Packinghouse Daughter
By Cheri Register
Perennial/HarperCollins, 278 pages, $13 paper
Social mobility has long been celebrated in American culture. Throughout our national history it has been pursued by millions, achieved by many and pointed to as an ultimate validation of the American economic system. The thornier issues of social class and class identity-its definitions, impact, consequences and implications-are often occluded in such celebrations.
These matters are subtly and skillfully explored in Cheri Register’s provocative and often beautifully written memoir, “Packinghouse Daughter,” a moving coming-of-age story set in Albert Lea, Minn., originally published in hardcover by the Minnesota Historical Society Press in 2000 and released in paperback by Perennial/HarperCollins late last year.
The child of a packinghouse worker father and a seamstress and occasional department store salesclerk mother, Register eventually went off to college, receiving a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in Scandinavian literature and languages, and then settled for much of her adult life in Minneapolis. Yet, she writes, “I say that I am `from’ Albert Lea,” the hometown whose industrial working-class community nourished and shaped her. “The place we meant to escape has formed us nonetheless.”
A visit home from college in the early 1960s impressed upon Register the distance she had traveled in a short time. When she expressed interest in buying a workshirt, then fashionable among her more well-to-do classmates, her father volunteered to bring one home from the packinghouse where he worked. He did, and it was stained with hog blood. “All I know for certain is that at this moment I realized I had truly left home,” Register writes. “I would never have to take a job on the sliced bacon line”-women’s work in the packinghouse-“nor would I live in dread of a phone call telling me that my husband was on his way to the hospital in an ambulance.”
If Register had indeed left home, she had been prepared for the departure much earlier in her life. Her childhood was “shaped by rising expectations, buoyed by a post-war economic boom.” As an elementary school student, her class took field trips to local places of employment; the visit to her father’s plant, Wilson & Co., was a disturbing one. Although she could not recall her teacher “ever spelling out the message she had planted deep inside us,” nonetheless it was later clear: “Start planning your escape. Everything you do from now on must help you out of here.”
Albert Lea, which is 100 miles south of Minneapolis, was founded a century ago by Scandinavian immigrants and their children. The local packinghouse, established in the late 19th Century, soon came under the control of out-of-town corporate interests and became Wilson & Co., presided over by Thomas E. Wilson, an industrial magnate whose mansion was hundreds of miles away in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood. Wilson & Co. lay just outside Albert Lea’s city limits, allowing the firm to avoid town taxes and public health codes until it was finally annexed in 1961 (a move that, predictably, it resisted fiercely). The plant itself occupied 37 acres and exercised a tremendous influence on the local environment and people’s lives: The air on the north side of town was filed with rancid-smelling smoke; effluents turned Albert Lea Lake “slimy”; and the noon steam whistle alerted workers and their families to the passage of time. More than that, it sustained a community, keeping “many of us fed and clothed and sheltered,” Register recalls. Or rather, as she observes elsewhere, it was her father and her friends’ fathers (and some mothers) who “earned the wages that kept us clothed and fed and full of dreams.”
Nationwide, the meatpacking industry supported hundreds of thousands over the years. The expansion of the industry in the mid- and late 19th Century was facilitated by growing railroad networks linking rural producers to urban packinghouses and consumers, and by the advent of refrigerated rail cars that made long-distance transportation of slaughtered and prepared meat feasible. Chicago became the hog and beef butcher to the world with the opening of its Union Stockyards in 1865. If cities and towns like Kansas City, Mo., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Austin and Albert Lea, Minn., could not compete with Chicago’s size, their meat-processing industries nonetheless generated widespread employment. Contemporaries marveled at the meatpacking industry’s subdivision of labor, mechanical conveyers and “disassembly lines.” Tens of thousands of immigrants from Europe, and later black migrants from the American South, earned a precarious livelihood in what socialist reformer Upton Sinclair termed “The Jungle.” In that 1906 muckraking novel, Sinclair took aim at the industry’s inhuman working conditions and their impact on the people who slaughtered animals and processed meat. What caught the attention of politicians and the middle-class public, however, was not the harsh treatment of working women and men but the condition of the meat; the ensuing uproar led not to labor-reform legislation but to modest health and inspection measures. It was left to packinghouse workers themselves to unionize and insist upon, and win, dramatic improvements.
