Part 19

id: "I supply you with regularity and I give you quality at a price more advantageous to you than your local butcher can command. My profit lies in that which has always been thrown away. As for sanitation, go visit your village slaughter-house and then come and see the way I do it!" Upton Sinclair scored two big points on Packingtown and its Boss Ogre. They were these: First, the Ogre hired men and paid them to kill animals. Second, these dead animals were distributed by the Ogre and his minions and the corpses eaten by men, women and children. It was a revolting revelation. It even shook the nerves of a President, one of the killingest men in the world, who, not finding enough things to kill in America, went to Africa to kill things. "You live on the dead," said the Eastern pundit, reproachfully, out of his yellow turban, to the American who had just ordered a ham-sandwich. "And you eat the living," replied the American, as he handed a little hand-microscope to the pundit and asked him to focus it upon his dinner of dried figs. The pundit looked at the figs through the glass, and behold, they were covered with crawling, wiggling, wriggling, living life! And then did the man from the East throw the microscope out of the window, and say, "Now there are no bugs on these figs!" That which we behold too closely is apt to be repulsive. Fix your vision upon any of the various functions of life and the whole thing becomes disgusting, especially so if we contemplate the details of existence in others. Personally, of course, we, ourselves, in thought and action are sweet and wholesome--but the others, oh, ah, bah, phew, ouch, or words to that effect! Armour's remark about the village slaughter-house was getting close home. If bad meat was ever put out, it was from these secret places, managed by one or two men who did things in their own sweet way. Their work was not inspected. They themselves were the sole judges. There were not even employees to see and blackmail them if they failed to walk the chalk-line. They bought up cattle, drove them in at night and killed them. No effort was made to utilize the blood or offal and this putrefying mass advertised itself for miles. Savage dogs and slaughter-houses go together, as all villagers know, and there were various good reasons why visitors didn't go to see the local butcher perform his pleasing obligations. The first slaughter-houses in Chicago were just like those in any village. They supplied the local market. At first the offal was simply flung out in a pile. Then, when neighbors complained, holes were dug in the prairie and the by-product buried. About Eighteen Hundred Eighty-two, a decided change in methods occurred. The first thing done was to dry the blood, bones and meat-scrap, and sell this for fertilizer. Next came the scientific treatment of the waste for glues and other products. Chemists were given a hearing, patient and most courteous. One day Armour beckoned C. H. MacDowell into his private office and said, "I say, Mac, if a man calls who looks like a genius or a fool, wearing long hair, whiskers and spectacles, treat him gently--he's a German and may have something in his head besides dandruff." MacDowell is one of the Big Boys at Armour's. He was a stenographer, like my old Bryant and Stratton chum, Cortelyou, and in fact is very much such a man as Cortelyou. "Mac" is the head of the Armour Fertilizer Works and is distressed because he can't utilize the squeal--so much energy evaporating. It is his business to capitalize waste. It was the joke of the place that if a German chemist arrived, all business was paralyzed until his secret was seized. Jena, Gottingen and Heidelberg became names to conjure with. Buttons were made from bones, glue from feet, combs and ornaments from horns, curled hair from tails, felt from wool, hair was cured for plaster, and the Armour Fertilizer Works slowly became grounded and founded on a scientific basis, where reliable advice as to growing cotton, rice, yams, potatoes, roses or violets could be had. "Meat" is the farmer's product. This meat is consumed by the people. One-half of our population are farmers, and all farmers raise cattle, sheep, poultry and hogs. Trade follows the line of least resistance; and the natural thing is for the local butcher to slaughter, and supply his neighborhood. There is only one reason why the people in East Aurora should buy meat of Armour, as they occasionally do, and that is because Armour supplies better meat at a lower price than we can produce it. If Armour is higher in price than our local butcher, we buy of the local man. The local butcher fixes the price, not Armour, and the local farmer fixes the price for the local butcher. Armour always and forever has to face this local competition. "I am in partnership with the farmer," Philip Armour used to say. "Their interests are mine and their confidence and good-will I must merit, or over goes my calabash." The success of capital lies in ministering to the people, not in taking advantage of them. And every successful business house is built on the bed-rock of reciprocity, mutuality and co-operation. That legal Latin maxim, "Let the buyer beware," is a legal fiction. It should read, "Let the seller beware," for he who is intent on selling the people a different article from what they want, or at a price beyond its value, will stay in trade about as long as that famous snowball will last in Biloxi. * * * * * Besides being father of the Packing-House industry, Philip D. Armour was a manufacturer of and a dealer in Portable Wisdom. His teeming brain took in raw suggestions and threw off the completed product in the form of epigrams, phrases, orphics, symbols. To have caught these crumbs of truth that fell from the rich man's table might have placed many a penny-a-liner beyond the reach of