod did the minimum harm and the maximum 
 good. 
 
 But even though his methods would require some 
 alteration to be usable today, the principle on which 
 they were based is just as sound as ever it was. The 
 man who hears promptly and forcefully about a mis- 
 take of procedure or of judgment has been caught 
 at the right time and in the right way to make him 
 remember the lesson. If he is the right kind of man 
 he is better off for being corrected. 
 
 It is remarkable to look back now and see how 
 large a proportion — how unbelievably large a pro- 
 portion — of the men who came in for father's re- 
 formative measures have come up and up in the 
 ranks. Some of the men he started in on could not 
 stand the treatment and dropped out. Most of those 
 who stuck it out became real assets to the company 
 and have been rewarded accordingly. 
 
 Yet it was not always easy to reconcile a spirited 
 man to treatment which he might feel was nagging. 
 Those of us who were very close to G. F. Swift and 
 
"I RAISE BETTER MEN" 145 
 
 had worked with him over a long term, knew that 
 he never nagged. It was a mark of distinction to 
 any man to have his chief return time after time to 
 point out that individual's shortcomings and general 
 uselessness. 
 
 One youngster was working as an assistant of mine 
 when some failing or other brought him to father's 
 attention. The boy was in a position where he was 
 responsible for the work of a sizeable group of 
 people, many of them a good deal older than himself 
 and longer in the service. Consequently when he 
 undertook to change their ways he had his troubles. 
 
 What caught the chief's eye was something that 
 the youngster's subordinates were doing wrong. I 
 happened to be out of town, else the first reproof 
 would have come my way. As it was, he went after 
 my helper. 
 
 It was his fashion, once some wrong method or 
 weak spot claimed his attention, to check it up daily. 
 The youngster did not make very fast progress in 
 correcting his people's fault. So every evening, along 
 about closing time, he was sent for. When he came 
 to the front office he received a talk on his weaknesses 
 as a manager. Finally the chief saw that some 
 resentment was smoldering. So he inquired, "You 
 think I've been after you pretty hard, don't you?" 
 
 "Yes I do, Mr. Swift." 
 
 "Well, I'll tell you. If you work for me long 
 enough, some day you'll know something and you'll 
 be some good to somebody." That was G. F. Swift's 
 
146 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 idea of a handsome way to make amends for all he 
 had said before! 
 
 Finally, after ten days or so I returned from my 
 trip. The youngster was just waiting for me to return 
 so he could quit. But I had one argument that 
 changed his mind. "Father doesn't go after a man 
 day in and day out if he thinks he's wasting it," I 
 told him. "You sit here every day, you hear the way 
 he goes after me, so you know you aren't getting half 
 as much scolding as I am. He's pretty careful about 
 not going to a lot of trouble to correct a man if he 
 doesn't think the man is worth correcting." 
 
 Before long the youngster was sent to England on 
 a particularly important job — at the chief's sugges- 
 tion. A little later he had to do some more foreign 
 traveling. While he was still in his early twenties he 
 was untangling hard knots for us all over the world. 
 Today he is operating one of our largest plants. He is 
 a fair sample of the results father got by his methods. 
 They were effective even though they sometimes 
 seemed harsh. 
 
 I doubt whether G. F. Swift consciously thought 
 of himself as a teacher in his job of training execu- 
 tives. Certainly he was about the most effective 
 teacher I have encountered. And while he was a 
 terror to the man who was weak or wrong, he was 
 extremely helpful to the man who tried hard. 
 
 One plant manager says of him: "When I first 
 started to work in a place where Mr. Swift saw me, 
 I was afraid of him and would go out of my way to 
 
"I RAISE BETTER MEN" 147 
 
 avoid him. But after I really knew what I was 
 doing, I especially wanted to see him when I came 
 to Chicago. Before I planned a trip definitely I 
 would generally try to find out if G. F. was planning 
 to be there. Even when I didn't have any one thing 
 to take up with him, I wanted to see him. For I 
 knew that in the course of our talk he would give 
 me some idea or other which would be valuable — 
 more valuable than anything I was likely to get else- 
 where." 
 
 When any of the leading men of the branch houses 
 or even one of the more important beef salesmen 
 came to Chicago, that man stayed at his chief's house. 
 The custom had its start in the early days when trans- 
 portation from the stockyards was slow and difficult, 
 so that for convenience the men had to be kept at the 
 house instead of being sent to downtown hotels. It 
 was continued because father liked to keep right on 
 with his business after the evening meal and he saw 
 a really valuable way to employ this time in talking 
 with his out-of-town men. 
 
 He would question the visitor by the hour until 
 he had satisfied himself that the man was honest and 
 knew his job. Then the more intensive questioning 
 ceased. But in the earlier months of a man's tenure 
 of his new job, every visit to Chicago meant so many 
 evenings of cross-examination. 
 
 One new manager after his first experience of this 
 sort went back home and prepared a good-sized 
 pocket notebook in which he kept facts and figures 
 
148 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 of all sorts that his chief might require. A travel- 
 ing auditor or someone of the sort brought back to 
 Chicago word of this loose-leaf ready-reference com- 
 pendium. It appealed to everyone, including father, 
 as a huge joke. Thereafter he was extra careful to 
 ask this man unusual questions. Tradition has it 
 that for three years the notebook was maintained, 
 that every time its owner came to Chicago he kept 
 his hand on its reassuring bulk in his coat pocket — ■ 
 and that not once in that time was he asked a ques- 
 tion for which he had the answer in his book I 
 
 After a new man in a new job had established him- 
 self as worth educating, his employer would proceed 
 with the training. One of his methods was to go 
 over a batch of random mail with the visitor, espe- 
 cially in the later years of his life when he used to 
 have some of his letters sent over to the house. He 
 would ask the guest what he would do about this 
 request for charity, about that application for rein- 
 statement. After a session like this the employee had 
 a grasp on some of the basic rules of business which 
 he had never before comprehended. 
 
 Once G. F. was convinced that a man should de- 
 velop into someone of consequence, he kept trying 
 and trying to do the job. It was seldom he failed. 
 But occasionally he had, after a long struggle, to give 
 it up. 
 
 There was one such man he sent to St. Joseph as 
 assistant manager. The newcomer did not fit in and 
 after a while was transferred to Kansas City. No 
 
"I RAISE BETTER MEN" 149 
 
 matter how much time his sponsor would spend with 
 this man, he could not bring him up to the mark. 
 Also he kept trying to get both the St. Joseph man- 
 ager and the Kansas City manager to say that the fel- 
 low was some good. Finally he gave it up. But he 
 hated to do it. 
 
 "There isn't much use giving up a man too early 
 if you think maybe he's going to be all right," he 
 observed on this occasion and a good many times 
 after. It became one of his precepts in developing 
 men. 
 
 If he once sized a man up as having possibilities, 
 he would not easily change his opinion. Occasion- 
 ally this wasted a good deal of everyone's time in 
 trying to develop a man who would not develop. 
 Also it lost just so many months in getting the right 
 man on that job. But more time is saved by patience 
 in training men than by impatience. Few traits cost 
 employers as much as the common failing of giving 
 up a man for hopeless long before he has proved it. 
 We try to inculcate in all our people this idea that 
 there is no use giving up a man before he has proved 
 himself worthless. As a result we develop the latent 
 ability in a good many men and women who would 
 not last two months if we were critical in the early 
 stages. 
 
 In general father was not much on hiring men 
 from the outside for jobs of any consequence. He 
 preferred hiring his men young and bringing them 
 up by hand. His inclination was to hire competent 
 
ISO THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 men on the outside only when they were especially 
 equipped for some new enterprise with which we 
 lacked experience. 
 
 Occasionally, though, he stepped right across the 
 line and hired someone for a special reason. When 
 our plant at St. Joseph was building, he made the 
 acquaintance there of an eastern man, O. W. Waller, 
 who was having an uphill fight to make his little 
 packing plant break even. Father developed the 
 habit of dropping in on Waller for a visit after his 
 list of duties in St. Joseph had been completed and 
 he was ready to leave by the first train. 
 
 One evening their visit continued until about half 
 an hour before time for the Chicago train. It hap- 
 pened that Waller was also going to Chicago but had 
 said nothing about it. Instead, once the caller was 
 out of his office he hustled out the back way, jumped 
 into his buggy, and drove home for dear life. At 
 home he changed his suit, packed a bag, ate a hasty 
 supper, and was driven up to the station platform at 
 a gallop just as the train pulled in. 
 
 Quite a party of us were going in on that train, 
 but father was fascinated by the performance of his 
 rapid-moving acquaintance. It was so wholly like 
 his own way of arriving with never a minute to spare. 
 He deserted his own forces for the companionship 
 of the St. Joseph packer after introducing us singly 
 and recounting the speed with which this gentleman 
 had traveled once he got started. 
 
 They sat together during all of the evening, in the 
 
"I RAISE BETTER MEN" 151 
 
 course of which father reminesced in great detail 
 about his career from the age of nine down to date. 
 This of itself was so unusual that we were all aston- 
 ished. As they said good-night, father told him, 
 "Any time you want to come to work for me, I've 
 a good job for you." 
 
 Not long afterward Waller gave up the fight. He 
 had not been able to overcome the handicaps of inade- 
 quate capital and inefficient plant. No sooner was 
 he announced as going out of business than the head 
 of Swift & Company was after him to take a job 
 with us. Waller's ability to accomplish a great deal 
 in a short time was so remarkably like his own that 
 father recognized he would fit well into a place of 
 responsibility. 
 
 So he was sent for to come to Chicago. And all 
 around the offices the chief introduced him to every- 
 one as "Mr. Waller from St. Joseph, who's come to 
 work for Swift & Company." 
 
 "But I'm not working for Swift & Company," pro- 
 tested Waller. 
 
 "You mean to say you wouldn't work for us in the 
 right kind of a job?" 
 
 "What kind of a job?" 
 
 "Manager of a packing house." 
 
 "It might be all right, if it was the right packing 
 house," admitted Waller. "What one did you have 
 in mind?" 
 
 "St. Louis." 
 
 "I wouldn't go there on a bet." 
 
152 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 "Will you go for six or eight weeks?" 
 
 "Why, yes, if it's only for that long." 
 
 "I thought you'd go to St. Louis," exulted his new 
 boss. "After that the new plant will be ready at St. 
 Joe and you can take it." 
 
 So Waller went to St. Joseph as manager of our 
 newest branch plant. He went on the chief's say-so 
 and pretty much over the judgments of the other men 
 well up in our councils, for he was a new man with 
 us and it has never been our policy to put outsiders 
 over old employees if the job could possibly be filled 
 from within. But this once, G. F. Swift was con- 
 vinced that he had hired a better man than any of 
 the "raised" variety who were available. And he 
 stuck to his conviction. 
 
 Because he did not want to take a single chance 
 of being wrong after he had put an outsider in this 
 place without consulting the judgment of his lieuten- 
 ants, the boss proceeded to devote special attention 
 to Waller. For the first year or so the St. Joseph 
 manager was frequently summoned to Chicago and 
 father went often to St. Joseph. 
 
 Since then Waller has occasionally told of his long 
 sessions with his chief. From dinner time on, every 
 evening in Chicago was devoted to talking over Wal- 
 ler's management problems, the affairs of the one 
 plant and of the company. Father was always ready 
 to counsel with him — though, in all justice it must 
 be said there was no need for paying any extra atten- 
 tion to him. As usual, the head of the business had 
 
"I RAISE BETTER MEN" 153 
 
 been absolutely right in his size-up of his man. Yet 
 Waller declares today, no doubt correctly, that 
 his lightning-like activity in catching the train at 
 St. Joseph is alone what attracted the attention of 
 G. F. Swift and brought about his offer of a good job. 
 
 In the early days the business kept calling for more 
 and more men as it grew, and its head had to hire a 
 good many men outside. His trade was shooting 
 upward so fast that even his ability at training execu- 
 tives could not keep up with the demand. So he was 
 always picking up likely looking men and putting 
 them in training for jobs that needed filling. 
 
 For example, there was a grocer near where we 
 lived. He had a good enough little business as neigh- 
 borhood grocery stores went. But that discerning 
 eye saw in him the material for a bigger place than 
 ever his little store would afford. Father therefore 
 advised him to sell his business and come to work 
 for us. 
 
 First thing we knew the store had changed hands 
 and the man was working in our wholesale market. 
 He learned there how a wholesale market is run and 
 the points which need watching. Presently he was 
 going around our branch houses checking up on the 
 managers, helping them to build up to the standard 
 maintained in our Chicago packing-house market and 
 picking up from all of them hints which he might 
 pass on to the rest so that the wholesale organization 
 would run more smoothly. 
 
 G. F. Swift's standing and reputation were such 
 
i 5 4 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 that many a man gave up his own established busi- 
 ness to come to us, with full confidence that he was 
 bettering himself. That is how L. A. Carton came 
 as treasurer in 1893 when the financial end of the 
 organization loomed too big for its founder's con- 
 tinuing attention. It is how a good many of the best 
 men came in the early days. 
 
