Philip Danforth Armour

• Born: May 16, 1832
• Birthplace: Stockbridge, New York
• Died: January 6, 1901
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

American industrialist and philanthropist

Armour, cofounder and chairman of Armour & Co., introduced modern and innovative technology and production methods to large meatpacking operations. Armour & Co. was among the largest employers in Chicago’s historic stockyards and meatpacking industry. He used his wealth for philanthropic and educational ventures, founding the Armour Institute of Technology, later renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Source of wealth: Sale of products

Bequeathal of wealth: Children; charity; educational institution

Early Life

Philip Danforth Armour was born in 1832 in Stockbridge, New York, the fourth of eight children of Danforth Armour and Juliana Brooks Armour. Danforth left Connecticut to run a rural New York family farm, where his children learned to slaughter cattle and produce soap from the fats. Armour attended the local Methodist church with his family and went to school in the nearby towns of Valley Mills and Cazenovia. He worked as a farm laborer for his family and neighbors, clerked in a store, and was employed as a driver on the Chenango Canal in New York, which connected the Susquehanna River to the Erie Canal. In 1852, he borrowed a wagon from the family and headed to California, lured there by the gold rush.

First Ventures

Armour was a determined entrepreneur. In the Sacramento Valley of California, Armour developed and leased aqueduct systems (sluiceways), bringing water to gold diggers and washers, which proved more profitable than mining. Returning east, he worked briefly in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, operating a soap business, then in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he partnered with James J. Hill, selling hides, then returned to Milwaukee and founded a grocer provisions firm with Frederick B. Miles. In 1862, he visited Cincinnati, Ohio, and observed the booming Civil War demand for salt pork.

It was in Cincinnati that Armour met and married Malvina Belle Ogden (1842-1927). They would have two sons, J. Ogden Armour (1863-1927) and Philip Danforth Armour, Jr. (1869-1900).

In 1862, Armour took a half interest in the Milwaukee slaughterhouse founded by John Plankinton (1820-1891). By then, Armour’s brother Herman Ossian Armour (1837-1901) was already the operator of a successful Milwaukee grocer provision firm, and another brother, Joseph Francis Armour (1842-1881), was a Chicago grain dealer. Before war’s end Philip Armour sold short on pork, making Plankinton and Armour wealthy, while the fall in pork prices drove many of their Cincinnati competitors out of business. Armour would henceforth become an influential speculator in agricultural commodities. Railways, cattle, and pigs would make Chicago a center for agricultural industries in post-Civil War America, and Armour and his brothers set their sights there.

Mature Wealth

Armour and his brothers acted aggressively to build their businesses. Plankinton and Armour expanded to Kansas City, Missouri; Henry Armour opened Armour, Plankinton, and Co. in New York (later H. O Armour and Co.); brother Simeon Armour (1828-1899) established Armour Packing Co. in Kansas City (the two merged into a single firm in the 1890’s); and Andrew Watson Armour (1829-1893) founded the Armour Brothers bank in Kansas City. The Armour yards and packinghouses in Chicago became the biggest in the city. Philip Armour led these enterprises with aggressive and astute business acumen, epitomizing the hard-nosed business culture of his era.

Armour was a great believer in trade and thrift (rather than in religion), as well as in the sciences that enabled their application in production. Thus he sought to employ the enormous amounts of waste, including heads, feet, tankage, and other matter, that packinghouses produced. Armour was among the first to fully incorporate and profit from the side businesses of manufacturing glue, oil, tallow, fertilizer, oleomargarine, sausage casings, pharmaceuticals, and other products from the nonmeat portions of farm animals. Eventually lower-quality meat was canned and sold as inexpensive new food products, such as pork and beans. Armour hired chemists and built a laboratory at his Chicago facilities to make possible the most efficient and profitable reuse of all parts of farm animals. He purchased competitors’ businesses or founded his own, including fertilizer and soap firms, and had designs on tanneries and related businesses until the antitrust legislation of the early 1900’s and the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 slowed the company’s growth. It was these businesses related to meatpacking that made Armour & Co. the largest of its kind in Chicago and a global innovator in industrial agriculture processing.

Armour, who built and directed the collection of companies that he and his brothers commanded, shared a large, nonpartitioned office with three hundred employees at the Home Insurance Building on Chicago’s LaSalle Street. Tall, weighing 250 pounds, he was known as a plain speaker whom few dared to cross. He became one of the wealthiest men of Chicago’s Gilded Age, along with Marshall Field, George Mortimer Pullman, and Armour’s chief rival, Gustavus Franklin Swift, who pioneered the refrigerated railway car for beef transportation. Armour relentlessly applied practical business methods to lower costs and inefficiencies, and he employed professional mangers to oversee a diverse empire. He kept a vigorous schedule, arriving at his offices by six o’clock in the morning and holding first meetings soon thereafter.

Confronting the problem of transportation and distribution, Armour partnered with railroad magnates; became an owner in the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad Company and in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; and established distribution centers for beef, pork, and grain throughout the country and in Europe. Armour overcame considerable public opposition to fresh beef, as it challenged commonly held notions of food safety and competed (many claimed unfairly) with local butchers. The Armour brand became widely known, and Armour had the motto “We Feed the World” painted on his company’s railway cars.

Chicago’s South Side, where the Back of the Yards neighborhood and the stockyards and slaughterhouses were located, was known for its unsafe and poor living and working conditions. Upton Sinclair’s best-selling book The Jungle (1906) depicted the stark life of packinghouse workers, and Jane Addams’s Hull House settlement programs were established nearby to provide educational and other services to these residents. Staunchly antiunion, Armour defeated major strike waves in 1879, 1886, and 1894, and the company required workers to sign agreements not to join a union. The industry remained nonunion during Armour’s lifetime.

Armour’s supporters pointed to his undeniable generosity, his scorn for wealthy “society,” his genuine love of children, and his ease with working men. He established the Armour Mission in Chicago in 1886, and in 1893 he founded the Armour Institute. These institutions became the passions of his life.

Armour died pf pneumonia in January, 1901, after a series of illnesses.

Legacy

Armour was one of the most innovative industrialists of late nineteenth century America. He represented the ideal of the self-made man of his era, and his Armour & Co. businesses embodied the great maturation of the United States into a sophisticated industrial agricultural provider to the world.

His personal fortune was estimated at more than $30 million. He was survived by his wife and older son, J. Ogden Armour, who took on the Armour business with great composure, having served as a partner since 1884. His son took the company to new heights, at one point grossing $1 billion in a single year, but the company barely survived the post-World War I economic slump.

Bibliography

Geisst, Charles R. Wheels of Fourtune: A History of Speculation from Scandal to Respectability. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2007. Exposition of Armour’s speculative business ventures.

Hakutani, Yoshinobu, ed. Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985. Includes Dreiser’s essential interview with Armour.

Hubbard, Elbert. Philip D. Armour. Reprint. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2005. Hubbard, a contemporary of Armour, wrote this essay in a triumphal form that celebrated American enterprise, and it serves as the best example of hagiography of the subject.

Leech, Harper, and John Charles Carroll. Armour and His Times. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938. A detailed, sympathetic overview of Armour, his business dealings, competitors, associates, and the industry. Includes reproductions and quotations of Armour’s writings, as well as photographs of his family and business partners.

Miller, Donald L. City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. A social history of the growth of nineteenth century Chicago, including a large section on the development of the meatpacking industry.

United States Office of Education. Art and Industry: Education in the Industrial and Fine Arts in the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1898. An official and very detailed account of the establishment of the Armour Mission and the Armour Institute of Technology.