It took until January 6, 1905, for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear arguments in the Beef Trust case, but only until the end of that month for it to render a decision.
The court’s unanimous opinion was drafted by Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who more or less plowed in behind the Seventh Circuit Court. It held that the commerce clause of the Constitution justified regulating the Trust, which was, indeed, an illegal combination in restraint of trade. It enjoined the Trust companies against continuing to suppress competition, fix prices, or press the railroads for preferential rates.1
Dissolving the new National Packing Company, however, was not an issue before the court, and this holding company would, for nearly another decade, continue to acquire stockyards, slaughterhouses, and refrigerator cars and place them under its expanding corporate umbrella. It remained an effective vehicle for the three companies that had formed it, and the fourth it had absorbed, to keep abreast of one another’s activities and quietly coordinate efforts.
Only the naïve thought the Supreme Court decision would actually put an end to the Beef Trust. These were contentious companies that continued to insist they had not broken the law in spite of the superabundance of evidence to the contrary and the verdicts against them. They were accustomed to being sued, and they were not about to abandon such lucrative cooperation easily. Although some of the more obvious mechanisms for coordination had been dismantled, there were still ways to act together under the radar. Less formally than before, but not much less effectively, they continued to divide territory, pressure cattlemen, and coordinate prices.
As the Daily People noted, “the methods and policy of the Trust have in no wise been altered. The livestock man who ships his cattle to the stockyards in Chicago, Omaha, Kansas City or Sioux city will find one price prevailing. No matter what the name of the company he sells to, the cattle find their way into the slaughter pens of the Trust.” Something similar could probably also have been said of their efforts to fix the wholesale prices demanded of their customers.2
What actually threatened the packers’ fortunes more than the Supreme Court’s decision was the publication of a novel. In 1904 muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair, who had done his research while living among laborers in the Chicago stockyards, chronicled working conditions and exposed the unsanitary practices of the meat industry in a powerful work of fiction called The Jungle. It was published in serial form in 1905 in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason and as a book in 1906.
Sinclair’s narrative was a wholesale indictment of the meat packing industry. His tale of the life of a fictitious Lithuanian immigrant was intended to disparage capitalism and advance the cause of socialism in America, but it was his description of unsafe and unsanitary conditions that most evoked public indignation. Sinclair told of how dirt, rat droppings, and even rats themselves wound up in the ground meat and sausage that ended up on people’s plates, and did far more to sully the reputation of the packers than manipulation of prices had ever done.
Sinclair’s work was not the first account of questionable food safety practices in the industry; the quality of the food supply had been publicly debated for some time, as had the meatpackers’ methods and their relationship to tainted and diseased meat. But Sinclair’s work pushed it all squarely into the spotlight.
He sent a copy of his book to President Theodore Roosevelt, who was so horrified by the descriptions in it that he ordered the nation’s abattoirs investigated. After Sinclair’s allegations were corroborated, Roosevelt raised the revolting conditions his investigators discovered in his December 1905 message to Congress. The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act soon followed; both passed in 1906.3
The latter law, which took effect that March, mandated inspection of livestock before slaughter and established sanitary standards for abattoirs and meat processing plants. It also added significantly to the cost of meat packing, however, and in so doing gave the industry a new excuse for raising prices.
Sure enough, by late November 1906 the Trust companies were at it again. They raised the wholesale price of beef, which in turn forced kosher butchers to raise retail prices once again. Chuck steak rose from fourteen to sixteen or seventeen cents a pound.
And East Side housewives didn’t like it any more than they had in May 1902.4
Once again, it was women who took the lead to protest. This time, however, there was no sign of Sarah Edelson, Caroline Schatzberg, or Sarah Cohn. An entirely new cast of characters emerged on November 29. Esther Dolobofsky and Rebecca Reznick, both of East Fourth Street, led the charge.
Just as the 1902 effort had begun abruptly with a meeting at Sarah Edelson’s family establishment, the 1906 meat protest began with a gathering of nearly fifty women at the home of twenty-two-year-old, Russian-born Dolobofsky, her out-of-work husband, Max, and their children. A “black-eyed mite of a Jewess” to the New York Tribune, the diminutive Dolobofsky advocated a strike. Then, together with twenty-six-year-old Rebecca Resnick, a mother of two who lived in the same tenement, she took to the streets. A gifted orator, she had no trouble attracting crowds wherever she went.5
Eventually, they made their way to Lewis Street, where William Ehrenfeld ran a butcher shop and Abraham Brechner did business across the street. They began calling on women to boycott the shops. This was too much for Brechner, an apple-cheeked man with a Van Dyke beard who emerged to shoo them away. He knocked Resnick off of a soap box and punched Dolobofsky. Others rose to their defense and a brawl ensued. Eggs and apples were hurled and clubs were brandished, and both women sustained serious cuts to their faces.
When the police arrived, they made no arrests. That, however, did not stop Dolobofsky. This was not her first rodeo; the New York Sun described her as “well-known as an agitator among East Side women.” Brechner complained later that she had been a cigar maker before her marriage, and that “she used to lead strikes—she likes strikes.” Later that day, she sought a warrant for Brechner’s arrest, and he was arraigned in Essex Market Court the next day on a charge of assault. There, magistrate Henry Steinert admonished Dolobofsky and Resnick to “mind your own business and keep out of trouble.”6
An early recruit to the cause was Rebecca Menzen of Madison Street, who parked herself in front of Louis Jeselowitz’s shop and took a big bite out of his business. She attracted a crowd, shut him down, and led them to another shop across the street for a repeat performance.
