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Neal A. Knapp, Making Machines of Animals : The International Livestock Exposition

Adrien X. Lievin
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Neal A. Knapp, Making Machines of Animals : The International Livestock Exposition, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023, 216 pages, ISBN : 9781421446554, $60.00.

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1The socio-economic trends that refashioned U.S. society at the turn of the twentieth century worried progressive reformers. Because of soil exhaustion and unfair competition, farmers and livestock raisers could not make ends meet and provide for their families, causing many to migrate to cities, as they were enticed by the economic opportunity that industries offered in urban environments. Feeding these urbanites, as well as improving the livelihood of country communities who could hardly rely on agriculture and livestock for their living, became an important societal issue that the unlikely alliance of Illinois capitalist meatpackers and progressive agricultural reformers intended to tackle. The pinnacle of this partnership was the 1900 Chicago International Livestock Exposition, established and utilized by packers and agriculture specialistsuniversity professors, researchers, and farm authoritiesto address the ongoing challenge of animal supply. Between 1900 and 1975, what was known as the International exhibited more than 10,000 animals annually and held contests. In addition to distributing prizes, trophies, and badges, the event showcased new ways of farming that conflated progress and efficiency, thus setting novel agricultural standards that livestock raisers should adopt to stay up-to-date and economically viable. Farmers and urban spectators eagerly attended the event, with the average yearly attendance reaching 400,000 between 1904 and 1906.

2A practicing agriculturalist and academic researcher, Neal A. Knapp recounts the origins, theories, ideologies, failures, and legacies of the agricultural revolution in meat production that swept the American countryside at the dawn of the twentieth century, drawing on land-grant university publications and files, meatpacker records, newspapers, as well as agricultural journals and magazines. In a rather concise work, he shows that with the active collaboration of progressive agricultural specialists and educators, who disseminated information through lectures, workshops, and formal school training, meatpackers compelled farmers to breed new animal species that would contribute to the packers’ profits, as well as serve the interests of processors and middlemen who produced and promoted capital intensive outputsthus creating a national network of agribusiness specialists. Whereas Knapp portrays agricultural specialists as more altruistic actors concerned with soil erosion and farmers’ dire economic situation, there is no doubt that packers did not care about animals and agriculturalists’ well-being. They wanted new species with physiological features that rendered them more marketable and economically profitable: “As a form of technology, the animal was no more or less a machine for converting Corn Belt grains, which were largely unusable as a food source in the harvested form, to human food,” the author writes (10).

3Knapp argues with much evidence that “[t]he International was therefore not simply an event but an institution that through incentives and penalties denormalized and renormalized modern biological beings and a complex, organizational ecosystem that propagated this revolution in American agriculture” (7). The International’s organizers and judges employed a system of rewards and penalties to reshape the livestock’s genetic traits and physical forms. Contest judges identified and standardized what they deemed modern body types and physiological characteristics, aligning them with specific farm functions or commodity specializations, such as meat or dairy production. After the Civil War, Chicago dethroned Cincinnati as the meat-processing hub of the nation. Particularly enabled by technological advances such as in transportation and food conservationlike refrigerated cars, the city’s meat processing leaders designed plans and strategies to make their industry even more fruitful. Sciencesas well as pseudoscience, as evidenced by their embrace of eugenicscoupled with notions of progressive efficiency were major contributors to the commodification of livestock, henceforth considered as projects in progress that trials and experiments could improve. Packers and agriculturalists claimed that by investing in new breeds, new food, and a new way of farming, significant profits could be reaped.

4Yet, Knapp does not fail to notice that it was the packers and middlemen who enjoyed success, with farmers benefiting little from this venture in agricultural capitalism. He claims that the International advanced industrial and work ideologies that, when implemented on farms, fostered producer dependency on a growing class of nonfarm agricultural specialists, who both promoted and served the interests of scientific crop and animal husbandry. As he argues, “[t]he International changed the meaning of animality itself, creating a new Biopolitical order connecting the animal to the industrial; the modern animal shaped farmer choices, dependencies, and fragilities, compelling [them] to dramatically change their routines to accommodate homogenous, high-density animal farming” (17). Not only did farmers have to change their methods to serve the new agribusiness middlemen but, in this revolution, animals also lost their status of living beings, becoming a means to an economic end.

