Philip Danforth Armour
Encyclopedia
Philip Danforth Armour, Sr. (16 May 1832 – 6 January 1901) was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 businessman who founded Armour and Company
Armour and Company
Armour & Company was an American slaughterhouse and meatpacking company founded in Chicago, Illinois, in 1867 by the Armour brothers, led by Philip Danforth Armour. By 1880, the company was Chicago's most important business and helped make the city and its Union Stock Yards the center of the...

, an American meatpacking firm.

Biography

Armour was born in Stockbridge, New York
Stockbridge, New York
Stockbridge is a town in Madison County, New York, United States. The population was 2,080 at the 2000 census. The name is derived from a group of Native Americans.The Town of Stockbridge is located on the eastern border of the county.- History :...

 to Danforth Armour and Juliana Ann Brooks. He was one of eight children and grew up on his family's farm. Armour was mostly of Scottish and English descent, with his surname originating in Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

. He was educated at Cazenovia Academy in New York until the school expelled him for taking a ride in a buggy with a girl. Among his first jobs was that of Driver on upstate New York's Chenango Canal
Chenango Canal
The Chenango Canal was a towpath canal that was built and operated in the mid-19th century in Upstate New York in the United States. It was 97 miles long and for much of its course followed the Chenango River, from Binghamton on the south end to Utica on the north end...

 which ran through Madison County
Madison County, New York
Madison County is a county located in the U.S. state of New York. As of the 2010 census, the population was 73,442. It is named after James Madison, fourth President of the United States of America...

 at that time and would have been a busy thoroughfare. At the age of 19, Armour left New York with about 30 other people for California, joining the great California gold rush. Before the journey, Armour “had received several hundred dollars from his parents,” making him, for the most part, “the financier of the party,” according to biographer Edward N. Wentworth. In California, Armour eventually started his own business, employing out-of-work miners to construct sluices, which controlled the waters that flowed through the mined rivers. In only a few years, Armour had turned his business into a profitable enterprise, earning himself about $8,000 by the time he had turned 24.

With his sizeable fortune in hand, Armour then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, starting a wholesale grocery business. In Milwaukee, Armour formed business partnerships with Frederick Miles in the grain business and with John Plankinton in the meatpacking industry. With his brother, Herman, he entered the grain business and built several meat packing plants in the Menomonee River Valley. Together they formed Armour and Company
Armour and Company
Armour & Company was an American slaughterhouse and meatpacking company founded in Chicago, Illinois, in 1867 by the Armour brothers, led by Philip Danforth Armour. By 1880, the company was Chicago's most important business and helped make the city and its Union Stock Yards the center of the...

 in 1867, which soon became the world's largest food processing and chemical manufacturing enterprise, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Armour & Co. was the first company to produce canned meat and also one of the first to employ an "assembly-line" technique in its factories.

In order to get his meat products to market Armour followed the lead of rival Gustavus Swift
Gustavus Franklin Swift
Gustavus Franklin Swift founded a meat-packing empire in the Midwest during the late 19th century, over which he presided until his death...

 when he established the Armour Refrigerator Line
Armour Refrigerator Line
The Armour Refrigerator Line was a private refrigerator car line established in 1883 by Chicago meat packer Philip Armour, the founder of Armour and Company....

 in 1883. Armour's endeavor soon became the largest private refrigerator car
Refrigerator car
A refrigerator car is a refrigerated boxcar , a piece of railroad rolling stock designed to carry perishable freight at specific temperatures. Refrigerator cars differ from simple insulated boxcars and ventilated boxcars , neither of which are fitted with cooling apparatus...

 fleet in the U.S., which by 1900 listed over 12,000 units on its roster, all built in Armour's own car plant. The General American Transportation Corporation
General American Transportation Corporation
GATX Corporation is an equipment finance company based in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1898, GATX's primary activities consist of railcar operating leasing in North America and Europe...

 would assume ownership of the line in 1932.

His meat packing plants pioneered new principles of large-scale organization and refrigeration to the industry. Armour was one of the first to take action to reduce the tremendous waste inherent in the slaughtering of hogs and to take advantage of the resale value of what had been waste products. It was reported that the company used every possible part of the animals to make products other than canned meat, such as fertilizer, glue and pepsin. Armour famously declared that he made use of "everything but the squeal".

Since the end of the Civil War, labor activists in Chicago had been struggling for better pay, as well as the eight-hour day
Eight-hour day
The eight-hour day movement or 40-hour week movement, also known as the short-time movement, had its origins in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where industrial production in large factories transformed working life and imposed long hours and poor working conditions. With working conditions...