 The man who could do better than most men some 
 task which was part of our function was a man to 
 catch his employer's attention. In the first years 
 of the business this is how a good many of the men 
 were found on the outside to take places of respon- 
 sibility with us. All the way through it has been 
 how men inside the organization have been chosen 
 for larger positions. 
 
 There was one young man who came as a clerk 
 in the president's office. At first his duties were 
 chiefly filing. But he showed a real knack for keep- 
 ing up with the work and for finding letters or con- 
 tracts on the instant. Moreover he displayed an 
 intelligent comprehension of the fact that he was 
 there to save his chief's time and energy. Several 
 times he used unusual gumption under circumstances 
 where he might have been excused for letting things 
 slide along. 
 
 So his boss noticed him. And one day when his 
 secretary was away, with the youngster taking hold 
 of the work as best he could, a cable announced that 
 a ship which we were counting on to carry a load 
 of beef to England had gone into dry-dock at 
 
On 
 
"I RAISE BETTER MEN" 155 
 
 Liverpool and therefore could not meet its scheduled 
 sailing date from Boston. 
 
 The schedule of sailings was handled in that office 
 by another man under the secretary. The secretary 
 always checked over this man's work and then sub- 
 mitted it to his chief. So the youngster turned over 
 to the expert the job of rearranging the schedule of 
 sailings. 
 
 But when it came to submitting this to the chief 
 the expert would not. He was downright afraid, 
 with that bone-quaking fear some clerks have of the 
 big boss. So the report had to be taken in by the 
 younger clerk, with the expert hovering in the back- 
 ground to handle any overtechnical questions. 
 
 Right away, of course, there came a question fairly 
 bristling with technicalities. The spokesman said, 
 "I don't know about that, Mr. Swift. Brown here 
 can tell you." 
 
 "So you don't know, eh?" inquired the boss pleas- 
 antly. "Well, I don't know as I'd expect you to 
 know all about that. But if you're going to come 
 in here with reports you've got to know all about 
 them. I don't want to have Brown explain it, as 
 long as you're the one that's bringing it to me. You 
 go along now and find out all about it. Probably 
 Brown can make you understand it. After you do, 
 come back and tell me. I expect to be in all morning. 
 And if we come to something else you don't know, 
 why I guess we can give you some more time to find 
 that out." 
 
156 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 One secret of his success in training men was the 
 way he dealt with them. He knew all about prac- 
 tically every detail in the business, the standards to 
 which every operation must be held. His micro- 
 scopic eye for detail never overlooked any really sig- 
 nificant points, even though he might not concern 
 himself too immediately with them. 
 
 When he wrote instructions to a manager or a 
 superintendent, he was explicit. Usually he closed 
 such letters with the injunction : "Please answer and 
 say if you will carry out these instructions. " That 
 phrase, winding up a letter, leaves no doubt in the 
 recipient's mind as to what is expected of him. 
 
 At the same time, given a man in whom he had 
 confidence, he would seldom overrule that individ- 
 ual's deliberate judgment. He preferred to let the 
 man incur a loss, if necessary, to prove to his own 
 satisfaction what would always have remained a 
 doubt if it had had to be accepted on his chief's say-so. 
 And he was seldom so cock-sure that he knew he 
 must be right and his employee wrong. 
 
 The manager of a middle-western plant found a 
 good market in San Francisco for dressed poultry. 
 After a few experimental shipments he sent a man 
 there to look after the dressed poultry business on 
 the coast and one day mentioned to his chief that 
 this had developed into a nice profitable venture. 
 
 It was the first father had heard of it. "You'll not 
 make any money shipping poultry to San Francisco," 
 he assured the manager. 
 
"I RAISE BETTER MEN" 157 
 
 "But we're making money at it now," was the 
 rejoinder. 
 
 "You'll not make money on it in the long run." 
 
 "Do you want me to stop shipping and bring that 
 man back here?" 
 
 "You'll not make any money at it." 
 
 "I think we can make money at it, Mr. Swift. Do 
 you want me to stop it?" 
 
 "Oh, let's talk about something else," suggested 
 the boss. 
 
 For a long while we made money at it. The man- 
 ager was right, even though father had been so sure 
 about it. His unwillingness to order a manager to 
 go against his own judgment was one reason why 
 he built up throughout the world a corps of repre- 
 sentatives who handled his affairs superlatively well. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE FORBIDDEN YARDSTICK 
 
 ALL his life G. F. Swift was developing at a 
 l prodigious pace, developing in mind and skill 
 and knowledge. Quite as naturally as a boy attain- 
 ing manhood loses his awe toward many unremark- 
 able adults who a few years before towered above 
 him, so father found his standards always changing. 
 
 Men whose technical skill at one time represented 
 his highest ideals of attainment became a few years 
 later to his fast-marching mind a pack of fogeys. 
 His own development had meanwhile gone to a point 
 far beyond the ken of the mossbacked gentry. 
 
 First and last a good many of his men, most of 
 them a deal younger than their employer, left him 
 because they had failed to keep within hailing dis- 
 tance as he progressed. It took a nimble wit and a 
 lust for hard work to hold that pace. Not that he 
 expected every man to keep up with him. But the 
 man in a key position — be he a department head or a 
 superintendent or a clerk in the president's office — 
 that man kept step or stepped out. 
 
 Only a good man could suit him for long. Father 
 was sizing his people up all the time. He watched 
 their performances in comparison with one another 
 and in the light of what he knew about their abilities. 
 
 158 
 
THE FORBIDDEN YARDSTICK 159 
 
 "The best a man ever did shouldn't be his yard- 
 stick for the rest of his life," was the maxim and the 
 working rule by which he managed his men. The 
 department head or superintendent who used that 
 forbidden yardstick was not worth keeping. 
 
 Even more than in developing executives — and he 
 excelled at it — G. F. Swift's knack of dealing with 
 human beings appeared in his work with the rank 
 and file of his employees. After all, it is easier to 
 build up alert, ambitious individuals into competent 
 executives and managers than it is to get a reasonable 
 degree of work and intelligence out of the ninety- 
 seven per cent of employees who never develop the 
 capacity for authority and who never can. For the 
 individual of managerial caliber is the exception and 
 will do his best to help you push him ahead. The 
 majority of inert people on the pay roll have an 
 uncanny gift for using just enough gumption to hold 
 their jobs and win little promotions, but they never 
 show the traits which bring a man major responsi- 
 bilities and major rewards. 
 
 The man of initiative and common sense quickly 
 gains enough experience to appreciate the reasons 
 behind his own promotions and reprimands. But 
 the fellow down in the lower ranks of the business 
 is usually more of an individualist. He lacks the 
 training; and he has never tasted the rewards which 
 come to one who subordinates personal preferences 
 to the group's welfare. 
 
 Whether it was in the earlier days when father was 
 
160 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 dealing direct with his workmen and clerks or 
 whether it was in the later years when he could plan 
 only the general policies, he displayed a genius for 
 handling employees. To people in Swift & Com- 
 pany who did not know him well, or who had not 
 worked with us long enough to understand what was 
 at the bottom of his relationship with employees, the 
 head of the business sometimes seemed an unpleas- 
 ant, hot-tempered boss. He was unquestionably sar- 
 castic. Sarcasm was his tool for keeping his sub- 
 ordinates alert and free from mistakes which should 
 not be repeated. 
 
 But his irritability (as it seemed to some em- 
 ployees) arose out of disappointment. He was really 
 disappointed, with a sense of personal error, when 
 he found a weakness in an employee who he had not 
 expected would have that particular failing. 
 
 One plan he followed constantly to minimize 
 expensive errors was to get reports on all claims 
 allowed our customers. These reports came to him 
 on large sheets with brief particulars of each claim. 
 Each summary described the error behind the claim 
 and told who had made it. 
 
 Whenever he found a few unoccupied minutes in 
 the day, he sent his office boy for a claim-sheet 
 offender. Into his office would march some clerk he 
 had never seen before. The culprit always knew, 
 from the time the claim was allowed, that eventually 
 he would be personally called to account by his chief. 
 
 Father would sit there for a moment sizing up 
 
THE FORBIDDEN YARDSTICK 161 
 
 the man responsible for the loss. To the clerk it 
 unquestionably looked as if his employer was rack- 
 ing his brain for a refinement of ingenious punish- 
 ment. Actually the boss was looking him over to 
 see whether he looked like a man who would habit- 
 ually make mistakes and whether he was worth trying 
 to save. His tendency was to err on the side of char- 
 ity, to give the man a chance to make good. 
 
 After a moment he would speak. "So you're the 
 young fellow who ordered out five hundred pounds 
 of leaf lard and two hundred and fifty pounds of 
 compound when a customer had bought two fifty of 
 lard and five hundred of compound?" 
 
 "Yes, Mr. Swift." 
 
 "I suppose you know the customer claimed he 
 used it up just the same way as if he'd got what he 
 ordered and we had to bill it to him the way he 
 ordered instead of the way we shipped?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "I suppose you think it doesn't make any difference 
 if you make mistakes like that. Doesn't make any 
 difference to a big rich company like Swift's if it 
 has to allow a customer a claim of $13.47. We'd be 
 in a fine fix if everybody made that kind of a mis- 
 take once a month, wouldn't we?" 
 
 The employee who emerged from the encounter 
 with the least damage and still on the pay roll was the 
 one who did not try to excuse the error, who acknowl- 
 edged it and showed by his demeanor that he recog- 
 nized it as a serious offense which he would carefully 
 
1 62 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 guard against in future. The man who tried to be 
 flippant, or who took the attitude that anyone was 
 likely to make mistakes and that a certain number 
 of mistakes was allowable to any man — that fellow 
 was likely to be through in a hurry. 
 
 Father did not consider any mistakes allowable in 
 a well-managed business. That was his base on which 
 he built the whole structure. He knew that errors 
 would continue to be made. But none were allow- 
 able and no one would be retained who showed too 
 strong a tendency to lose us money. 
 
 This is one of the really sound principles of busi- 
 ness management. No mistakes are allowable and 
 every mistake must be regarded as a serious lapse. 
 If any other attitude is taken toward errors, then 
 there is no controlling them. 
 
 It is always necessary to draw a definite line some- 
 where. It is impossible to draw a definite line on 
 errors unless it is drawn right at the source. Allow 
 it leeway in the slightest and it will move steadily 
 away in the direction of more mistakes. And it is 
 mistakes which lose money for a business. 
 
 If a concern is engaged in a sound line of business 
 and if some fundamental change such as a new and 
 monopolized invention which could not be prophe- 
 sied does not render it suddenly unsound, then it may 
 in general be said that it will always make money 
 except when someone makes a mistake. The mistake 
 may be one of judgment, of wastefulness, of careless- 
 ness, or whatnot. It may at the time seem important 
 
THE FORBIDDEN YARDSTICK 163 
 
 or unimportant. But the most basic mistake of all is 
 to condone mistakes. 
 
 Twenty or thirty years ago it was no doubt easier 
 to hold employees to a strict accountability. Disci- 
 pline in the office and in the packing house was almost 
 as strict as discipline in the family. And back in the 
 '80s and the '90s the head of the family was obeyed 
 or there was real trouble! Discipline was a part of 
 the working code rather than a tradition of bygone 
 days. 
 
 Father was a strict disciplinarian. Not always did 
 his disciplinary measures bring about the results he 
 had counted on. But he kept working along the same 
 lines nevertheless. 
 
 He was walking through the cellars at one of our 
 western plants one day with the superintendent when 
 a negro trucker passed, whistling loudly. "Stop him 
 whistling, stop him," the chief directed. So the super- 
 intendent called, "Hey, Sam, no whistling on the 
 job" — which was the first ever heard of this on the 
 plant in question. And the chief added, as explana- 
 tion to the surprised negro, "If everyone whistles, 
 we'll have no order." 
 
 A few minutes later they went to the hog-killing 
 floor. The hog house was small for the plant and 
 everything was done by hand. 
 
 The gang was composed of stalwarts every one — 
 most of them southern negroes, with a few Irish at 
 pivotal points. The day's schedule was six thousand 
 hogs, a big day's work. Someone had started the 
 
164 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 negroes singing when the whistle blew that morning 
 and the work had been turned out six hundred hogs 
 an hour, ten a minute, right from the start. 
 
 "Here! Here! Stop it!" the astounded visitor had 
 to shout to make himself heard over the ringing 
 chorus of "Down in Mobile." So the superintendent 
 called the foreman, who immediately silenced the 
 singers. 
 
 "That will slow up the work, Mr. Swift," the 
 superintendent told him. "We want to get out six 
 thousand hogs today and we'll never do it without 
 the singing. It helps those boys work." 
 
 "Never mind," directed his employer. "I think 
 we can kill the hogs without any musical accompani- 
 ment. Yes sir, we turn out a lot of pork at Chicago 
 without singing." 
 
 "You have conveyor chains, rolling tables, all the 
 other facilities at Chicago for speeding up the work. 
 If you need to turn out a little more than the usual 
 production, you speed up the conveyors a little and 
 the men speed up to keep pace." 
 
 "I think we don't need the singing. It's bad for 
 discipline," was the final word on the subject. 
 
