The Yankee of the Yards: The Biography of Gustavus Franklin Swift (Classic Reprint)
(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.
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Louis Franklin Swift was an American meat packer. He was a head of the Swift & Company, which was the largest meat-packing empire in the United States at this time and was known as one of the first companies to build air conditioned office buildings at their company's headquarters at the Chicago stockyards.
Background
Louis Franklin Swift was born on September 27, 1861 in Sagamore, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and was a descendant some of the first American who landed from the Mayflower. He was the oldest of eleven children of Gustavus Franklin Swift, founder of the packing firm of Swift & Company, and Annie Maria (Higgins) Swift. At the age of 9 or 10, he used to help his father with the family business by holding a lantern for him. The family moved to Chicago in 1875 and there the packing business was begun.
Education
As a boy, Louis Swift moved with his family to various towns, including Albany and Buffalo, and at the age of fourteen finally arrived in Chicago, where he completed his formal education in the Graham Grammar School and Englewood High School.
Career
The elder Swift from the start trained his sons in the family business. Louis first helped his father dress a steer carcass at the age of nine. His first job in the Chicago stockyards was to learn the art of efficient cattle buying. Later he became proficient in the operations of the pork department and directed it while his brothers Edward and Charles had charge of the cattle and lamb divisions of the business.
When Swift & Company was incorporated in 1885, Louis Swift was one of the incorporators. He served as treasurer until 1895, when he became vice-president.
In 1903 it had $25, 000, 000 of capital stock, $5, 200, 000 of accumulated earnings, and annual sales of $200, 000, 000. By 1918, due to war expansion needs, capital stock had been increased to $150, 000, 000.
Besides Louis, six of the sons of Gustavus F. Swift became active in the company.
In 1902 the Swift company had joined with two other leading meat packers, Armour & Company and Nelson Morris & Company, in organizing the National Packing Company, but this combination quickly drew the fire of federal antitrust prosecutors and was eventually dissolved.
Suspicions that a "Beef Trust" still functioned, however, led President Wilson to order a Federal Trade Commission investigation in 1917, and the commission's six-volume report found "conclusive evidence" of monopoly.
A new action ended in a consent decree (signed early in 1920) by which Swift, Armour, and Morris, along with Cudahy, Wilson, and other smaller concerns, agreed to dispose of their holdings in public stockyards, stockyard railways and terminals, market newspapers, and public cold-storage warehouses, and forever to dissociate themselves from the retail meat business and all "unrelated lines. "
Following his retirement he spent much time in travel and at his California home in Santa Barbara. He died of a heart ailment in a Chicago hospital and was buried in the family mausoleum in the Lake Forest Cemetery.
Achievements
On his father's death in 1903, Swift became president of Swift & Company, and during the twenty-eight years of his administration it enjoyed its greatest period of growth. During this time he pioneered in the development of various uses for the company's by-products, which contributed greatly to increasing its productive efficiency. He also directed much of the promotion of the new lines of dairy and poultry products, added to meet the demands of branch houses and other outlets for a full line of food products and to ensure the more efficient use of the company's fleet of refrigerator cars.
Under his remarkable leadership, the Swift & Company grew to be one of the world's greatest food processing and distributing businesses. By 1931, when "L. F. ," as he was always referred to by his friends and associates, retired from the presidency, annual sales exceeded $700, 000, 000, and there were 55, 000 employees, 43 meat packing plants, 114 dairy and poultry plants, 400 branch houses, and many other units.
Swift also pioneered in many employee-welfare activities, including, as early as 1907, an Employees Benefit Association to provide low-cost sickness, accident, and death benefits and, in 1916, a pension plan entirely financed by the company. He 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). His philanthropies were many and considerable, but in keeping with his rather reserved attitude in personal affairs they were mostly anonymous.
An able executive, trained by his father to pay close attention to detail, Swift never visited a city where one of the company's branch offices was located without making a first-hand inspection and offering constructive suggestions.
Swift believed in being accessible to his employees and accordingly conducted a considerable part of his activities at a large, high desk, at which one stood to work, placed outside his private office.
Personality
It is known that Swift had always been naturally gregarious and interested in people. In personal appearance Swift was of large stature and athletically inclined.
Interests
Swift was a lover of all outdoor sports. His special hobby was the growing of flowers in the conservatories of his estate, Westleigh, at Lake Forest, Illinois.
Connections
On September 9, 1880, Louis Franklin Swift married Ida May Butler of Chicago. Their children were Nathan Butler, Bessie E. , Alden Brackett, Idamay, Louis Franklin, and William Elliott.
