(Excerpt from The Yankee of the Yards: The Biography of Gu...)
Excerpt from The Yankee of the Yards: The Biography of Gustavus Franklin Swift Heer 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Gustavus Franklin Swift was born on June 24, 1839 in Sagamore, Massachusetts. Through his father he was descended from William Swift (or Swyft) who settled at Sandwich on Cape Cod in 1637, and through his mother, from Elder William Brewster of the Mayflower.
Gustavus Swift attended the common school and at fourteen went to work for his brother, the village butcher.
At sixteen, Gustavus Swift made his first independent venture, buying a heifer which he slaughtered himself, and peddling the dressed meat from door to door. Before he was twenty he had begun to journey once a week to the cattle market at Brighton, where each time he bought and killed a steer, returning to Cape Cod and peddling his meat before the next market day.
In 1859-60 he opened his first butcher shop, at Eastham, Massachussets; this shop he soon turned over to a brother, establishing another in Barnstable.
In 1872 James A. Hathaway, a Boston meat dealer, took him into partnership to do the buying for the firm, and Swift, following the cattle market westward toward the source of supply, established his headquarters successively at Albany, at Buffalo, and in 1875 at Chicago.
He subsequently opened meat markets in Clinton and Freetown, and from these centers sent meat wagons out daily over regular routes, thus serving a considerable territory. Meanwhile he had acquired a reputation as a shrewd judge of beef cattle and had built up a thriving business as a cattle dealer.
At that time, beef consumed in the East was still shipped in the form of live cattle and slaughtered locally. The cost of feeding stock in transit, loss of condition from overcrowding, and the fact that freight was paid on the entire animal whereas some parts were considered unsalable made the process unduly wasteful, in Swift's estimation, and he determined to ship dressed beef. He sent his first carload to Boston in the late fall of 1877.
His partner James A. Hathaway, afraid of the new project, dissolved the partnership, but Swift persisted in his efforts. Successful winter shipments of dressed beef had been made previously, but attempts at refrigeration for warm-weather shipment had not met with great success, and to Swift is largely due credit for the practical development of the refrigerator car.
The engineer he employed designed a car in which there was a circulation of fresh air, chilled by passing over ice. This arrangement proved satisfactory, and an essential step toward a revolution in the meat industry of the world had been accomplished.
The problem of refrigeration was only one of those confronting the Western packers, however. The Eastern consumers had to be convinced of the quality of Chicago beef; the railroads, enjoying revenue derived from carrying livestock, fought the change by excessive charges on shipments of dressed meat; the Eastern butchers resented the competition.
Swift, with his intimate knowledge of the meat trade in New England, introduced his product and won cooperation by forming a series of partnerships with local butchers.
For the transportation of his beef he negotiated with the Grand Trunk Railway, which, having carried few cattle, had no stockyards to be maintained along its route. His refrigerator cars, however, he was forced to build at his own expense. When Swift went to Chicago, Nelson Morris and Philip D. Armour were both established packers, and competition was keen.
In the effort to cut costs, waste was eliminated wherever possible. Because cleanliness reduced loss through spoilage, Swift insisted on scrupulous cleanliness in his plant. He was a pioneer in the development of by-products from parts of the animal formerly thrown away--oleomargarine, glue, soap, fertilizer, and eventually pharmaceutical preparations.
He put all his profits and all the money he could borrow into the expansion of his business, which in 1885 was incorporated as Swift & Company with a capital of $300, 000, twenty months later was capitalized at $3, 000, 000, and before his death, at $25, 000, 000.
In his endeavor to secure a place for American beef in the British market, he himself made a number of trips across the Atlantic, and his hard-won success in Great Britain was followed by the establishment of distributing houses in Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Hongkong, Manila, Singapore, and Honolulu.
Additional packing plants were established in the newer cattle centers--St. Louis, Kansas City, St. Joseph, Omaha, St. Paul, and Fort Worth.
In 1902, with J. O. Armour and Edward Morris he formed the National Packing Company, a combination subsequently dissolved by court order.
He had a gift for training men; most of his executives, including his own sons, were brought up from the ranks. About 1900 he began to encourage his employees to buy stock in the concern. His attention was devoted almost entirely to his business until the last decade of his life, when his philanthropies began.
He died in his sixty-fourth year, of an internal hemorrhage following an operation. He and his family are interred in a mausoleum in Mount Hope Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois.
Gustavus Swift founded a meat-packing empire in the Midwest during the late nineteenth century, over which he presided until his death. He is credited with the development of the first practical ice-cooled railroad car, which allowed his company to ship dressed meats to all parts of the country and abroad, ushering in the "era of cheap beef. " Swift pioneered the use of animal by-products for the manufacture of soap, glue, fertilizer, various types of sundries, and even medical products. Swift donated large sums of money to such institutions as the University of Chicago, the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). Gustavus Swift established Northwestern University's "School of Oratory" in memory of his daughter, Annie May Swift, who died while a student there. When he died in 1903, his company was valued at between US$125 million and $135 million, and had a workforce that was more than 21, 000 strong. "The House of Swift" slaughtered as many as two million cattle, four million hogs, and two million sheep a year. Three years after his death, the value of the company's capital stock topped $250 million.
(Excerpt from The Yankee of the Yards: The Biography of Gu...)
Gustavus Swift was one of the founders and chief supporters of St. James Methodist Episcopal Church, Chicago, and a liberal donor to the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the Y. M. C. A. , and other causes.
Gustavus Swift had a reputation of an energetic and ambitious person. Also, thrifty, industrious, rigidly honest, Swift was rigorous in his requirements both of himself and of his employees. He was unsparing in criticism, rarely gave praise, but was quick to recognize merit by promotion.
On January 3, 1861, Gustavus Swift married Annie Maria Higgins, who with nine of their eleven children survived him.
