How the Chicago International Livestock Exposition leveraged the
eugenics movement to transform animals into machines and industrialize
American agriculture.
In 1900, the Chicago International Livestock Exposition became the
epicenter of agricultural reform that focused on reinventing animals'
bodies to fit a modern, industrial design. Chicago meatpackers partnered
with land-grant university professors to create the International--a
spectacle on the scale of a world's fair--with the intention of setting
the standard for animal quality and, in doing so, transformed American
agriculture.
In Making Machines of Animals, Neal A. Knapp explains the motivations
of both the meatpackers and the professors, describing how they deployed
the International to redefine animality itself. Both professors and
packers hoped to replace so-called scrub livestock with "improved"
animals and created a new taxonomy of animal quality based on the
burgeoning eugenics movement. The International created novel
definitions of animal superiority and codified new norms, resulting in a
dramatic shift in animal weight, body size, and market age. These
changes transformed the animals from multipurpose to single-purpose
products. These standardized animals and their dependence on
off-the-farm inputs and exchanges limited farmers' choices regarding
husbandry and marketing, ultimately undermining any goals for balanced
farming or the maintenance and regeneration of soil fertility.
Drawing on land-grant university research and publications, meatpacker
records and propaganda, and newspaper and agricultural journal articles,
Knapp critiques the supposed market-oriented, efficiency-driven
industrial reforms proffered by the International, which were
underpinned by irrational, racist ideologies. The livestock reform
movement not only resulted in cruel and violent outcomes for animals but
also led to twentieth-century crops and animal husbandry that were rife
with inefficiencies and agricultural vulnerabilities.