mental avarice. One man, indeed, swept up the crumbs into a book that is not half crumby. The man is George Horace Lorimer, and his book is called, "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son." Lorimer was a department-manager for Armour and busied himself, it seems, a good deal of the time, in taking down disjecta, or the by-product of business. Armour was always sincere, but seldom serious. There is a lot of quiet fun yet among the Armour folks. When the Big Boys dine daily together, they always pass the persiflage. Lorimer showed me a bushel of notes--with which he proposes some day to Boswellize his former Chief. Incidentally, he requested me never to mention it, but secrets being to give away, I state the fact here, in order to help along a virtuous and hard-working young man, the son of the Reverend Doctor George C. Lorimer, a worthy Baptist preacher. "Keep at it--do not be discouraged, Melville--a preacher's son is usually an improvement on the sire," said Philip D. Armour to Melville Stone, who was born at Hudson, McLean County, Illinois, the son of a Presiding Elder. "I'm not worrying," replied the genealogical Stone. "You and I were both born in log houses, which puts us straight in line for the Presidency." "Right you are, Melville, for a log house is built on the earth, and not in the clouds." Then this came to Armour, and he could not resist the temptation to fire it: "Boys, all buildings that really endure are built from the ground up, never from the clouds down." No living man ever handed out more gratuitous advice than Philip Armour. He was the greatest preacher in Chicago. With every transaction, he passed out a premium in way of palaver. He loved the bustle of business, but into the business he butted a lot of talk--helpful, good-natured, kindly, paternal talk, and often there was a suspicion that he talked for the same reason that prizefighters spar for time. "Here, Robbins, get off this telegram, and remember that if the rolling stone gathers no moss, it at least acquires a bit of polish." "Say, Urion, if you make a success as my lawyer you have got to get into the rings of Orion; be there yourself, the same as the man that's to be hanged. You can't send a substitute." To Comes--now Secretary of Armour and Company--"I suppose if I told you to jump into the lake you'd do it. Use your head, young man--use your skypiece!" And he did. This preaching habit was never pedantic, stiff or formal--it gushed out as the waters gushed forth from the rock after Moses had given it a few stiff raps with his staff. Armour called people by their first names as if they all belonged to his family, as they really did, for all mankind to him were one. He thought in millions, where other big men thought in hundreds of thousands, or average men thought in dozens. "Hiram," he once said to the Reverend Hiram W. Thomas--for when he met you, you imagined he had been looking for you to tell you something--"Hiram, I like to hear you preach, for you are so deliberate that as you speak I am laying bets with myself as to which of a dozen things you are going to say. You supply me lots of fun. I can travel around the world before you get to your firstly." For all preachers he had a great attraction, and it wasn't solely because he was a rich man. He supplied texts, and he supplied voltage. Most men put on a pious manner and become hypocritically proper when a preacher joins a group, but not so Philip Armour. If he used a strong word, or a simile uncurried, it was then. They liked it. "Mr. Armour, you might use a little of your language for fertilizer, if times were hard," once said Robert Collyer. He answered, "Robert, I'm fertilizing a few of your fallow acres now, as any one who goes to hear you preach next Sunday will find out, if they know me." A committee of four preachers once came to him from a country town a few miles out of Chicago, asking him to pay off the debt on their churches. It seems they had heard of the Armour benevolence and decided to beard the lion in his den. He listened to the plea, and then figured up on a pad the amount of the debt. It was fifteen hundred dollars. The preachers were encouraged--they had the ejaculation, "God bless you!" on tap, when Mr. Armour said: "Gentlemen, four churches in a town the size of yours are too many. Now, if you will consolidate and three of you will resign and go to farming, I'll pay off this debt now." The offer was not accepted. When Armour was asked to subscribe one thousand dollars to a fund to provide an auditorium and keep Professor Swing in Chicago, Swing having just been tried for heresy, he said: "Chicago must not lose Swing--we need him. If I had a few of his qualities, and he had a few of mine, there would be two better men in Chicago today. Yes, we must keep Swing right here. Put me down for a thousand. I don't always understand what Swing is driving at, but that may be my fault. And say, if you find you need five thousand from me, just let me know, and the money is yours." There is no use trying to work the apotheosis of Philip D. Armour: he was in good sooth a man. "I make mistakes--but I do not respond to encores," he used to say. When a man told of spending five thousand dollars on the education of his son, Armour condoled with him thus: "Oh, never mind, he'll come out all right--my education is costing me that much every week." One of the Big Boys at Armour's is a character called "Alibi Tom." Time has tamed Alibi, but when he was twenty-two--well, he was twenty-two. Now Philip Armour was an early riser, and at seven o'clock he used to be at the office ready for business, the office opening at eight. Sometimes he would come even earlier, and if he saw a clerk at work before eight, he might, under the inspiring spell of the brisk early-morning walk, step over and give the fellow a five-dollar bill.