, safer working conditions, and the right to form unions. At a time when the living wage for a five member family was $15.40 a week, the workers at Armour and Company had only earned about $9.50 a week. After Armour's butchers had publicly called for better pay and improved job security in the early 1880s, Armour kicked out the union workers and blacklisted the leaders of the strike. In the weeks before the Haymarket bombing of May 4, 1886, Armour had even encouraged his colleagues to equip a militia to suppress future labor actions. In the book Death in the Haymarket, historian James Green notes that the supplies included “'a good machine gun, to be used by them in case of trouble.'” Over the course of his career, Armour had broken three major strikes that had directly concerned his factories, blacklisting all of the union leaders involved. Nevertheless, the New York Times managed to emphasize in its reporting how greatly Armour “cares for his labor” without any sense of irony. “Although his workers lived and worked in squalid conditions,” the PBS series American Experience
American Experience
American Experience is a television program airing on the Public Broadcasting Service Public television stations in the United States. The program airs documentaries, many of which have won awards, about important or interesting events and people in American history...

reports a bit more honestly, “Armour was known as a philanthropist” (see below for further discussion).

The company's reputation was further tarnished by the scandal of 1898–99 in which it was charged with selling tainted beef. This event provided fodder for the muckraking
Muckraker
The term muckraker is closely associated with reform-oriented journalists who wrote largely for popular magazines, continued a tradition of investigative journalism reporting, and emerged in the United States after 1900 and continued to be influential until World War I, when through a combination...

 novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...

 entitled The Jungle
The Jungle
The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel with the intention of portraying the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion of the book pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking...

, which was published in February 1906 and became a bestseller
Bestseller
A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and published by newspapers, magazines, or bookstore chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and...

.

In 1893, Armour donated $1 million to found the Armour Institute of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology, commonly called Illinois Tech or IIT, is a private Ph.D.-granting university located in Chicago, Illinois, with programs in engineering, science, psychology, architecture, business, communications, industrial technology, information technology, design, and law...

 (a privately endowed coeducational college), which merged with the Lewis Institute to become Illinois Institute of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology, commonly called Illinois Tech or IIT, is a private Ph.D.-granting university located in Chicago, Illinois, with programs in engineering, science, psychology, architecture, business, communications, industrial technology, information technology, design, and law...

 (IIT) in 1940. He also created the Armour Mission, an educational and healthcare center. In 1900 his oldest son, Philip D. Armour, Jr., died.

Armour died on January 6, 1901 of pneumonia
Pneumonia
Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—especially affecting the microscopic air sacs —associated with fever, chest symptoms, and a lack of air space on a chest X-ray. Pneumonia is typically caused by an infection but there are a number of other causes...

 at his Chicago home. He was survived by his wife, Malvina Belle Ogden whom he had married in 1862, and by one son, the other having died about a year before.

Legacy

The town of Armour, South Dakota
Armour, South Dakota
Armour is a city in and the county seat of Douglas County, South Dakota, United States. The population was 699 at the 2010 census.- History :...

 was named for him in 1885, and the town of Armourdale, Kansas
Armourdale, Kansas
Armourdale community is a district in the lower part of the Kansas River valley in Kansas City, Kansas. It is a main district between the West Bottoms and the Rosedale, Kansas area....

 (now the district of Armourdale in Kansas City, Kansas) in 1881. Streets in Cudahy, Wisconsin
Cudahy, Wisconsin
Cudahy is a city in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 18,429 at the 2000 census.-History:Originally known as the Buckhorn Settlement, it was renamed in the late 1800s when Patrick Cudahy purchased 700 acres of land in the Town of Lake, two miles from the Milwaukee city...

 (a Milwaukee suburb founded by meat packing magnate Patrick Cudahy
Patrick Cudahy
Patrick Cudahy, Jr. ; March 17, 1849 - July 25, 1919) was an American industrialist in the meat packing business and a patriarch of the Cudahy family.-Background:...

) as well as Oconomowoc, Wisconsin
Oconomowoc, Wisconsin
Oconomowoc is a city in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, United States. The name was derived from Coo-no-mo-wauk, the Potawatomi term for "waterfall." The population was 12,382 at the 2000 census. The city is partially adjacent to the Town of Oconomowoc and near the Village of Oconomowoc...

, where the Armour family had a summer estate, also bears his name. The streets of North Redondo Beach, CA are named after prominent American businessmen of the industrial revolution. Armour Lane is one of them.

Further reading

  • Depew, Chauncey M. (1895). "Philip D. Armour, 'The Pig Industry'" in 100 Years of American Commerce.
  • Gunsaulus, Frank W. "Philip D. Armour, A Character Sketch".
  • Hill, Napoleon (1987). Think and Grow Rich. New York: Ballantine Books
    Ballantine Books
    Ballantine Books is a major book publisher located in the United States, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. It was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann AG in 1998 and remains part of that company today. Ballantine's logo is a...

    . ISBN 978-0449214923.
  • Kane, Mary A. (2006). "Oconomowoc (Postcard History Series)" Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 978-0738540894.
  • Leech, Harper and John Charles Carroll (1938). Armour and His Times, New York: D. Appelton-Century Company.
  • Lowe, David Garrard (2000). Lost Chicago. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications. ISBN 0-8230-2871-2.
  • White, John H. (1986). The Great Yellow Fleet. San Marino, California: Golden West Books
    Golden West Books
    Golden West Books is a privately owned American publishing company specializing in American Railroads. Donald Duke founded the company in 1960, and wrote some of its titles. Its headquarters are in San Marino, California...

    . ISBN 0-87095-091-6.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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