 But along later in the day as the visitor and the 
 plant manager entered the superintendent's office, 
 that practical soul took from his desk the production 
 reports which had been accumulating during the day. 
 They showed that from the moment the singing had 
 stopped hogs had been killed at the rate of four 
 hundred an hour instead of six hundred as before. 
 
THE FORBIDDEN YARDSTICK 165 
 
 He handed the sheet to his chief without comment. 
 
 "Hm," came the decision after a considerable 
 pause. "Hm. I guess maybe there's a little some- 
 thing in what you say. Maybe you might let those 
 boys sing when they've got an extra lot of work to 
 do. But — " regretfully — "it's mighty hard on dis- 
 cipline." 
 
 One of the cardinal principles which enabled him 
 to raise better men than he could hire was his sparing 
 use of compliments. He believed in seldom prais- 
 ing. His creed held that if a man does good work 
 he deserves no praise for it, it is exactly what he is 
 paid to do. If his work is exceptionally fine, still 
 don't praise him. Give him a raise and a better 
 job with more responsibility at the first chance. Thus 
 you give the man the benefit he has earned by his 
 ability. You have, as an employer, advantaged your- 
 self of the employee's capacity. And you haven't 
 spoiled him by telling him he is good. 
 
 The good man who came to us from another con- 
 cern was likely to have been told that he was good 
 and consequently to have had his head just a trifle 
 inflated. The man who knows he is good is likely 
 to be a bit sensitive about how he is treated. He 
 requires an amount of dignity to support his best 
 work. Father had his attention centered only on 
 getting the work done and he had no time to think 
 of useless frills. He did not build up non-essentials 
 by compliments. That is one way he raised better 
 men than he could hire. 
 
166 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 He tried his best to hold his managers to the same 
 point of view. He did not want them upsetting the 
 apple-cart by giving out praise. Once at St. Joseph 
 he was going over the plant with the manager when 
 they encountered a negro janitor engaged in some 
 job which, while it had to be done, yet was outside a 
 janitor's regular duties. The manager praised him 
 for his alertness in seeing the need and pitching into 
 the job on his own hook. As they walked away he 
 said to his chief, "There's one of the best men on 
 this plant. He's always surprising me by doing bet- 
 ter than I can expect anyone to do." 
 
 They walked on for a minute or two in silence. 
 Then from the depths of his experience the older 
 man offered his comment: "You're going to spoil a 
 good boy — spoil a good boy, Mr. Donovan." 
 
 At another plant he was going through with a 
 younger man, a foreman who has since become a 
 plant superintendent. As they were standing by a 
 long zinc table where they were doing the scraping 
 by hand, he inquired, "Mr. Pratt, where do you think 
 these hogs should be cleaned?" 
 
 "Right here where they are being cleaned," an- 
 swered the foreman. 
 
 "We don't do it that way at Chicago," retorted 
 his boss — this was the reply he used to squelch any- 
 one at any of our other plants who stood up for an 
 inferior way of doing. Chicago was at that time 
 supposed to include all packing-house virtues devel- 
 oped to date. The other plants were the provinces. 
 
THE FORBIDDEN YARDSTICK 167 
 
 "There are a lot of things you don't do at Chi- 
 cago," replied Pratt. "We're scraping them while 
 they're still hot from the scalding water. At Chi- 
 cago they scrape the hogs on the rail. I think this 
 is a great deal better than the Chicago way." 
 
 "Young man, you're right," his employer admitted. 
 This was the highest praise he could bring himself 
 to administer. 
 
 The veteran who went through this experience 
 laughed about it many years later. And he com- 
 mented: "I believe this is the only time Mr. Swift 
 ever agreed with me about anything we discussed! 
 Next time I was in Chicago, a few months later, I 
 observed that he had them handling their hogs by 
 our method." 
 
 It is noteworthy that the chief did not tell the man 
 his idea had been adopted. He knew the originator 
 would see it some time at Chicago. Meanwhile there 
 was no use acting as if the man had done something 
 to make a fuss over. 
 
 But if G. F. Swift was sparing of praise, he was 
 lavish with advice about better ways to do things. 
 He never overlooked an opportunity to instruct. 
 
 "How do you think these hogs are dressed?" he 
 inquired of a plant man on another trip. 
 
 "I think the day's killing is well dressed," the em- 
 ployee told him. 
 
 "I beg to differ with you. That's all," — and he 
 waved the younger man back to his work. 
 
 Next day the plant man received a letter from the 
 
168 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 plant superintendent, with the president's criticism 
 attached. Busy as he was, father had gone into great 
 detail about how the hogs should be opened straight 
 through the center of the aitch-bone, split to show 
 the loin and fin bones equally on each side of the hog, 
 and the button of the neck split in the center. It 
 was a constructive set of instructions on one opera- 
 tion of pork packing. Giving instructions took up a 
 much larger part of his usual day than did praise. 
 
 One thing he insisted on was absolute honesty. 
 Time and again he came to my desk or called me to 
 his and pointed out some slip-up in shipping dates 
 or a let-down in quality or something else which had 
 the appearance of a sharp corner having been cut 
 to get an advantage for Swift & Company. He 
 would lecture me on the specific mistake. But always 
 he would end up by talking about the need for being 
 absolutely fair and honest all of the time. "We 
 want character to go with our goods. And sixteen 
 ounces is a Swift pound." I don't know how many 
 times he said this to me; it must have run well up 
 into the hundreds. 
 
 So it is not surprising that in the early days espe- 
 cially, before the spirit of fair dealing had been 
 absorbed by all of our people, a good many men got 
 through in a hurry. Usually it was for a lie or for 
 misrepresenting to a customer. Father had no use 
 for anyone who had any other standard than abso- 
 lute honesty and sixteen ounces to the pound. 
 
 I recall one man who was fired for stealing. He 
 
THE FORBIDDEN YARDSTICK 169 
 
 appealed to the front office. "I've worked for you 
 for twenty years, Mr. Swift," he pleaded. 
 
 "You stole, didn't you?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "You worked for me twenty years too long then," 
 was the decision. 
 
 There was another man, manager of a branch 
 market, who got to drinking and committing a lot 
 of the faults which so often accompany this overin- 
 dulgence. He was sent for. 
 
 "Mr. So-and-So, how do you like working for 
 Swift & Company?" 
 
 "Oh, very well, Mr. Swift." The employee went 
 on to enlarge on the virtues of the house. 
 
 "You like your job, do you?" 
 
 "Oh, yes, I'm very well satisfied. I'm trying to 
 
 do my very best " and so forth. The chief 
 
 waited for him to finish. 
 
 "Well, you've been doing a lot of things you hadn't 
 ought to, a lot of things we don't stand for. I'm 
 glad you liked your job, for you ain't got it now." 
 And the man was through. 
 
 This kind of discipline was not inspired by any 
 desire to be unkind. There was none of the cat-and- 
 mouse idea in inviting the man to come from his 
 eastern branch to be fired and in asking so solicitously 
 after his liking for his job. Father knew the story 
 would run through the whole organization and serve 
 as a reminder that employees were not encouraged 
 to behave themselves in ways which interfered with 
 
170 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 their usefulness. It was stern discipline, but effec- 
 tive. 
 
 Yet, rigid as were his ideas of discipline, he 
 allowed them to relax for the worker who had earned 
 special consideration or about whom there was some 
 reason for not holding to too high a standard of 
 expectation. There was a coachman who was dis- 
 covered getting away with a little money. 
 
 Mother simply sent over to the cashier at the office 
 when she needed money. This had long been the 
 custom. The cashier handed over the money and 
 charged it to "G. F. Swift Personal." Almost any- 
 one was sent over from the house on occasion and 
 the cash was always handed over — sometimes in 
 rather larger amounts than the servant who got it 
 was used to handling. 
 
 When the coachman was discovered knocking 
 down money under this plan, he decamped. Father 
 had him brought back by the police. And then he 
 began thinking about how unbusinesslike the whole 
 arrangement had been, how unfairly it placed temp- 
 tation in the servants' ways. He couldn't keep the 
 man in his employ. But he dismissed the charges 
 against him and worked out a voucher system which 
 made it unlikely that any such thing would happen 
 again. 
 
 Another time the head of the ice department went 
 to his chief to tell his suspicions that an old-time 
 employee assigned to a minor but trusted place in 
 his department had been dishonest. The old-timer 
 
THE FORBIDDEN YARDSTICK 171 
 
 was being used to pay off the ice-harvest gangs, 
 always in cash. There was at the time no way to 
 check up whether his payments and his amounts 
 drawn for the purpose tallied. 
 
 "I think he's taking all of the ice-gang pay-roll 
 money that's left after he pays off," the manager 
 explained. "He isn't turning any in. Of course he 
 may be carrying over the surplus from one gang and 
 using it to pay the next, but I doubt it." 
 
 "The chances are he ain't," father admitted. "You 
 know, he never had a very good education. Don't 
 know the difference between his money and mine. 
 But he's been a good faithful servant here and we 
 can't expect maybe that he ought to be trusted with 
 cash. He's always got a job here, though, as long 
 as he lives. We may have to guard him from temp- 
 tation, but he's always got a job here." 
 
 I think it is generally agreed by the men who 
 worked with him that Gustavus F. Swift was one of 
 the fairest, squarest bosses anyone ever had. He 
 treated everyone alike, whether the employee was a 
 member of his family or someone who had been 
 placed on the pay roll only a week before. Some 
 of us, in fact, suspected that he was more, lenient to 
 the ordinary run of employees than he was to his 
 near relatives. 
 
 He was very much interested in the personal affairs 
 of his people — a goodly amount more so than some 
 employees thought was any of his business. He real- 
 ized that a man's personal habits had a great deal 
 
172 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 to do with his ability and also that they shed light 
 on what might be expected of the individual. When 
 an employee got a share of Swift stock, the presi- 
 dent of the company was likely to check up a year 
 afterwards to see if he still had it. If it had been 
 transferred, then he wanted to know why. 
 
 He wished his people to own stock. He was a 
 pioneer in bringing this about in a big way. His 
 was the first large concern to encourage its employees 
 to become substantial stockholders. 
 
 A typical instance of the way he did it was when 
 he called in one young man who had been with us 
 for about a year. The youngster was doing well and 
 gave every indication of becoming a valuable man. 
 "Are you intending to stay with us?" was shot at 
 the boy. 
 
 "Yes, Mr. Swift." 
 
 "Well, you seem a likely sort of young man. May- 
 be I'm mistaken, but it looks to me as if you might 
 develop into someone who'd be of some use around 
 here if you stay. Now, I want to have my young 
 men partners, even if they can't do it in a big way. 
 Like the idea?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "We're going to increase our capital stock. Got 
 any money?" 
 
 "Only about two hundred dollars." 
 
 "All right. You can buy a thousand dollars worth 
 of this stock if you want to. Pay down what you 
 can and give me your note for the rest. I'll carry 
 
THE FORBIDDEN YARDSTICK 173 
 
 it for you and you can pay me off as fast as you're 
 able." 
 
 So the employee got the stock. He still has it, I 
 think, along with a good many more shares. That 
 he was a likely young man was proved when he 
 developed into a department head, then went abroad 
 in charge of a substantial share of our business. 
 
 Father never overlooked an opportunity to place a 
 few shares of stock with his people. When there was 
 no other stock available, he would sell a little of his 
 own to the employee, replacing it at the first good 
 opportunity. But all of the time he kept in mind 
 that the employee who is a partner is usually the 
 keenest to make money for the firm. 
 
 Likewise he recognized that the concern which is 
 owned by a very large number of shareholders is 
 more stable than the company which is closely held. 
 And its stock is more difficult of stock market man- 
 ipulation. 
 
 Next in desirability as stockholders he rated cus- 
 tomers. Swift stock was originally bought by eastern 
 live-stock and meat men who constituted our first 
 body of customers, the nucleus around which our 
 dressed-beef business was developed. When new out- 
 lets were added, either as dealers or as agents, the 
 newcomers were given the opportunity to buy a few 
 shares. Thus the sales organization was built up 
 with an undivided loyalty and a desire, founded on 
 self-interest, that the company prosper. 
 
 I have said that sarcasm was my father's working 
 
174 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 tool in handling employees. He might be and he 
 generally was very personal in his remarks, but he 
 meant them impersonally. No matter how hard he 
 jumped us — I got just as large a share of this as any- 
 one else — he left us with the feeling that it was all 
 deserved. He left no sting but he left us convinced. 
 No matter how hard he might jump, no matter how 
 wholly unpleasant he might be in the tenor and tone 
 of his remarks, next time he saw the employee the 
 storm had blown over. The man who weathered one 
 such talking-to generally got through any of its suc- 
 cessors without having his feelings seriously abraded. 
 
 Another of his knacks in raising better men than 
 he could hire was his ability at cross-examination. 
 Whether the questioning took place in his office or 
 at home or at the employee's desk or workbench, the 
 procedure had its common characteristics. If the 
 chief was seated, he looked as if he had been poured 
 into his chair. He slumped down with his weight 
 on the small of his back. But no matter how indolent 
 his appearance, his lively blue eye kept roving. 
 