“Look what fools we are to buy meat when fish is cheaper,” Menzen told her audience. “Fish is better than meat. If you don’t know how to make fancy dishes out of fish, I will teach you if you come to my house. When you have it cooked in different styles you can’t tell the difference from meat!” She then led them to her home and as many as were able to crowd into her tiny kitchen heard an edifying lecture on preparing fish.7
All day long there were demonstrations in front of meat shops, and damage was done to the stock in several of them. By one estimate, more than two thousand people hit the streets, and the butchers, many of whom were veterans of the 1902 strike, were frightened. They hurriedly called a meeting the next day to establish a new organization to represent their interests, the East Side Hebrew Retail Butchers’ Association having been rendered defunct after the 1902 strike was over. They named it the Hebrew Retail Kosher Butchers’ Protective Association. Louis Kirsch of Rivington Street was chosen as president, and he lost no time in fixing the responsibility for the rise in prices on others.
“We are not to blame for the present high prices of meat,” he told the newspapers. “The Beef Trust, the packers, are the ones. We have to pay 10½ to 11 cents wholesale for forequarter beef where we only had to pay 8 and 8½ cents a week ago.” But he made it clear that he and his cohorts had no appetite for a return to 1902. “We shall not fight the women,” he predicted. “Rather than have meat riots like five years ago, we will close up our shops until the price of meat comes down.”8
Most of the problem was the high prices demanded by the wholesalers, but the abandonment of a popular Lower East Side custom was also a factor. Over the years, Jewish women had come to expect extra bones and a piece of fat or suet to be thrown in with the purchase of a pound of beef. The wholesalers, however, had always charged the butchers for them. As a result, if a retailer sold 140 pounds of beef, for example, he was actually paid for only about eighty pounds of it. Now, in self-defense, the butchers had taken to charging customers for both soup bones and fat.
Pressed on one side by wholesalers who demanded higher prices and on the other by consumers who insisted on lower ones, many butchers were lucky to net five dollars a week. Some took home less than three dollars and were paying their hired help more than that. They saw no obvious way forward that would stave off eventual bankruptcy.
So they did the only thing they could think of: they appealed to the President of the United States.9
Theodore Roosevelt was not a distant figure to those who had been in New York for some years. He had been president of the city’s board of police commissioners between 1895 and 1897 before being elected governor of New York in 1898 and vice president of the United States in 1900, and before succeeding William McKinley as president after the latter was assassinated in 1901. And the butchers knew he was an opponent of trusts. He had personally intervened in the Pennsylvania miners’ strike, and it had been he who had directed Attorney General Knox to pursue the Beef Trust. It had also been during his tenure as president that the Supreme Court had sustained the verdict against the Beef Trust.
The invitation to Roosevelt was extended informally through the press. The butchers’ naïve hope was that he might advise them directly or intercede on their behalf as he had in Pennsylvania. “If President Roosevelt says we should shut our shops up, then we will shut our shops up,” one butcher vowed at the meeting, “and then the women will know that it is not our fault that meat is so high.”10
In early December, fighting broke out in Harlem. Female Jewish pickets made a huge dent in the local kosher meat business. Four butchers had closed by December 3, and others were making no money. At a poorly attended meeting of the butchers’ association on December 5, those assembled agreed nearly unanimously to stand by the women and leave the matter up to them.11
At a meeting on the Lower East Side that same night, the Meat Consumers’ Protective Association was formally established. Those assembled blamed the Beef Trust for the rise in prices; unlike in 1902, the retail butchers were believed and were not considered enemies this time. But nor were they respected. Esther Dolobofsky observed that “they have not the courage that we women have. They are afraid to fight, and they leave it to us to begin. Well, we will begin, and we will fight and fight until we win. It will be hard. But if we stand together shoulder to shoulder we can accomplish a great deal, as we did before.”12
It was a tip of the hat to the victory of 1902, still very much in people’s consciousness.
The women also decided to appoint some thirty of their number to go from house to house in the tenement district requesting all housewives to join a general boycott, another tactic borrowed from five years earlier.13
The conservative English-language weekly American Hebrew was sympathetic to the downtown Jews and worried that the city might see a repeat of the earlier unrest. “The poverty of the East Side cannot stand a rise in the price of meats,” it declared in an editorial. It, too, accepted at face value the retail butchers’ explanation—that the root of the problem was that the wholesalers had raised their prices—and it sent a reporter to two East River slaughterhouses to investigate. Schwarzschild & Sulzberger, which by now was doing relatively little kosher business, denied it had raised prices at all. And United Dressed Beef, now the dominant supplier to the East Side butchers and a part of the National Packing Company, blamed not a shortage of supply, but growing demand for kosher meat.14
At a mass gathering on Monday, December 10, more than two hundred Brownsville butchers voted to close their doors indefinitely. While that meeting was going on, five hundred Jewish women met three blocks away. They, too, held the retail butchers blameless, and in fact issued a statement to that effect. But they also vowed to wreck the shops of anyone who sold meat. It was the only way they could see to send a message to the Beef Trust.15
While the East Side remained quiet, Brownsville boiled over. Most butchers closed, but those who did not bore the brunt of the anger of protesters, most of whom were female. Women patrolled the streets, goading butchers into closing or delivering summary justice in the form of broken windows and kerosene-soaked meat. Several shops were wrecked, a few people were injured, and a handful were arrested, keeping the police busy. But by the next day there was peace, as almost all of the shops had closed.16
Chicago Livestock World echoed the opinion of United Dressed Beef that the cause of the spike in prices was that demand had exceeded supply, and it declared the 1906 meat strike a “tempest in a teapot,” which is more or less what it turned out to be. After a dramatic beginning, it did not get much traction, and by the end of December it was a memory.
Nor, as far as is known, was anything ever heard from President Roosevelt.17