American Immigrant Women Found Their Power in 1902, and We Threw it Away in the 2020s
The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902. The Great Food Inflation of the 2020s.
In 1902, Jewish women, mostly recent immigrants living in poverty in the Lower East Side of New York City, grew irritated and frightened over an unusual rise in the price per pound of kosher meat. They didn’t sit around complaining about the corporationists and Trumpians of their day — and there were plenty, as this was still the Gilded Age in the USA. The women took action and made meat prices a national issue.
I recently traveled to New York City and took a guided tour of the Tenement Museum located at 103 Orchard Street. Our fantastic tour guide told the tale of the women-led 1902 kosher meat boycott and acted out several parts with intense emotion. She was so good I told her she should put together a one-woman show on Broadway. For her presentation, she sourced museum records, oral histories handed down in the families involved then written and donated to the museum, and a book by Scott D. Seligman, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902. The title of the book is no hyperbole. It was a war.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several innovations collided, including refrigerated rail cars, the awakening of individual freedom in the masses, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and all the inventive tricks companies employed (and still employ) to avoid the Sherman Antitrust Act. Bad news for me, the sole Chicagoan on the museum tour, an illegal trust formed by Chicago meat packing companies, was the big bad guy. But, initially unaware of the trust, the women blamed their local butchers, and the local butchers blamed the middlemen.
The Roosevelt and Taft administrations eventually went after the trust but might have done nothing had the women not taken to the streets, organized their neighbors, and protested. Trust leaders went so far as to hide out in New Jersey to avoid service in state and federal lawsuits — that they eventually lost. Then, they changed tactics and reincorporated as one company, and the feds went after that too. The Justice Department won the dissolution of that company in 1912. This was unprecedented federal action at the time, but the enforcement actions and lawsuits were too slow for the women trying to feed families on teeny tiny wages with no social safety net — something Republican fight for (and not against) now.
With little English, no vote, no power, no organizing experience, no telephones, no email, and no social media, while still fighting local antisemitism, they organized a meat boycott that got national attention. They knocked on doors and spoke to their neighbors. They pleaded with butchers to close until prices dropped. That didn’t work initially, but butchers eventually joined the boycott and closed.
The women also pleaded with kosher rabbis, many of whom were suspected of being corrupt from being paid by meat companies to inspect kosher meat. They broke into Sabbath services to speak to orthodox congregations that typically relegated them to upstairs balconies or other female ghettos kept behind curtains. They wrote letters to their local newspapers. They got a lot of media attention. The New York Times lied about and dumped on these women worse than the meat companies had. When words failed, the mostly female strikers fought it out in the streets stopping anyone who bought or sold meat. They wielded, slung, spoiled, and burned lots of meat. They also broke a lot of windows and ruined several butcher shops. Many of the women paid a steep price for their actions during the boycott in the form of arrests, unusually high fines, and jail time.
The women did not declare victory and end their boycott on any one particular day. They built coalitions with sympathetic trade unions and political organizations that added monitoring food prices to their agenda and expanded the boycott, getting butchers and rabbis to see reason and join. They switched to fish and vegetables despite nagging husbands and children and eventually opened several meat cooperatives. They ran down demand so much that prices eventually dropped. Prices went up again in 1912 due to war speculation and again during the Great Depression due to company withholding and price fixing, and women used what they and their mothers learned in 1902 to win price reductions.
In the 2020s, we have food inflation again, and we have food trusts again, yet no one does anything but complain, and governments put on a show and do little else. According to a 2021 article in The Guardian, mega food companies control every link in the American food supply chain, and politicians love them because of lobbying and campaign donations. Only 15 cents of every food purchase dollar goes to farmers, and the rest goes to processing and marketing. Scrolling down the page of this article, you’ll see the percentage of many separate food types controlled by these unchecked trust
The Biden Administration, often accused of being socialist, does nothing to slow down the gravy train of corporate donors. The Republicans? Don’t make me laugh. TR and Taft would be more than ashamed of that bunch trying to increase shortages and reinstitute child labor. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act remains, as amended by the Clayton Antitrust Act, that closed some loopholes that let companies merge. But, the law is rarely enforced, and the right-wingers (including Democrats) on the Supreme Court, the most corrupt version in many years, are unlikely to enforce it.
Unlikely to be successful in the corporate and Federalist Society-owned courts, there is a pending federal suit against Google. There’s a pending DC case and an expected federal case against Amazon. These companies meet with the booster clubs that used to be regulatory agencies to forestall enforcement.
Rep Katie Porter introduced a bill that Biden Democrats (in addition to the worthless Republicans) continue to ignore. Other than against Amazon, and while the Biden Administration claims it’s being tough on big agra, there’s little action against big food, and what exists sits pending settlement. Federal officials say the law is too tough to enforce, but it was tougher before Clayton. They could always try to pass something better but that might be hard and our politicians don’t do hard and don’t lead constituents. They only pander and follow.
Democrats believe there’s no need for activism because the Biden Administration created a committee on competition, The White House Competition Counsel. You can see the Counsel’s activities by scrolling down to Competition in Food and Agriculture and clicking on the little +. There appears to be some planned enforcement and some grant money and guaranteed loans for independent companies to increase competition. The latter may be optimistic as any companies coming out of it will find tough supply chains and competition and anti-competitive behavior to rival the Chicago Meat Trust — and the modern big players have a lot more money and can incite cults with their media and social media following.
While there are a few food co-ops around, no one talks about organizing any large ones to compete with the big corps because of the dirty S-word. Here’s the NCBA impact report showing the small numbers, but good for them anyway. The $225 million to combat meat monopolies seems to have disappeared from the discussion. The rest of the Counsel's actions don’t address competition and prices directly. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition attempts to educate the public on the lack of competition in agriculture.
Unfortunately, with all our resources and communication, the name Trump is mentioned exponentially more than the name of this committee or any other efforts to stop trust and monopoly activity. Biden appears to have lost TR’s big stick. He’s up to his eyeballs in Ukraine. Congress is up to its eyeballs on Hunter Biden. The courts are bought. People still vote to attack people they’ve been incited to hate instead of voting for their own interests. Antitrust efforts are reduced to a website and a few doomed lawsuits.
No one’s organizing, not a peep about any of this on all our new shiny tools. I am not telling people to resort to violence. The Jewish women of the early 20th century succeeded when they changed their tactics, eliminating the violence. I am saying that we have everything the Jewish women didn’t have in 1902, resources, communication tools, and information at our fingertips, and we can’t manage to get together to reduce consumption enough to make anyone take notice or make it clear to politicians that they must knock it off with the nonsense and do the people’s business in the people’s house.