 His first questions would be so unrelated that the 
 employee would wonder what on earth the boss was 
 driving at. His succeeding questions would begin to 
 shape up into a skeleton so that the man began to 
 think he knew what it was all about. And then, 
 when the conclusion seemed right ahead and the 
 employee felt himself safely exonerated of all blame, 
 father would with one or two well-placed queries 
 turn an abrupt corner and skewer his victim neatly 
 
THE FARM HOUSE AT BARNSTABLE. 
 
 G. F. SWIFT'S ACCOUNTS, 1859-60, RECORDING 
 SALES OF MEAT FROM HIS BUTCHER CART. 
 
THE FORBIDDEN YARDSTICK 175 
 
 on the sharp point of the cumulative admissions 
 which conclusively convicted the man of something 
 he had not even known he was suspected of. Never 
 did G. F. Swift's questions indicate the direction in t 
 which he was working, until he had the answers so 
 well in hand that there was no use denying his con- 
 clusions. His method might conscientiously be rec- 
 ommended to any earnest prosecuting attorney! 
 
 But if his questionings were devious, his instruc- 
 tions to employees were always direct. He said abso- 
 lutely what he wanted done, in as clear-cut a way as 
 anyone could devise. Then he left it to the employee 
 to work out how he would get the results. 
 
 He was the driver, the dynamo of the business. 
 He worked his men hard and treated them fairly. 
 From time to time I have heard rumors of this or 
 that employee who felt himself badly treated by 
 father. But whenever I have been familiar with the 
 facts, they have been all on the employer's side. 
 
 One instance was a man who came to us at a good- 
 sized salary to improve our office routines. He was 
 recommended as a first-class man and so represented 
 himself. But like most men who set themselves up 
 as experts, he soon showed that he knew consider- 
 ably less than the good practical office men we had 
 with us all of the time. So father had him fired. 
 
 Presently he appeared at the front office and was 
 admitted. He was tremendously angry. He had, 
 so he claimed, been hired for a year — and here he 
 was fired within two months. "You're not getting 
 
176 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 the results you said you'd get, are you?" his employer 
 inquired mildly. 
 
 "Not yet. But I was hired for a year, Mr. Swift." 
 
 "All right," the boss assented — not showing by his 
 actions or manner what he thought of someone who 
 failed to deliver what he had agreed to, but demanded 
 his pay just the same. "You go over to Mr. So-and-So 
 in the packing house. He'll have a job for you." 
 
 A telephone message got there ahead of the office 
 man. When the one-year employee arrived, he was 
 given a squeegee and instructions to keep the blood 
 running into the blood-gutters. After a few hours 
 there he had enough, even though he would have 
 been drawing his stipulated pay as an office expert. 
 
 I have no doubt that this man felt terribly mis- 
 treated. There are instances of this sort which give 
 rise to lurid tales of G. F. Swift's terrible temper 
 and rank injustice. But I have never found a basis 
 for it. 
 
 Over against this we can set the statement of a man 
 who worked with him from the start at Chicago — 
 who came out, in fact, from the slaughterhouse of 
 Anthony, Swift & Company at Assonet to take charge 
 of slaughtering at Chicago. He left us in 1897 to 
 take a position with another concern which could 
 temporarily afford to pay several times as much as 
 we could for his specialized ability. Thereafter he 
 had no connection with us, no reason for telling a 
 good story about us. 
 
 It was almost thirty years after he left us and 
 
THE FORBIDDEN YARDSTICK 177 
 
 fifteen years after he retired to live on his income that 
 he told a man unconnected with our business: 
 
 "I worked for G. F. Swift for twenty-seven years. 
 He was the squarest man I ever worked for. All 
 that time I never asked him what he was going to pay 
 me. I never had cause to complain. If you worked 
 well for him, he saw that you got what you deserved 
 in money and in every other way." 
 
 There, it seems to me, is the basic explanation of 
 father's oft repeated assertion: 
 
 "I can raise better men than I can hire." 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 FIGHT WHEN YOU MUST 
 
 IF INDUSTRIES have birthdays, all record of 
 them is usually lost in the snurled-out memories 
 of the dead. Seldom can you put your pencil on 
 the yellowed page of an ancient calendar and say, 
 "On this day began such-and-so an industry." These 
 birthdays are difficult to mark. 
 
 But the birth record of the packing industry may 
 be here written down with certainty and in no fear 
 of contradiction. The modern dressed-meat business 
 was born on the day after the Assonet butcher gang 
 came to Chicago. 
 
 It was an autumn day of 1876. These Yankee 
 butchers who had worked for Anthony, Swift & 
 Company just outside Fall River came on a Grand 
 Trunk pass, as was general in those times. Next day 
 they fell to their task in the shed — by courtesy called 
 a slaughterhouse — which G. F. Swift had purchased 
 from one Billy Moore in preparation for their arri- 
 val. The lard refinery of the business he founded 
 stands today on the site of Billy Moore's unprenten- 
 tious establishment. 
 
 The day can be marked as an industrial birthday 
 because the beef those New Englanders slaughtered 
 was placed in a box-car and shipped back to their 
 
 178 
 
FIGHT WHEN YOU MUST 179 
 
 home town. From this start came Swift & Com- 
 pany. I think we are not boastful in feeling that 
 with it began the modern packing industry. 
 
 It marked a definite era in father's business career. 
 It meant that he foreswore the live-stock business 
 which during most of his life had been his liveli- 
 hood. Instead of live stock as the merchandise he 
 dealt in, he was substituting dressed beef. Because 
 he envisioned an industry shipping beef from Chi- 
 cago to feed the eastern states, he made dressed meat 
 an industry. 
 
 His partner, D. M. Anthony, of Fall River, agreed 
 with him — agreed, however, with a reservation of 
 enthusiasm. Anthony was willing to risk a little 
 money on his partner's idea, but he was not giving 
 up his profitable going business to undertake a cru- 
 sade for a new idea, even though that crusade might, 
 as he hoped, turn out a moneymaker. 
 
 J. A. Hathaway, father's partner in his other firm 
 of Hathaway & Swift, had no faith in the idea. It 
 is not remarkable that he had not, for he was a cattle 
 dealer. Anthony, a slaughterer and meat dealer, 
 might have been expected to show more interest in 
 a means of making money for handlers of meat. 
 Hathaway could only look on it as an unsound plan. 
 If this unsound plan should by any chance work out 
 successfully, he knew it must ruin his line of busi- 
 ness. It is human nature to take little stock in any- 
 thing which might cost you your living. 
 
 Hathaway and his partner differed so radically on 
 
180 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 this question that they dissolved their partnership. 
 Their viewpoints could not be reconciled. Hathaway 
 came to Chicago, paid cash for his partner's share 
 of the joint interests, and returned to his cattle busi- 
 ness at Brighton. He brought with him from the 
 East a financial statement on which to base the set- 
 tlement. "How do those meet your figures?" he 
 inquired of his partner. 
 
 "I don't agree with you," the younger man told 
 him. "I don't agree with you at all." 
 
 "Why, I'm surprised," declared Hathaway. "I 
 thought I had my figures right. How far are we 
 apart?" 
 
 "One cent. Your figures give me one cent more 
 than I'm entitled to." 
 
 So they parted the best of friends. The older man 
 brought along two gold watches. One of these he 
 gave to father and the other to mother. They were 
 fine watches and were treasured always as a memento 
 of a friendly partnership which could not be con- 
 tinued. 
 
 Gustavus F. Swift was not a man who had many 
 quarrels. "Use tact when you can — fight when you 
 have to," was one of his working maxims. He always 
 preferred going around a difficulty to going through 
 it. He never threw a challenge into the other fel- 
 low's territory until he had made up his mind that 
 arbitration or compromise would not settle the 
 trouble. 
 
 One result of his tactful ways was that he had only 
 
FIGHT WHEN YOU MUST 181 
 
 two serious labor troubles during his lifetime. The 
 first of these was in the '80s, the other was the Pull- 
 man strike of the early '90s. With neither of these 
 was he specifically concerned as an opponent of the 
 strikers' demands. But when the strikes came and 
 he saw that tact would no longer serve, he swung into 
 the job of fighting with every resource he had. 
 
 If the disputes leading to these affairs had arisen 
 out of conditions directly under his control, there 
 would have been no strikes. When, however, the 
 strikes threatened his prosperity through no fault of 
 his own, then he proceeded to do everything he could 
 to break them. 
 
 The first was a bitter strike. Particularly in those 
 early days, father could not afford a shutdown and 
 the consequent loss. He moved into the stockyards 
 men who would work in spite of the strike. And 
 he got his foremen to exert every influence to keep 
 their men at work. 
 
 He was pretty well recognized as a leader in 
 breaking that strike. Broken it was. After it was 
 over, the foremen who held any considerable propor- 
 tion of their men were noted for meritorious serv- 
 ice. Not a few individuals who later rose to impor- 
 tant responsibilities owed their promotions to the 
 attention they attracted by holding their men at work. 
 
 The Pullman strike was altogether different. It 
 was aimed not at us but at the Pullman Company. 
 Its net result was to prevent the free movement of 
 freight — which in the packing business means a 
 
182 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 shutdown in short order. The strikers were deter- 
 mined that cars should not move. G. F. Swift had a 
 stubborn streak when anyone tried to tell him what 
 he could not do. His determination matched the 
 strikers'. He refused to be buffeted about in the 
 role of innocent bystander. 
 
 The crisis as it affected us came one day when get- 
 ting the cars rolling was especially important to us — 
 it was July 3, or the day before Memorial Day, or 
 some such occasion. The trainmen of the railroad 
 which switched cars in the yards had been intimi- 
 dated. Trunk railroads, however, were under United 
 States military protection. If the cars were once 
 placed on trunk line tracks we were reasonably sure 
 they would reach their destinations. 
 
 So we organized an impromptu train crew, with 
 guards, to move the cars from our loading docks and 
 turn them over to the Michigan Central. Richard 
 Fitzgerald, president of the Chicago Junction Rail- 
 way, lent us a switch engine. An old employee who 
 knew the workings of a locomotive served as engi- 
 neer. The rest of the crew was made up of one or 
 two high officials, such as the general superintendent, 
 and the whole Swift family, including father. 
 
 To the accompaniment of jeers and, be it confessed, 
 an occasional brickbat, we switched a train of refrig- 
 erator cars out of the stockyards onto the tracks of 
 the Michigan Central. There a yard engine was 
 waiting to take them. Then we all went back on 
 the engine and tender and repeated the operation. 
 
FIGHT WHEN YOU MUST 183 
 
 Feeling ran against us among those who sympathized 
 with the Pullman strikers. A few of our empty 
 refrigerator cars were burned up and a few cars of 
 beef likewise. 
 
 But the meat kept moving out of the Yards — and 
 when President Cleveland called out the United 
 States troops from Fort Sheridan to protect lives and 
 property, the strike was soon broken. It was a daring 
 move for a man in political office. I can think of 
 few who would have done it, however much right 
 was on the side of law and order as against the 
 strikers. 
 
 Difficulties with transportation had been father's 
 daily portion almost from the time he came to Chi- 
 cago. As soon as he began shipping dressed beef he 
 ran into snags which were skillfully placed in his 
 way. The railroads, in short, did not want his 
 dressed-beef business. They wanted to continue haul- 
 ing live stock, which gave them about double the 
 tonnage. The basic idea of slaughtering at Chicago 
 and shipping beef east was to avoid having to pay 
 freight on the inedible portions of the cattle and to 
 avoid the loss of weight to the cattle, due to the hard- 
 ships of travel. But the railroads had not yet been 
 educated to an appreciation that what is economically 
 sound is in the long run most profitable to the car- 
 riers. It was this lack of understanding which even- 
 tually brought upon them the first governmental reg- 
 ulation. 
 
 Rate making in those days of the '70s and early 
 
184 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 '80s was almost entirely a matter of bargaining 
 between the individual shipper and the carrier. The 
 Interstate Commerce Act had not yet appeared. And 
 the carriers would not bargain on dressed-meat rates. 
 They simply set a high rate and sat tight. 
 
 This was the group of old railroads, comprising 
 the Trunk Line Association, which have the direct 
 routes from Chicago to the East. They got the live- 
 stock business, of course, for the shorter the haul the 
 less shrinkage in weight of cattle on the hoof. The 
 roads which reached the East by roundabout routes 
 got none. 
 
 The Grand Trunk, running through Canada, had 
 practically no live-stock business. So its officials were 
 delighted to get a share of the traffic in meat since 
 they could not have it alive. They were glad to set 
 a fair rate on dressed beef. They welcomed the result- 
 ing revenue. One other railroad used occasionally 
 to accept a little of our dressed beef for the East, 
 but only in small quantities at the low rate. 
 
 Father used to meet in New York the chairman of 
 the Trunk Line Association, a German named Albert 
 Fink. He and Fink would argue the dressed-meat 
 rate by the hour and never get anywhere. Fink had 
 his orders from the railroads and could not budge an 
 inch. 
 
