Swift, Gustavus

Swift, Gustavus (1839–1903), meatpacker and corporate innovator.The younger son of a large Cape Cod farm family, Gustavus F. Swift rose from a partnership in a Boston wholesale meat market to become a legendary captain of the meatpacking industry in Chicago. The key to Swift's ascendancy was his use of refrigerated railroad cars to ship dressed beef from livestock markets and packing plants in Chicago and other western centers to eastern, urban markets. Employing that technology to integrate the entire production‐to‐distribution process, Swift undercut eastern centers by as much as 75 cents per hundred weight. By 1886, his Chicago packing plant, Swift and Company, utilized an advanced division of labor to produce three thousand carcasses a week. The company operated a national network of twenty‐four refrigerated branch distribution outlets and four hundred refrigerator cars while maintaining an army of traveling salesmen who convinced local retailers of their product's safety and high quality.

Swift's leading Chicago competitors quickly adopted his innovations in distribution and production. By the time of his death, Swift and Company was one of four firms supplying more than half the nation's meat. Collectively keeping labor costs low and pricing their goods on the basis of average costs rather than supply and demand, these firms dominated the industry into the 1950s. Swift was a true entrepreneurial pioneer—an innovator who shook up the established order. He played a key role in the emergence of the modern managerial corporation based on the concentration within a single business enterprise of activities formerly dispersed among multiple small companies.
See also Food and Diet; Gilded Age; Industrialization; Livestock Industry; Mass Production; Meatpacking and Meat Processing Industry; Railroads; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Mary Yeager , Competition and Regulation: The Development of Oligopoly in the Meatpacking Industry, 1981.
Jimmy Skaggs , Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 1607–1983, 1986.

Paul Street