Philip Danforth Armour

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Philip Danforth Armour (1832-1901) was a typical American industrial capitalist of the period following the Civil War. He helped build meat-packing into a great industry by using new technology and working out distribution methods for domestic and foreign markets.

Philip Armour was born on May 16, 1832, at Stockbridge, N.Y. His father was a farmer of Scotch-Irish and Puritan origins. Young Armour went to a district school, then to the nearby Cazenovia Academy, from which he was dropped. In 1852 he left for California and worked as a miner and, more successfully, as a contractor selling water and digging water ditches for miners. After 4 years - during which he accumulated some $6,000 - he returned to the family farm but soon left it permanently. He became a provisions and grain dealer in Cincinnati and then in Milwaukee, two early hog-packing centers.

Meat-packing (largely of hogs) was a wintertime farm industry: slaughtering took place after the first frost; then the hog products were moved to local markets by commission men or dealers. Armour joined forces with Frederick B. Miles and later, in 1863, with John Plankton. As the Northern armies of the Civil War demanded more and more salt pork, the firm of Plankton, Armour and Company became one of the important suppliers. After 1875 Armour made Chicago his base; by this time his brothers were in partnership with him and were located in Kansas City and New York.

Armour was a leader in modernizing the meat-packing industry. Among new technological devices he introduced were the conveyor-belt system and the use of natural ice, which made continuous operations possible; live animals could be brought to city plants for slaughter and dressing. The early 1880s saw the installation of ice-making and cooling machines and the adaptation of these devices to refrigerate railroad cars and ships. Thus, transportation was revolutionized, making it possible to move dressed meats (and also fruits and vegetables) to branch offices, eastern markets, and Europe.

Armour blazed trails in two ways: his companies owned and operated their own freight cars, forcing special, lower carload rates from the carrier railroads; and he aggressively entered English, German, and French markets, breaking down local resistance to American hog and beef products. Other innovations in which Armour led were the imaginative use of animal by-products (in making soap, glue, fertilizer, neat's-foot oil, and pharmaceuticals) and the use of tin cans for vacuum-packing beef.

At its peak in the 1890s Armour and Company controlled 6,000 refrigerator cars moving over 150,000 miles of railway. This, curiously, was the chief reason for reformer Charles Edward Russell's hostility to the industry; his influential book, The Greatest Trust in the World (1905), accused the packers of terrorizing the railroads as well as defying Wall Street. Armour was attacked because he operated family-owned companies rather than publicly owned ones and because he got his working capital from local (Chicago and Kansas City) banks and his investment capital from the plowing back of profits.

Armour also figured prominently in the activities of the Chicago Board of Trade as a trader in grain and pork products, helping establish orderly futures markets. Thus, he broke a bear raid on pork in 1879 and prevented a corner in wheat in 1897-1898. In this connection his system of grain elevators was considered the largest and best in the world.

During the 1890s Armour gave large sums of money for the construction of low-cost housing for his workers and for the establishment of the Armour Institute of Technology and of a preparatory scientific academy. He died on Jan. 6, 1901. Reputed to be worth $50,000,000, he left an estate of $15,000,000.

Further Reading

There is a good biography of Armour by Harper Leech and John Charles Carroll, Armour and His Times (1938). See also Rudolf A. Clemen, The American Livestock and Meat Industry (1923; abr. 1966) and By-Products in the Packing Industry (1927); and Louis F. Swift and Arthur Van Vlissingen, Jr., The Yankee of the Yards: The Biography of Gustavus Franklin Swift (1927).

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Philip Danforth Armour
Born	May 16, 1832(1832-05-16) Stockbridge, New York
Died	January 6, 1901 (aged 68) Chicago, Illinois

A refrigerator car of the Armour Refrigerator Line (ARL), circa 1917.

A Pullman-built "shorty" reefer bearing the Armour Packing Co. - Kansas City logo, circa 1885. Note that the name of the "patentee" was displayed on the car's exterior, a practice intended to "...impress the shipper and intimidate the competition..."

Philip Danforth Armour (16 May 1832 – 6 January 1901) was an American businessman who founded Armour and Company, the giant American meatpacking firm.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Legacy 3 References 4 Further reading 5 See also 6 External links

Biography

Armour was born in Stockbridge, New York 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.^[1] He was educated at Cazenovia Academy in New York before he dropped out and went to work on the family farm. Among his other first jobs was that of Driver on upstate New York's Chenango Canal which ran through Madison County at that time and would have been a busy thoroughfare. While not an easy job, the countless miles must have built his legs and tenacity, for in 1852, he walked across the country. He went to mine the gold fields of California, and eventually earned thousands of dollars- a sizeable sum for that time.

He then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with a sizeable fortune and started 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 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 when he established the Armour Refrigerator Line in 1883. Armour's endeavor soon became the largest private refrigerator car 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 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".

The company's reputation was tarnished by the scandal of 1898–99 in which it was charged with selling tainted beef. This event provided fodder for the muckraking novel by Upton Sinclair entitled The Jungle, which was published in February 1906 and became a bestseller.

In 1893, Armour donated $1 million to found the Armour Institute of Technology (a privately endowed coeducational college), which merged with the Lewis Institute to become the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1940. He also created the Armour Mission, an educational and healthcare center.

Armour died on January 6, 1901 of pneumonia at his Chicago home.^[2] 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 was named for him in 1885, and the town of Armourdale, Kansas (now the district of Armourdale in Kansas City, Kansas) in 1881. A street in the Milwaukee suburb of Cudahy, Wisconsin (founded by meat packing magnate Patrick Cudahy) also bears his name.

References

1. ^ Rootsweb at worldconnect.rootsweb.com
2. ^ "Chicago Millionaire Passes Away After Two Years' Illness. Sought Health at Home and Abroad. Began to Sink with the Commencement of Winter. His Wealth Estimated as High as $50,000,000". New York Times. January 7, 1901. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9406E3DA1138E733A25754C0A9679C946097D6CF. Retrieved 2009-07-31. 

Further reading

• White, John H. (1986). The Great Yellow Fleet. Golden West Books, San Marino, California. ISBN 0-87095-091-6.
• Hill, Napoleon. (1987). 'Think and Grow Rich. Ballantine Books, New York, New York. ISBN 978-0449214923.
• Cleveland, H. I. (March 1901). "Philip Armour, Merchant". The World's Work: A History of Our Time I: 540-547. 
• Depew, Chauncey M. 'Philip D. Armour, "The Pig Industry"' in 100 Years of American Commerce, 1895.
• Leech, Harper and John Charles Carroll (1938), Armour and His Times, D. Appelton-Century Company, New York and London.
• Lowe, David Garrard (2000), Lost Chicago. Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, NY. ISBN 0-8230-2871-2.
• Gunsaulus, Frank W. Philip D. Armour, A Character Sketch.

See also

• Gustavus Franklin Swift
• Hormel

External links

• Armour Square Park of the Chicago Park District
• History of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)
• Biographical sketch for Philip Armour on PBS American Experience
• Profile page for Philip Armour on Find A Grave

Preceded by Creator

President of Armour and Company 1867–1901

Succeeded by J. Ogden Armour

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