 Because father saw that the only way he could pos- 
 sibly get anywhere was by tact, he used tact for ten 
 years, or as close an approach to tact as was possible 
 under the circumstances. Meanwhile his beef for 
 
FIGHT WHEN YOU MUST 185 
 
 points around New York City was turned over by 
 the Grand Trunk to American roads at Buffalo and 
 for New England points at other junctions nearer to 
 this market. The American roads charged local 
 rates on these hauls, which made them tremendously 
 expensive as freight went in those days. 
 
 He kept this up until the Interstate Commerce Act 
 was passed in 1887. Then the railroads had to take 
 his commodities at a fair rate and had to desist from 
 other practices which had stood in the way of freely 
 shipping meat to the East. It closed a long argu- 
 ment between father and Fink! 
 
 His serious difficulties in shipping beef had started 
 almost simultaneously with the first trouble on trunk 
 line rates. G. F. Swift had shipped some dressed 
 beef experimentally in box cars in the winter of 
 '75-'76. He had not been at it long before the rate 
 situation first blocked him, then turned him to the 
 Grand Trunk. 
 
 Technical difficulties of carrying dressed meat a 
 thousand miles in all weathers were, however, very 
 real. The first car of beef he shipped was an ordi- 
 nary box car with a temporary framing built inside 
 to suspend the carcasses from. It was shipped in 
 cool weather and the meat arrived sweet and edible. 
 
 Then followed experiments, directed at first to 
 mastering the difficulties of winter shipping. A box 
 car of beef might start out in zero weather and the 
 meat be frozen stiff before it left the Chicago city 
 limits. In Indiana it might encounter a warm wave 
 
186 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 and thaw out. Then it might freeze again and thaw 
 again before arriving at Fall River or Clinton. After 
 this it would be in a good deal worse condition than 
 if it had gone all the way either frozen or chilled. 
 
 Cars were sent carrying small stoves with a man 
 along to tend the stoves. Various wrappings and 
 packings were tried. And finally the conclusion was 
 plain that the beef lost in no way except appearance 
 if it arrived frozen and was thawed out gradually. 
 
 This was in the winter before the butcher-gang 
 came from Assonet to work in Billy Moore's slaugh- 
 terhouse. The cattle that father sent dressed this 
 winter were killed for him by G. H. Hammond for 
 a slaughtering toll. When spring came in 1876 he 
 gave up the experiment for a few months and went 
 back to shipping cattle. 
 
 Hammond was, I think, the first man to ship beef 
 commercially in refrigerator cars. He had at this 
 time a handful of refrigerator cars which he used 
 for shipping beef east. He was reasonably success- 
 ful at it and had made a modest start toward attain- 
 ing what father had in mind. 
 
 But G. F. Swift's energy and vision were destined 
 to make a bigger thing of it than Hammond could 
 make it. Hammond was using the idea as an auxiliary 
 money-maker, something that yielded him a good 
 steady little profit month in and month out. Father, 
 once he had the device mastered, used it to build an 
 industry such as had never been dreamed of before. 
 
 His first effort was to get the railroads to build 
 
FIGHT WHEN YOU MUST 187 
 
 cars. The railroads as a class did not want dressed- 
 beef traffic, much less were they going to encourage 
 it. Finally it narrowed down to the Grand Trunk. 
 But the Grand Trunk would not build the refriger- 
 ator cars, even if guaranteed a steady volume of traf- 
 fic for them summer and winter. It was experimental. 
 
 Development of a satisfactory refrigerator car was 
 being pushed from two sides at that time. On the 
 one hand was the need to carry dressed beef from 
 Middle West to East. But far more urgent was the 
 demand for cars which would enable the farmers of 
 the Pacific Coast to carry to eastern markets the 
 fruits which they had in such abundance but could 
 not sell. The coast had been growing in population 
 and in fruit culture since the transcontinental rail- 
 roads had been completed only a few years before. 
 It was pressing hard for some means to market the 
 perishable products of its fruit farms. 
 
 Outside the fruit belts of the United States, peo- 
 ple seem to think of the refrigerator car as an appur- 
 tenance of the packing industry. Actually, by recent 
 figures, there are several times as many refrigerator 
 cars carrying fresh fruit, vegetables, and the like, as 
 there are owned by packers and used principally for 
 meat products. While G. F. Swift struggled to make 
 progress to forward his ideas of shipping beef, a 
 real effort was being made in many quarters to pro- 
 duce a satisfactory refrigerator car. Some had 
 already been built which came pretty close to doing 
 what they were supposed to. 
 
188 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 Father rented such of these as he could get. In 
 them he shipped beef east to his own wholesale mar- 
 ket at Clinton, Massachusetts, and to Anthony, Swift 
 & Company at Fall River. Ke even managed to get 
 a couple of distributors and to keep them supplied 
 with Chicago-dressed beef. The first two customers 
 to push his product in the East — outside of the two 
 firms which he owned or had an interest in — were 
 Francis Jewett, of Lowell, and I. M. Lincoln, of 
 Providence. 
 
 When the railroads refused to build refrigerator 
 cars for him to ship in, he approached the Michigan 
 Car Company, of Detroit. The McMillen family 
 owned this concern. They were rich and had a lean- 
 ing toward an undertaking which might make them 
 a profitable future market if they took a little chance 
 in the present. 
 
 Reduced to its barest terms, G. F. Swift's pro- 
 posal to the owners was that they build him some 
 refrigerator cars and let him pay for them out of 
 their earnings. They took a chance with him, even 
 though they did not know that the cars would earn. 
 To be sure, they retained a hold on them — some- 
 thing on the order of a mortgage which was, I think, 
 the forerunner of the modern equipment trust. But 
 the cars would be worth little to anyone unless they 
 could yield a profit. And if G. F. Swift could not 
 make them pay, then the Michigan Car Company 
 stood a slender chance of ever being paid for them. 
 
 He paid fifteen per cent down, as I recall the 
 
FIGHT WHEN YOU MUST 189 
 
 transaction, with the remainder to be paid monthly 
 out of earnings. It was a remarkable deal for those 
 days. Car builders were used to getting cash for 
 their products. The railroads had not yet been 
 reduced to the intricate ways of financing which 
 have become general as operating costs have risen. 
 
 Patents had offered a real obstacle, too. The pat- 
 ent situation on refrigerator cars was a maze. Ham- 
 mond had certain patents which made his refriger- 
 ator cars satisfactory. There was a Tiffany patent, 
 a Zimmerman patent. There was the Anderson car, 
 the Wickes car. Not one of them was absolutely 
 right for the purpose; all of them had some good 
 features. 
 
 So father made what arrangements he could with 
 the patentees and designed a car which seemed to 
 incorporate the best features of them all. This was 
 the design by which his first ten cars were being 
 built in Detroit. Once he could have the cars roll- 
 ing, he felt sure he would begin making money fast. 
 The cars were completed and success seemed just 
 around the corner. 
 
 But before they could be moved and put to work, 
 Hammond brought injunction proceedings. He 
 claimed an infringement and he tied up in the build- 
 er's yards all ten of those urgently needed cars. 
 
 Here they remained for several months. Legal 
 procedure is always too slow to help much in a situ- 
 ation of this sort. No matter how father might fight 
 it in the courts, at best it would take months or years 
 
190 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 before he could hope to have his cars released for 
 his use. 
 
 Once more he resorted to tact. It was a blue time 
 for him. But he managed to convince another 
 wealthy man of the possibilities in those cars. This 
 man lent him the money to put up as a bond with 
 the court to guarantee Hammond against any dam- 
 ages the cars might do him. By hustling around, 
 father soon had the ten cars hauling beef east for him. 
 Eventually his claims were upheld. The courts ruled, 
 "No infringement." 
 
 But even after it was working, almost nobody had 
 much confidence in his plan of slaughtering cattle in 
 Chicago and selling the meat in the East. "Stave's 
 Wild West scheme" it came to be known among the 
 Cape Cod relatives. 
 
 Within two years the Yankee had over a hundred 
 cars running from the Yards to the East. They were 
 all making money. Still no one took him seriously. 
 Others before him had tried shipping beef east and 
 had failed. Everyone prophesied that it would break 
 him. He kept on, getting a tremendous head start 
 while the others waited for him to fail. By 1880 the 
 refrigerator car, and with it G. F. Swift's method 
 of dressing beef in Chicago, was indisputably a suc- 
 cess. 
 
 Once he got the refrigerator cars running, his diffi- 
 culties were still on the increase. His technical trou- 
 bles with the cars and with getting the meat chilled 
 properly before hanging it in the cars very nearly 
 
FIGHT WHEN YOU MUST 191 
 
 broke him. Ruin was so close several times, in fact, 
 that good active hustling was all that saved him. 
 
 Aside from these troubles, he had to develop all 
 kinds of auxiliary equipment for his refrigerator cars 
 and his beef coolers. He had to buy ice-harvesting 
 rights in lakes all over northern Illinois and 
 southern Wisconsin so that he might have the ice 
 for cooling his beef and loading the ice boxes of his 
 cars at Chicago. He had to develop icing stations 
 all the way across the country to his markets in the 
 East — the railroads would not build them. Then 
 he had to get the ice-harvesting facilities to supply 
 these stations. He had to build ice houses of huge 
 capacity. His ice-consuming capacity was by the 
 wave of a hand and the development of an idea 
 greater than any other ice user's in the country. 
 
 These stations have, for the most part, long since 
 gone out of our hands. The Interstate Commerce 
 Commission ruled on complaint of other packers that 
 we could no longer hold icing stations, since our icing 
 stations gave us a small profit on all competitors' 
 shipments. So the stations were sold to the railroads, 
 which by then were glad to take them over. And 
 refrigeration by mechanical means had displaced ice 
 to such an extent that only a small percentage of all 
 of our refrigeration requirements were supplied by 
 natural ice. 
 
 But the means by which father built them, financed 
 them, and maintained them — all of this is with us as 
 vitally as it was then. For it comprised the principal 
 
192 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 essentials of building a business under great handi- 
 caps of inadequate capital. He built under those 
 circumstances. What is more, he built both fast and 
 sound. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 NEVER STAY BEATEN 
 
 NEVER admit it even when somebody's beat 
 you." 
 
 My father draped his angular person over my old- 
 fashioned roll-top desk and gratuitously offered me 
 this bit of friendly advice a hundred times, I sup- 
 pose, during the '80s and '90s. To be sure, he vented 
 a Jovian wrath more times than that when he had 
 me beaten on some point and I would not admit it. 
 But he seldom intended his generalizations of con- 
 duct to apply to his managers and his sons in their 
 relations with him! 
 
 Had he been more the philosopher and less the 
 man of action, father would have stated his advice a 
 little differently. As he exemplified his maxim in 
 daily life, in his idiom it should have been: "Never 
 admit it even to yourself when somebody's beat you." 
 He never admitted it, even to himself. 
 
 "Let's talk about something else," he would direct 
 on those rare occasions when a manager or one of the 
 boys cornered him and penned him in with heaped- 
 up facts. Translated, this meant, "Go ahead, do it 
 your way. But I won't admit you have me beaten!" 
 
 He was never small about it. He did not reserve 
 this attitude for his subordinates or for the moments 
 
 193 
 
i 9 4 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 when, perhaps, a superintendent proved conclusively 
 that his pet way of splitting a hog was far ahead of 
 the plan his chief was sponsoring. What was true in 
 the minutiae of his daily work was quite as notice- 
 able in his moments of great crisis. 
 
 He would never admit a defeat, even to himself. 
 He never knew when he was licked. If he had recog- 
 nized a number of different occasions when he was 
 genuinely worsted, his history must inevitably have 
 been different. 
 
 Several times his business was in such shape that I 
 cannot yet quite understand how he managed to pull 
 it through. Certainly he would have lost it if ever 
 he had recognized its hopeless state. In the early 
 years at Chicago he was frequently so deeply involved 
 that one marvels he came through at all. 
 
 A man who was associated with Gustavus Franklin 
 Swift for many years, at first back in Brighton and 
 later in Chicago, always declared that his friend and 
 employer progressed as he did through two closely 
 related reasons: "He had abiding faith in his ulti- 
 mate success. He was afraid of nothing." 
 
 These are the only explanations I can offer for sev- 
 eral extraordinary phenomena which acquaintance- 
 ship with his career brings to mind. How was he 
 able to take hold of the refrigerator car — something 
 which others had tried, which some in fact had used 
 — and make it in his hands a tool a thousand times 
 more potent than ever it had seemed? How did he 
 manage, in a field where others were large and pow- 
 
NEVER STAY BEATEN 195 
 
 erful, to grow from insignificance at a speed which 
 even in this day of larger affairs seems dizzy, to 
 overcome obstacles which from this perspective seem 
 to have been insurmountable, and to become even- 
 tually the leader in his new industry? 
 
 His faith, his lack of fear, these made possible what 
 he accomplished. He simply could not dignify dis- 
 couraging circumstances by letting them discourage 
 him. He went his way serenely ignoring what by 
 all calculations should have disheartened him. 
 