5Knapp dedicates the first of his five chapters to the origins and the very early stages of the International, in the 1870s, with the advent of Chicago as the new “Porkopolis” and the improbable alliance between profit-driven industrial meatpacking capitalists and reform-minded agricultural progressive educators at the end of the nineteenth century. Although the packers and agricultural specialists had different goals in mind and contributed in various ways to the meat industry, they both recognized that “designing” and producing animals with consistent genetics and physiological traits served the interests of their respective endeavors. The second chapter of this monograph analyzes how contemporary eugenics permeated agriculture and the International’s theories. Indeed, at a time when the myth of racial hierarchies and the supremacy of Anglo-Saxonism reigned, it is no surprise that “scrub” animals of mixed pedigreesincluding Mexicanshould have been deemed unworthy and replaced with a breed coming from the British Isles. With the aim of regulating animal bodies and ensuring uniformityin colors, shapes, and particular featuresprogressive breeders selected similar animals, including relatives, and bred them to minimize the chances of physiological variations. The role played by purebred associations and registries in cataloging and tracking ancestries, thus guaranteeing the animal’s breed purity, was essential in the establishment of this new agricultural order. Knapp’s third chapter focuses on contests and how judgesand the International’s organizersset new trends, sometimes paradoxical and contradictory, but nonetheless still eagerly followed by numerous farmers. The author delves into the physiology of these new breeds and the way remarkable changes in livestock were implemented in only two decades. The next chapter deals with progressive reformers’ educational strategies, such as collegiate agricultural clubs, and reveals how the next generation of successful breeders, agricultural demonstrators, and contest judges were trained. Knapp’s study and analysis of pedagogical materials is particularly interesting and manages to detail much of the progressives’ plan to reform the countryside’s economic and ecological dire state. The fifth and last chapter covers the quite disappointing and underwhelming legacy of the International over six decades. Knapp shows how genetic experiments and progressive breeding caused an outbreak of dwarfism, as well as a plethora of physiological deformities and unexpected consequences on the health and physiology of livestock. Knapp’s findings and take on the International are thus rather grim and show that the movement was cruel to animals, harmed farmers, and served to funnel profits to a new agribusiness elite.

6Echoing Gabriel Rosenberg’s (2016, 2020) recent studies that highlight the intricate relationship between farm animals, progressive education, eugenics, and sciences, Knapp’s scholarship is beyond recommendable. It is accessible, and its less than 200 pages are filled with interesting facts, as well as quite stark, even revolting descriptions of the meat industry’s ideology and consideration of livestock and those who raised them. His inclusion of pictorial elementsold pictures of animals and farmers during actual contests, textbook cases and anatomical tablesis particularly relevant for the reader to understand livestock physiology and the stakes of the International’s agricultural theories and teachings. The scope of Knapp’s study is rather narrow, given its focus on one group of actors who instigated an event and a set of agricultural theories and methods. No matter the national and global dimensions of the International and the standards that it set, one should remember that this monograph focuses mostly on the International and its instigators, hence a few areas and fields that are evoked more superficially and are not particularly detailed. Knapp thus pays little attention to actual farmers and those working for and competing in the International, focusing instead on those that launched and directed it. Unlike Louise Carroll Wade (1987), who focuses more on the socioeconomic and environmental impact that this industry had on the surrounding communities and the working class, as well as Robert A. Slayton (1986), whose work centers mainly on ethnic and religious cultures and different strategies of self-help within the immigrant communities surrounding the Chicago yards, Knapp focuses on an institutionthe Internationaland its business as well as scientific ideologies and doings, leaving aside social elements.

7Indeed, Knapp does not really deal with those that were subjected to this institution and its dictates: we do not hear farmers’ voices. One may wonder about their identity, their agency, and whether any farmers did earn significant money from their ventures in progressive agriculture. Some economic outputif availablewould have been welcome to draw a clearer picture of those who raised the livestock and evaluate the International’s doings. Including women and their participation in agriculture (which nonetheless timidly appear in the chapter on education) would also have enabled readers to have a better grasp of the failures and successes of this agricultural movement. No matter what the discourse on public and domestic spheres dictated, historians such as Lu Ann Jones (2002) and Elizabeth Engelhardt (2011) have revealed that womenyoung students, as well as older housewivesdid engage in agricultural practices and even reaped profits from it. They did participate in agricultural contests, even in the supposedly conservative American South, won prestigious prices, and enjoyed some sort of social emancipationto lesser or greater extent. Yet only a handful of pages mention them in Knapp’s monograph, and some readers may have appreciated to know, over the years and in regard to this particular event in Chicago, the roles that women assumed later on in the movement. Knowing more about farmers and farming communities would have enabled a better evaluation of the International and a broader understanding of its role and of what it achieved. Were farmers just victims? And when they resisted the International’s standards, how did they do so?

8Despite the grey areas and a few elements left uncoveredprobably because of the scope of the projectKnapp’s work is laudable, and hopefully will inspire other historians and scholars to further our understanding of the intricate relationship between capitalism, progressivism, education, and agriculture.

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Bibliographie

ENGELHARDT, Elizabeth S. D. A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

JONES, Lu Ann. Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

ROSENBERG, Gabriel. The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

ROSENBERG, Gabriel. “No Scrubs: Livestock Breeding, Eugenics, and the State in the Early Twentieth-Century United States.” The Journal of American History, vol. 107, n° 2, 2020, p. 362-387.

SLAYTON, Robert A. Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

WADE, Louise Carroll. Chicago's Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

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Adrien X. Lievin, « Neal A. Knapp, Making Machines of Animals : The International Livestock Exposition »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 17 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/23636 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134hm

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Adrien X. Lievin

Université de Lille

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