 Had he recognized facts which were as plain as the 
 nose on his face he would have quit and lost his busi- 
 ness in '93. He would never have got past the dis- 
 couraging times of the late '70s when daily he staked 
 more than he could afford to lose. He staked it on 
 the performance of faulty refrigerator cars which 
 perversely failed to keep their perishable contents 
 cold. He staked it on imperfect beef coolers which 
 took the most inopportune occasions to obstinately 
 refuse to chill the natural heat out of the fresh-killed 
 carcasses in time for them to be shipped. 
 
 He was playing for big stakes, playing long shots 
 to win. The odds against him were his faulty coolers 
 and faulty cars. When he won, when a shipment got 
 through in good shape, he made a good profit. When 
 he lost, when a car of beef arrived good only for 
 dumping into the bay at Fall River, then the loss 
 should have staggered him. 
 
 But it did not. Such a loss failed to disturb him. 
 "It will be all right," he would assure the rest of us 
 
196 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 as we discussed our bad luck in the depths of our 
 discouragement. Then with all good cheer he would 
 promptly entrust another half-dozen loads of the 
 precious beef to his fallible cars. Probably this 
 would get through in good shape and so would the 
 next shipment. Then, just as he was getting in the 
 clear with his profits on successful shipments, some- 
 thing would go wrong again. 
 
 It took only two or three cars of soured beef to 
 wipe out his gains on a good many cars that arrived 
 sweet and salable. Two successive losses of good 
 size frequently put him in the red for an amount 
 beyond the limits of any other man's credit. Some- 
 how, though, he would keep his courage up, refuse 
 to admit he was in a corner, get more money if the 
 case was that desperate. 
 
 "The trouble is, we don't quite know how to do 
 it right," he would admit with not a trace of dis- 
 couragement. "We'll get it, though. We'll learn." 
 Then he would set about experimenting some more, 
 watching even more carefully than before to make 
 sure that he overlooked no known precaution. 
 
 Many a hot July and August night he got on a 
 horse and rode over to the packing house at mid- 
 night or later. He would go straight to the coolers 
 and eye the thermometers. Then he would be after 
 the foreman. "You've got to get those men to shovel- 
 ing more ice and more salt," he would direct. "Let's 
 see the temperature come down five degrees." And 
 though it meant vigil to the moment of going to his 
 
vmmm 
 
 
 THE ORIGINAL WINDLASS USED BY G. F. SWIFT 
 FOR HOISTING STEER AFTER KILLING — 
 BARNSTABLE, l86l- 
 
 THE ORIGINAL BULL-RING USED 
 BY G. F. SWIFT FOR PULLING 
 ANIMAL DOWN FOR SLAUGHTER. 
 
NEVER STAY BEATEN 197 
 
 desk for the morning mail, father would walk among 
 the men urging them to greater efforts until the tell- 
 tale mercury column dropped to a reassuring depth. 
 
 Inventors busied themselves those days with coolers 
 and refrigerator cars. Orchardmen beyond the Sier- 
 ras clamored for something on wheels that would 
 roll into Hoboken yards with its fragile freight all 
 toothsome. Swift, the Yankee of the Yards, chafed 
 for the chance to try any device which might serve 
 surely to haul his Chicago beef sweet and edible to 
 New England and New York. The world's mechan- 
 ically minded worked to perfect the means. 
 
 But they seemed to crawl. Progress must be faster 
 if this pioneer was to build an industry and control 
 the large share of it his heart was set on. So besides 
 having a look at any device brought to him, he like- 
 wise experimented on improvements to find what he 
 must have. 
 
 Before he came to Chicago, he had at Fall River 
 installed a refrigerator built by the Chase patent — 
 then rebuilt it to make it work. At Chicago he built 
 Chase refrigerators and Zimmerman refrigerators — 
 and rebuilt them. He and his superintendent worked 
 continually at improving these carcass chillers. They 
 would build a model incorporating some hopeful idea 
 for circulating air through every part of the com- 
 partment, the basic problem of refrigeration. Then 
 they would send smoke through the chambers, so that 
 their eyes might trace the currents. 
 
 Painfully, step by step they wprked out the funda- 
 
198 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 mental laws of refrigeration which are generally- 
 known today. They were not scientists looking for 
 principles. They were practical packing-house men 
 in search of ways to chill beef carcasses properly. 
 Today we know that they discovered the principles 
 and might well have written monographs and text- 
 books on refrigeration had they been so inclined. 
 
 All the while they were working with cars, too. 
 Father tried out first, as I recall it, the Wickes car 
 and the Anderson car. Anderson relied on the nat- 
 ural circulation of air through the ice chambers and 
 the beef chamber — but the car was so built that this 
 circulation took place only imperfectly. Wickes em- 
 ployed in his cars a contraption which hitched a fan 
 to the car axle, thus blowing the cold air through the 
 car. 
 
 It was an excellent device, barring a few flaws. 
 When the car stopped moving, if it went on a siding 
 or if the locomotive broke down or if a wreck stopped 
 the train, then circulation stopped with it and con- 
 sequently so did the refrigeration. Likewise if the 
 belt broke or loosened. We lost a good deal of meat 
 first and last in Wickes cars which were delayed. If 
 the train kept moving, then the meat arrived in per- 
 fect condition — always assuming that the fan kept 
 blowing! 
 
 Because the laws of refrigeration were not under- 
 stood, we had difficulty in chilling carcass meats in 
 quantity at the packing house. When we killed per- 
 haps thirty or forty cattle a day, chilling was easy. 
 
NEVER STAY BEATEN 199 
 
 But as the day's slaughter mounted into the hundreds, 
 the carcasses contained in the aggregate a great deal 
 of heat when they came into the cold rooms. It was 
 like bringing in so many loads of hot bricks. They 
 raised the temperature effectively and frequently held 
 it high through the night until the next day's fresh 
 kill came in to reinforce them. If this kept up for 
 two or three days, perhaps every carcass in the cooler 
 was still warm to the touch. 
 
 When this happened and the warm meats went 
 into the cars, they might be chilled in transit. But 
 if a car happened to be one of the faulty ones, then 
 its load was likely to sour long before it got to market. 
 
 In the late summer of '77 father got hold of the 
 Zimmerman car, a great improvement over the oth- 
 ers. But when he tried the same principle in a 
 carcass chiller, it failed utterly. 
 
 Not until the summer of '79 did he get the proper 
 design for his beef coolers. He had nothing but grief 
 until then, when he got in an improved Chase patent 
 refrigerator and added to it his own refinements for 
 air circulation. Once this was working, he built on 
 the same design several chillers of about one hun- 
 dred-carcass capacity each. He insisted that beef 
 must hang here between two and three days as a 
 minimum. 
 
 Thus his Zimmerman car and his Chase cooler 
 put him in what was by contrast with his previous 
 experience extremely good shape. They left him 
 free to work on other major problems. It was sev- 
 
200 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 eral years later that he discovered the Chase princi- 
 ple produced a better car, too. 
 
 But even when he had the Chase cooler and the 
 Zimmerman car, the worst of his early troubles were 
 over. He made money very fast. He could undersell 
 the local slaughterers of the East and still make more 
 profit per dollar of sales. He enjoyed a fixed differ- 
 ential in his favor, the saving he made by paying 
 freight on only the edible portions of the beef animal. 
 
 The technical difficulty of getting chillers and cars 
 to do what they were supposed to was only part of 
 his troubles as a pioneer. Beef spoiled in transit or 
 in the underchilled coolers. It cost him lots of money, 
 too, when lots of money was exactly what he lacked — 
 still this was only a beginning to his woes. 
 
 G. F. Swift's total wealth at the time he settled 
 his partnership with J. A. Hathaway was around 
 thirty thousand dollars. He had made little during 
 the early years, for what he made on successful ship- 
 ments he lost on the failures. And he poured good 
 money after bad on experiments with coolers and 
 cars — experiments which advanced his knowledge of 
 refrigeration and so in the long run amply repaid 
 their cost. But at the time they looked like dead loss. 
 Dead loss was the one thing he could not afford. 
 
 Meanwhile he was having to put money and still 
 more money in auxiliary equipment to further his 
 refrigeration. Mechanical refrigeration was not in 
 use then — at least not in packing houses. Our first 
 mechanical refrigeration unit was built in our first 
 
NEVER STAY BEATEN 201 
 
 pork-packing plant in 1887. It was our maiden step 
 from our bondage to natural ice. 
 
 He had become by his adoption of the principle of 
 slaughtering in one place and selling the meat a thou- 
 sand miles away the country's largest user of ice. To 
 supply ice in the quantities he needed and at the 
 places he needed it, he provided the extensive facili- 
 ties already mentioned. 
 
 Financing all this extension was a real burden. It 
 came when money was most urgently needed in other 
 divisions of the business — and before investors were 
 eager to put in their money. 
 
 When father needed money in these days he usu- 
 ally went out and hustled for it. His presence 
 inspired confidence. People usually believed in him 
 from the first meeting. So, with his wide acquaint- 
 ance in New England's beef and live-stock trades, he 
 managed selling shares or borrowing money rather 
 easily. 
 
 When everything else failed, he would go to D. 
 M. Anthony and to John Sawyer in Boston. He 
 always managed to get money from them. A good 
 many times during those blue times of '77 and '78 
 their funds, wheedled from them by his persuasive 
 enthusiasm, were all that saved him. But if he had 
 ever let himself see there was doubt of his pulling 
 through, he must many times have given in to the 
 overwhelming odds. 
 
 His capital was habitually depleted. Frozen assets 
 of one sort and another were almost the rule at first. 
 
202 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 And while in a brisk market his business could have 
 been sold on the auction block to yield enough for 
 the creditors and leave a little something over for 
 the owners, still he met the technical definition of 
 insolvency. He could not have met his obligations 
 at the time they fell due. 
 
 Somehow, though, he would fight through the trou- 
 bles. He would not admit, even to himself, that he 
 was beaten. So he was not beaten. He would go to 
 a creditor for an extension, or to a banker with 
 another note to replace the one which would soon 
 fall due — and he would get what he went after. 
 
 These were growing pains, these financial trou- 
 bles. The last of them and the most serious were the 
 troubles of '93. He had got through one crisis after 
 another by increasing the company's stock. The 
 assets had grown considerably faster than the capi- 
 tal; book value was always considerably above par 
 value. So he got more money into the business by 
 issuing more stock when he needed it. 
 
 The business was coming to the place where it 
 would need a lot more money to take care of its rapid 
 expansion. Father saw this in '92. He also sus- 
 pected the approach of the financial panic which 
 appeared by May of '93. He did not, however, 
 expect it so soon. 
 
 An unusually large cash dividend was declared at 
 the end of 1892 — something like twenty-four per cent, 
 as I recall it. And, on the heels of this, the stock- 
 holders authorized a large increase of the capital 
 
NEVER STAY BEATEN 203 
 
 stock. This issue was offered to the stockholders 
 very soon after. 
 
 But it did not sell well at all. There had, of 
 course, been in the directors' minds the idea that the 
 big dividend would make the stock sell out in a hurry. 
 But the stockholders were already feeling the pinch 
 of the money tightness which was to clamp them 
 three months later in the great panic. Thankfully 
 they accepted the cash dividend and thankfully they 
 used it to help themselves out of their other finan- 
 cial difficulties! As to the new stock issue, it would 
 be a nice thing to buy, they figured. But when you 
 haven't the money, you can't buy. So they didn't 
 buy. 
 
 This is really why the panic of '93 hit Swift & 
 Company hard. The treasury was bare of ready 
 cash — and the proceeds of the stock issue which had 
 been expected to yield plenty to carry through the 
 slump failed to materialize. It was perhaps six 
 months before the stock issue sold clean. By then the 
 business was out of the woods. Father, aided by 
 L. A. Carton, had managed to finance the business on 
 its own assets. For half a year the business had been 
 living, like the traditional desert camel, on its hump. 
 
 Details of that fight have been told in a preceding 
 chapter. It was a magnificent struggle, the more 
 remarkable that it was successful. If the head of 
 the business had been willing to face the situation 
 with a real recognition of how desperate it was, I 
 do not believe he could have pulled it through. He 
 
20 4 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 would not admit even to himself that he was beaten. 
 He laughed at the facts, though he relaxed mean- 
 while not an ounce of his effort to overcome them. 
 
 His attitude toward the whole affair came up one 
 day in a conversation with his head butcher. The 
 butcher was getting fifteen dollars a week — he wanted 
 a raise. That a panic was raging meant nothing to 
 him. The demand might have exasperated anyone 
 at such a time. Strangely enough it did not annoy 
 his chief. 
 
 "I'll tell you what I'll do," the boss countered to 
 the astounded packing-house man. "I'll trade you 
 my profits this week for your wages." On that jocu- 
 lar basis, the employee soon found himself good- 
 naturedly agreeing that he didn't want a raise! 
 
 With the autumn of '93, Swift & Company was 
 done with growing pains. Then it was that the 
 business reached maturity. Within a year or two the 
 continual shortage of ready money was over. Now 
 its head could take his ease, with the business grown 
 to a size greater than any other industrial concern 
 in the country and with money plentiful. 
 
 It was the first time. From the very start, when 
 he came to the Chicago Yards as a Yankee cattle 
 buyer, G. F. Swift had been cramped for cash. When 
 he started out in the dressed-beef business, then he 
 was indeed of small financial importance beside 
 Armour and Morris. 
 
 Armour & Company in 1875 handled no beef, no 
 mutton. They were pork packers only. In cool 
 
NEVER STAY BEATEN 205 
 
 weather they slaughtered, pickled, cured, and smoked 
 pork products. These they shipped all over the 
 world. When warm weather came once more they 
 shut down their packing houses. 
 
 This, by the way, was true packing. The modern 
 packer devotes only a part of his effort to packing. 
 Packing involves preserving meats so that they will 
 not spoil, at least not spoil easily. Hams, bacon, 
 corned beef, smoked tongue, smoked sausage, salt 
 pork, these are packed products. The dressed meat 
 business is in no sense packing, though the word has 
 come to include a great many nonpacking activities. 
 G. F. Swift was in the dressed-meat business from 
 1876, but except in a very incidental way he was not 
 a packer until 1887. 
 
 Morris & Company did no packing in 1875. It 
 dealt only in fresh beef, as locally around Chicago as 
 did Anthony, Swift & Company around Fall River. 
 For beef could not be shipped dressed, a minor quan- 
 tity always excepted which was salted and pickled 
 principally for export. 
 
 P. D. Armour and Nelson Morris were rich men 
 and older men than G. F. Swift. By the time they 
 realized he was not going to fail, he had such a head 
 start that they never overtook him. 
 
 From the time he had his refrigerator car lines 
 going, he was the largest slaughterer of beef. He 
 soon added mutton and was almost immediately at 
 the top on this score. When pork was added, in 1887, 
 he began dealing in huge quantities of fresh dressed 
 
206 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 pork — though it was a good many years before the 
 pork products business, the hams and bacons, and 
 the like, overtook that of his established competitors. 
 
 But even when the business was going well, he 
 had his periodical troubles. One of these was the 
 oleo oil patent suit. Father thought he had the rights 
 to make oleo oil. A patent-holder thought that he 
 had not. So the patent-holder brought suit for 
 infringement. 
 
 The head of our company was put in the situation 
 where he had to get that whole set of patents 
 adjudged open to the world, else his business would 
 have been liable for so much money that it could 
 not have survived. This patent suit made little im- 
 pression outside the packing industry. But every 
 packer knew it was a fight to the death. By the time 
 the decisions had been appealed and reappealed and 
 a final unreversible decision handed down, anyone 
 was at liberty to make oleo oil by any process he 
 cared to use. Once more his refusal to admit he was 
 beaten had won the day. For at the outset, if ever a 
 lawsuit looked hopeless this one did. 
 
 Another set of troubles — minor perhaps but none 
 the less obstinate — were those with the British dis- 
 tributors already referred to. They were willing to 
 handle American beef. But because it was not native 
 to the British Isles, their sound British instincts told 
 them it must be inferior. 
 
 So they cut the meat differently from the standard 
 way. This made it look inferior. Actually it was 
 
NEVER STAY BEATEN 207 
 
 up to the standard of the best British beef ever pro- 
 duced anywhere. Ours was fine, clean meat. It did 
 not take a cynic to have his reasonable doubts about 
 the cleanliness of a good deal of the British beef. 
 
 Father was forever turning up at Smithfield mar- 
 ket in the gray London dawn with his cheery insist- 
 ence on having his beef cut properly. Although Brit- 
 ish conservatism seemed a hopeless obstacle, in time 
 he wore it down — for he could not see the obstacle as 
 hopeless. 
 
 He went at it cheerfully, won his point as he 
 always did, and soon his beef was in demand as the 
 finest obtainable. Before long he had to open branch 
 houses all over Great Britain and Ireland to accom- 
 modate the trade. 
 
 He encountered a comparable task when he went 
 at the job of feeding Chicago-dressed beef to the hide- 
 bound, rockbound conservatives of New England 
 and New York. Eat meat dressed a thousand miles 
 away? No Yankee had ever been served a steak 
 which originated more than a few miles from the 
 stove that cooked it, no sir, not if he knew it! To 
 people accustomed to having a slaughterhouse just 
 outside the limits of every town, the very idea of 
 Chicago-dressed beef was repugnant. The meat was 
 actually fresher in condition if not in time. It had 
 been produced in cleanliness instead of in a filthy 
 small-town shambles. The cattle were in better con- 
 dition when slaughtered. But all this made little 
 difference. Prejudice is founded on feelings, not on 
 
208 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 knowledge. When one puts his mind to work on a 
 question, then prejudice cannot remain. 
 
 Father would not admit that a prejudice could 
 stop him. He wore down that Yankee prejudice — 
 mind you, he was doing this in the self-same weeks 
 when he was watching his smoke currents eddy 
 through embryonic chillers and refrigerator cars, on 
 the day before or the day after he was buying an 
 ice house with fifty thousand dollars which he confi- 
 dently expected to get from selling stock to a friend. 
 He was doing it between appointments at Brighton 
 and Boston where he would somehow borrow the 
 money to make up his losses on spoiled shipments. 
 How any man could carry so many activities and 
 perform them all so well has never been answered 
 to my satisfaction. Yet I was with him several hours 
 a day while he kept the equivalent of a fish-bowl, 
 a cannon ball, and a live rabbit in mid air. It was 
 uncanny. 
 
 His wide acquaintance in the live-stock and meat 
 trade of the East served him in getting distribution, 
 just as it served him in getting money. In fact, the 
 two often went hand in hand. He would sign up a 
 wholesale dealer to carry our dressed beef; then 
 before he got through he would sell that dealer a 
 small block of Swift stock. He got not only an outlet, 
 but along with it the sincere loyalty of a partner- 
 And he got the money he was needing so badly all 
 the while. In the course of a few years he and his 
 brother Edwin worked out several hundreds of these 
 
NEVER STAY BEATEN 209 
 
 partnership arrangements, usually with a Swift inter- 
 est in the distributing business as a double bond. 
 
 After the panic of 1893 had passed and money was 
 easy in the business, an idea began to develop tending 
 toward consolidation. The steel consolidations had 
 just been completed. Consolidation was in the air. 
 
 So father, J. O. Armour, and Edward Morris 
 formed the National Packing Company in 1902. It 
 was capitalized at fifteen million dollars. Its com- 
 ponents were a group of "small packers," the term 
 which includes all but the handful of very large 
 companies. The plan w^s to continue with the 
 merger, taking in the smaller of the large packers. 
 Then, when all of these were welded into one unit, 
 the National Packing Company would absorb the 
 "Big Three," Swift, Armour, and Morris. It was 
 an ambitious plan. 
 
 But public opinion was too strong against it. Per- 
 haps if father had lived, it might have gone through 
 — though I doubt it. He died early in 1903. As 
 public opinion rose against the enterprise, the terms 
 on which the bankers would finance the merger rose 
 at the same pace. Once the financing charges had 
 begun their climb, the plan died of its own weight. 
 Eventually by court order the National Packing 
 Company was dissolved, and the smaller companies 
 which composed it were returned to their previous 
 owners. 
 
 So father's last great business dream fell through 
 when he was no longer here to know it. 
 
210 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 Of all the major plans he had ever made, this alone 
 he failed to push through to successful, profitable 
 completion. 
 
 Can there be a more forceful, compact way of 
 summing up G. F. Swift's record? 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 Albany, N. Y. 6, 8, 59, 127 
 
 Alterations avoided 13 
 
 Anderson refrigerator patents 
 
 and cars 189, 198 
 
 Anthony, D. M. 10, 78, 126, 
 
 128, 179, 201 
 Anthony, Swift & Co. 10, 78, 
 
 126, 176,178, 188, 205 
 Armour & Co. 204-205, 209 
 
 Armour, J. Ogden 209 
 
 Armour, Philip D. 92, 204-205 
 
 Assonet, Mass. 107, 127, 176, 
 
 178, 186 
 Auditor, Swift as 99 
 
 B 
 
 Back-of -Yards widows 
 Bankruptcy, rumors of 
 
 Barnstable, Mass. 
 Bateman 
 Beacon Hill 
 Beardstown, 111. 
 Beaten, never stay 
 Beef bags and tags 
 Beef coolers 
 "Big Three" 
 Bigelow carpets 
 Blankets, horse 
 Blood 
 
 Board of Trade 
 Borrowing 
 
 from employees 
 Bosses kept at work 
 Boston 
 Bran mash 
 
 74, 
 
 101 
 
 35-36 
 
 123-124 
 
 16-17 
 
 47 
 
 138-139 
 
 193 
 
 101 
 
 9, 57, 72, 195-200 
 
 209 
 
 50 
 
 63 
 
 11, 176 
 
 36,37 
 
 29 
 
 32 
 
 15 
 
 6, 120, 122, 125, 155 
 
 62,63 
 
 Brighton, Mass. 6, 59, 74, 90, 
 
 122-124, 126-128, 180, 194 
 British market 63, 91, 206 
 
 Bruise-trimming 47, 48 
 
 Bubbly Creek 3-5 
 
 Buffalo, N.Y. 6,8,127 
 
 Buggy, horse and 83 
 
 Bullock, splitting 59 
 
 Bureau of Animal Industry 7 
 
 By-products utilization 4, 10-12, 131 
 
 Cape Cod iv, 5, 7, 8, 11, 49, 
 
 51-52, 74, 119-124, 190 
 Capital 
 
 stock increased 27 
 
 Swift's first 25 
 
 Carfare for boy 100 
 
 Cars, freight 
 see Freight 
 Carton, L. A. 44, 154, 203 
 
 Casings 10, 98 
 
 Character, we want 168 
 
 Chase refrigerator patents and 
 
 cars 197, 199-200 
 
 Cheating punished 97 
 
 Chicago 
 
 in the 1870s v, 6, 11, 127-128 
 
 in the 1880s 3 
 
 in the I890S 3 
 
 packers 11,37-38 
 
 stockyards v, 5, 25-26, 29, 153, 204 
 plant 17, 56, 59, i°4, 145-146 
 
 Swift comes to 6,25,127,178 
 
 Chicago Board of Trade 36, 37 
 
 Chicago Junction Railway 182 
 
 213 
 
214 
 
 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 Chicago Union Station 
 
 11S 
 
 Chicago World's Fair 
 
 39-40 
 
 Chilling meat 
 
 191, 198 
 
 Chuck beef 
 
 57 
 
 Church, interest in 
 
 46, 62 
 
 Claims examined 
 
 19, 160 
 
 Clark Street 
 
 114 
 
 Cleanliness 
 
 47,54 
 
 Cleveland, President Grove: 
 
 c 183 
 
 Cleveland, Ohio 72-73 
 
 , 139-140 
 
 Clinton, Mass. 49-52, 78, 
 
 in, 
 
 125-127: 
 
 , 186, 188 
 
 Coachman steals 
 
 170 
 
 Compliments 
 
 165 
 
 Conference, use of 
 
 107 
 
 Coolers kept attractive 
 
 57 
 
 Cooling beef 
 
 191, 196 
 
 Covering wagons 
 
 18 
 
 Credit maintained 
 
 28 
 
 Cross examination 
 
 i47, 174 
 
 Crotch fat 
 
 56 
 
 Crowell, Grandfather 
 
 121 
 
 Crowell, Paul 
 
 121-122 
 
 Cure formula 
 
 104 
 
 Customers 
 
 
 partnerships 
 
 80-81 
 
 stock sold to 81 
 
 , 173, 208 
 
 Cutting beef 
 
 57 
 
 Cut to sell 
 
 75 
 
 D 
 
 
 Decisions 
 
 129 
 
 Defeat not admitted 
 
 157, 193 
 
 Detroit 
 
 188-189 
 
 Disciplinarian, Swift as 
 
 163 
 
 Dishonest employees 
 
 168, 170 
 
 Displaying meats 
 
 50, 51, 75 
 
 Donovan, John 
 
 166 
 
 Doud, Levi B. 
 
 42-43 
 
 "Down in Mobile" 
 
 164 
 
 Drainage, roof 
 
 138 
 
 "Dummy-train" 
 
 84-85 
 
 Duty first 
 
 Eastham, Mass. 123 
 
 East St. Louis plant 16-17, 
 
 47-48, 132, 151-152 
 Ellis Avenue no 
 
 Ellis, E.W. 121 
 
 Emerald Avenue no 
 
 Failure refuted 
 
 36 
 
 Fall River, Mass. 10, 
 
 126-127, 
 
 131, 178-179, 186, 
 
 188, 195, 205 
 
 Father starts Swift 
 
 120 
 
 Faults, men's, corrected 
 
 144 
 
 Feet, beef 
 
 10 
 
 Filing 
 
 86-87 
 
 Financing 
 
 27, 201 
 
 Fink, Albert 
 
 184 
 
 Fire in packing house 
 
 89 
 
 Fitchburg, Mass. 
 
 70-71 
 
 Fitzgerald, Richard 
 
 182 
 
 Foremen visit Swift 
 
 97, no, 147 
 
 Formula, pork cure 
 
 104 
 
 Fort Sheridan, 111. 
 
 183 
 
 Foster, A. C. 
 
 90 
 
 Freight 
 
 
 cars rented 
 
 188 
 
 rates 
 
 9,i83 
 
 saving in 
 
 8, 24, 26, 128 
 
 Frogs' legs 
 
 133 
 
 Fruit cars 
 
 187 
 
 G 
 
 
 Glue 
 
 38 
 
 Goodspeed, Thomas W. 
 
 121 
 
 Grandfather sells hens 
 
 119 
 
 Grand Pacific Hotel 
 
 114 
 
 Grand Trunk Railroad 178, 
 
 184-185, 187 
 Great Britain 63-64, 91, 206-207 
 
 Great Plains 6 
 
INDEX 
 
 215 
 
 H 
 
 Halloway 
 
 77 
 
 Lancaster ginghams 
 
 5o-5i 
 
 Hammond, G. H. 
 
 186 
 
 Lard 
 
 161 
 
 patent suit brought by- 
 
 189-190 
 
 compound 
 
 161 
 
 Handling men 
 
 140 
 
 refinery 
 
 178 
 
 Hathaway & Swift 
 
 25, 78, 
 
 Lawrence, Mass. 
 
 67 
 
 117-118, 
 
 126, 137, 179 
 
 Leadership secured 
 
 130 
 
 Hathaway, James A. 
 
 25, "7- 
 
 Leavitt, Calvin, & Son 
 
 128 
 
 118, 126, 128, 
 
 179-180, 200 
 
 Leavitt, Wellington 
 
 90, 128 
 
 Heads, beef 
 
 10 
 
 Lincoln, I. M. 
 
 188 
 
 Hearts, beef 
 
 10 
 
 Liverpool 
 
 154 
 
 Hides 
 
 7, 10, 38 
 
 Livers, beef 
 
 10- 1 1 
 
 Higgins, Annie Maria 
 
 
 Live Stock Exchange 
 
 
 (Mrs. G. F. Swift) 
 
 123 
 
 Building 
 
 113, 143 
 
 Hoboken 
 
 197 
 
 Location studied 
 
 133 
 
 Hogs 5-7, 60-61, 
 
 98, 122, 
 
 London 
 
 64, 91, 207 
 
 
 163-164, 166 
 
 Longhorns, Texas 
 
 6, 72, 131 
 
 Honesty 
 
 168 
 
 Lowe & Sons 
 
 70-71 
 
 Horse 
 
 
 Lowell, Mass. 
 
 67-68, 188 
 
 and buggy 
 
 83 
 
 
 
 blankets 
 
 63 
 
 M 
 
 
 Horses 
 
 see Swift, C. F., horses 
 
 
 Managers 
 
 
 Ice, ice-houses, and icing 33, 
 
 138-141, 170-171, 191, 196, 200-201 
 
 Incorporation 
 Injunction, car patents 
 Instructions made clear 
 Interstate Commerce Act 
 Interstate Commerce 
 
 Commission 
 Inventory reduced 
 Ireland 
 
 J 
 
 Jewett, Francis 
 Judge of men, Swift as 
 
 K 
 
 27, 80 
 
 189 
 
 156 
 
 9, 184-185 
 
 191 
 38 
 
 207 
 
 188 
 158 
 
 Kansas City plant 47-48, 54-55, 
 99, 103-104, 114, 131-132, 148-149 
 
 must sell 65 
 
 trained 21 
 
 visit Swift 97, no, 147 
 
 McKinley, President William B. 86 
 McMillen family 188 
 
 Meat carts 51-52,121,174 
 
 Meats 
 
 fresh 7-9, 18, 49-52, 65-81 
 
 shipment of 8-9, 24, 130-131, 
 
 183-192, 195, 205-208 
 pickled and smoked 38, 103-106 
 Mechanics a luxury 13 
 
 Men 
 
 handling 140 
 
 training 140, 146, 159 
 
 Michigan Avenue 36 
 
 Michigan Car Co. 188 
 
 Michigan Central Railroad 182 
 
 Midway 40 
 
2l6 
 
 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 Milwaukee 92 
 
 Mistakes not allowed 162 
 
 Moore, Billy 178,186 
 
 Morris & Co. 38, 205, 209 
 
 Morris, Edward 209 
 
 Morris, Nelson 92, 204-205 
 
 Mutton 131, 205 
 
 N 
 
 Napoleon iv 
 
 National Livestock Bank 42-43 
 
 National Packing Co. 209-210 
 
 Neat's foot oil 10 
 
 Negroes, whistling stopped 163 
 
 "Never admit you're beat !" 193 
 New York City 66-67, 184 
 
 "No dead lines" 112 
 
 Notes widely held 43 
 
 O 
 
 Ogden, Utah 80 
 
 Oleomargarine 11 
 
 Oleo oil 19-20, 47-48, 206 
 
 Omaha 62, 99-100, 104, 132 
 
 Outside men, hiring 149 
 
 Overcoat, foreman wears 54 
 
 East St. Louis 16-17,47-48, 
 
 132, 151-1S2 
 Kansas City 47"48, 54-55, 
 
 99, 103-104, 114, 132, 148-149 
 South Omaha 62-63, 
 
 99-100, 104, 132 
 South St. Paul 104, 134-135 
 
 St. Joseph 14-15, 60, 104, 
 
 132-134, 148-153, 166 
 Pocket note book incident 148 
 
 Pony, small 58 
 
 Pope 126 
 
 Poultry, dealing in 156 
 
 Pork 131, 204-206 
 
 cures 103-106 
 
 Praise, sparing use of 115, 165 
 
 Pratt, T. L. 166, 167 
 
 Prejudice against western 
 
 beef 69, 206 
 
 Premium brand 106 
 
 Providence, R. I. 50, 188 
 
 Pullman 
 
 company 181 
 
 strike 181-183 
 
 Q 
 
 Questions, Swift asks 
 
 97 
 
 Packing, true 205 
 
 Paint 63 
 
 Panic of 1893 28-45, 87-88, 202-204 
 
 Partnership dissolved 179 
 
 Partnerships 80 
 Patents 
 
 car 189 
 
 litigation settled 190 
 
 oleo 206 
 
 Personal habits of employees 171 
 
 Pig buying 122 
 
 Piper, A. S. 33-35 
 Plant 
 
 Chicago 17, 56, 59, 104, 145-146 
 
 Raise refused 142, 204 
 
 Rank and file 159 
 
 Rates, freight 183 
 
 Refrigeration in 1869 50 
 
 Refrigerator cars 9, 27, 62, 
 
 130-131, 185-192, 195-201, 205 
 
 Reports, use of 102 
 
 Ribs 57 
 
 Rotterdam 47 
 
 Runaway horse 113 
 
 Sal soda 
 Salaries, small 
 
 54 
 112 
 
INDEX 
 
 217 
 
 Sandusky, O. 140 
 
 Sandwich, Mass. 72 
 
 San Francisco 78-79, 156-157 
 
 Sarcasm used 53, 160, 173 
 
 Sawyer, John 201 
 
 Scraping hogs 60, 166 
 
 Self-reliance 94 
 
 Sell hardest first 72 
 
 "Sets," beef 10-11 
 
 Sewer wastes 4, 20 
 
 Shin-bones 11 
 
 Shortages 65 
 
 Singing stopped 164 
 
 Sioux City, la. 135-136 
 
 Slaughterhouses, local 7 
 
 Smithfield Market 64, 91, 207 
 
 South Boston 47 
 
 Statement to banks 41 
 
 "Stave's Wild West scheme" 190 
 
 Stealing 168, 170 
 
 Steamship dispute 95 
 
 Stock 
 
 capital 27-28 
 
 first issue 28 
 
 issue of 1892 203 
 
 sold 27, 81, 172-173, 203, 208 
 
 to customers 81, 173, 208 
 
 to employees 172 
 
 St. Joseph plant 14-15, 60, 104, 
 
 132-134, 148-153, 166 
 St. Paul plant 104, 134-135 
 
 Strike 
 
 of 1884 IIO-III 
 
 Pullman 181-183 
 
 Superintendents visit Swift no 
 
 Swift & Co. 
 
 Chicago plant 17, 56, 59, 
 
 104, 145-146 
 Cleveland branch house 
 
 72-73, 139-140 
 eastern financial 
 
 connections 28-29, 43 _ 44, 208 
 
 East St. Louis plant 16-17, 
 
 47-48, 132, 151-152 
 incorporation and 
 
 capitalization 27-28,45, 
 
 80, 137, 202-203 
 Kansas City plant 47-48,54-55, 
 
 99, 103-104, 114, 132, 148-149 
 loan from Morris & Co. 38 
 
 Missouri River plants 28 
 
 rumors of bankruptcy 35-36 
 
 South Omaha plant 62-63, 
 
 99-100, 104, 132 
 South St. Paul plant 104, 134-135 
 St. Joseph plant 14-15, 
 
 60, 104, 132-134, 148-153, 166 
 Swift & Company, G. F. 80 
 
 Swift Brothers 80 
 
 Swift, Edwin C. 67, 78-81, 
 
 99, 126, 208 
 Swift, Gustavus Franklin 
 
 at Chicago plant 17-18, 
 
 59-61, 141-147 
 at Cleveland 72, 139-140 
 
 at Fitchburg, Mass. 70-71 
 
 at Kansas City 47"48, 54*55, 99 
 at London 64, 91, 207 
 
 at Omaha 62-63, 99-100 
 
 at St. Joseph, Mo. 14-15 
 
 at St. Louis, Mo. and East 
 
 St. Louis, 111. 16-17,77 
 
 buying live stock 58-59, 121-128 
 by-products development 4, 
 
 10, 12, 131 
 church 62 
 
 correspondence 86-87 
 
 early slaughtering at 
 
 Chicago 8, 10, 26, 128-129 
 
 early years on Cape Cod 25, 
 
 49, 72, 119-124 
 encourages stock ownership 
 
 by employees 172-173 
 
 by customers 81,173,208 
 
218 
 
 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS 
 
 Swift, Gustavus Franklin 
 
 (Continued) 
 financing 24-25,87-88 
 
 horses 58, 62-63, 83-85, 
 
 94-95, 100, 112-114, 196 
 insists on cleanliness 48-56 
 
 insists on dressing animals 
 
 carefully 54-55, 57, 59-61 
 
 New England and Albany 
 
 until 1875 25,49-52, 
 
 74-75,125-127 
 personal appearance 3, 29, 193 
 
 photographs of Frontispiece, 132 
 refrigeration and refrigerator 
 
 cars 9,27,50,57,62,107, 
 130-131, 185-192, 195-201, 205 
 sarcasm 53"54, i73"i74 
 
 selling 9, 63-81, 91, 109-110 
 
 starting at Chicago 26, 
 
 128-129, 136-137, 142-143 
 starts at 14 7 
 
 steamship rate arbitration 95-96 
 teacher 21, 58, 140, 146, 167 
 
 tendency to business 
 
 expansion 24-30,44-45,117-137 
 
 warring on waste 
 
 3-13, 
 18-21,56-57 
 90 
 
 Swift, Louis F. 
 Swift, Mrs. Gustavus 
 
 Franklin 91, 123, 170 
 
 Swift, Nathaniel 53, 123 
 
 Swift, Noble 119 
 
 Swift, Sally Sears Crowell 
 
 (mother of G. F. Swift) 120 
 
 Swift, William (brother of 
 
 G. F. Swift) 70-71 
 
 Swift, William (father of 
 
 G. F. Swift) 120 
 
 Swift's Market, Clinton, Mass. 
 
 49-52, 74-75, 78, in 
 
 Tallying beef 
 
 19 
 
 Tankage 
 
 11 
 
 Teacher, Swift as 
 
 21, 58, 
 
 
 140, 146, 167 
 
 Tiffany refrigerator patents 
 
 and cars 
 
 189 
 
 Time saving 
 
 182 
 
 Titles 
 
 116 
 
 Tongues, beef 
 
 10 
 
 Trade wars 
 
 12 
 
 Training 
 
 
 managers 
 
 21-22 
 
 men 
 
 140, 146, 182 
 
 Tripe 
 
 10 
 
 keg 
 
 56 
 
 Trunk Line Association 
 
 184 
 
 U 
 
 
 United States Steel Corporation 5 
 
 University of Chicago 
 
 121 
 
 W 
 
 
 Waller, 0. W. 
 
 150-153 
 
 Waste 
 
 4,20 
 
 Watchman challenges S 
 
 wift 16-17 
 
 Weight tickets, loans on 
 
 42 
 
 Widows, work for 
 
 101 
 
 Wickes refrigerator patents 
 
 and cars 
 
 189, 198 
 
 Wool 
 
 38 
 
 Worcester, Mass. 
 
 5o 
 
 Yards 
 
 see Chicago, stockyards 
 Yardstick, the forbidden 
 
 158 
 
 Zimmerman refrigerator patents 
 
 and cars 189, 197, 199-200 
 
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 
 B.S9772S C004 
 
 THE YANKEE OF THE YARDS LOND 
 
 12 025409449