Improvements notwithstanding, packinghouse work remained difficult, dangerous and unpleasant, facts inscribed in Register’s father’s daily routine. Gordy Register had been a farm laborer, a carpenter and a wholesale grocery salesman before getting a job with Wilson in 1943. He remained on the company’s payroll until he retired in 1974. Working as a skilled millwright at Wilson’s, he labored in a noisy environment; upon returning home from work, he spoke loudly “until his ears had adjusted to the quiet.” The work was also demanding and long; he left before dawn and, after putting in overtime, returned home in the late afternoon and would fall asleep stretched out on the floor. Injuries were common (Gordy himself broke two wrists and suffered permanent spinal damage, laying him up for six months, in his 29th year on the job), for packinghouses had the highest accident rates in industrial America, a dubious distinction they retain.
Yet for all the unpleasantness, the packinghouses offered a route to a good life for workers and their families. Register credits this not to the beneficence of Wilson & Co. but to the struggles of packinghouse workers and their union: “Packinghouse wages were among the highest in town, thanks to Local 6 of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), . . . which kept a vigil on pay and working conditions.”
Born in the labor upheavals of the 1930s and affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the UPWA was an exceptionally democratic industrial union that relied on the involvement of its rank and file. In a city like Chicago, where the union had its headquarters, the UPWA drew its organizational strength from left-wing radicals and civil rights activists to forge an interracial alliance that advanced the interests of all workers, including those of its large black membership. Register later recalled the union’s letterhead, with a drawing of a black hand and white hand clasped in brotherhood. Wilson & Co. in Albert Lea employed no blacks in the 1950s (few, if any, lived in the town), but the union’s general interracial spirit touched the Register household. “It was simply right for us to side with people of another race,” Gordy told his daughter as they watched the unfolding racial crisis in the South on TV in the late 1950s.
In the reconstruction of a history–of the life of an individual, a family, or a community–a reliance on memory or family lore alone can produce an incomplete, even distorted picture, as Register recognizes. ” ‘Oral tradition’ . . . conjures a false, sentimental image of the working-class family gathered around the kitchen table for an after-supper heritage lesson. Stories get told in spottier fashion than that.” And sometimes, they never get told at all. Register’s father talked little about his work; what happened inside the packinghouse walls remained a mystery to her. Similarly, her friend Bill’s father worked in the plant for 25 years. But Bill “still doesn’t know exactly what he did there,” for the work inside the plant walls was simply not a subject of conversation. Bill got the message, though: “The work . . . was dreadful.”
Not surprisingly, while growing up, Register never heard of her parents’ family’s failures as farmers; some aspects of family heritage are not proudly passed down through the generations. But she also learned little if anything about her family’s own radical lineage or the struggles of packinghouse and other workers in Albert Lea in previous decades. The long threads of progressive politics that connected the past to her world remained invisible until she began research for her memoir. Investigating the 1937 American Gas Machine Co. sit-down strike in Albert Lea in the microfilmed pages of the Freeborn Patriot, a short-lived radical weekly, she discovered that a great-grandfather, Elbert H. Ostrander, was not just an unsuccessful farmer but a self-described “dissenter” and a member of a broader progressive community that included the Independent Union of All Workers and the Farmer-Labor Party. Leaping off the front page of a 1935 issue was Ostrander’s byline on an article denouncing a local agricultural drainage project of milling and refining companies.
Archival and library research allow Register to test the veracity of her memories and the stories she has collected to fill in the silences and correct subtle misrepresentations. She relies heavily on microfilm and memory in her carefully crafted account of the 1959 labor conflict (workers called it a lockout, the company called it a strike) at the Wilson plant. Of the two, she notes, microfilm “is the sturdier” source, “but it lacks the passion of memory.” As a “source of information, the emotional storehouse is random and unreliable,” she honestly acknowledges, but it was “emotional memory” that compelled her to write about the strike, and “it animates my face and flutters my hands as I do.”
The 109-day Wilson strike in the brutally cold winter of 1959-1960 sharply divided Albert Lea, pitting strikers and their families against newspaper editors, white-collar workers, plant managers and strikebreakers. When violence erupted, the governor, sympathetic to the union, ordered the plant closed and sent in the Minnesota National Guard. Albert Lea “looked like a setting for a World War II movie”; whether the presence of troops “looked like liberation or an invasion or an embarrassing blotch on the community’s image depended on where you stood.” A federal court soon ruled that the governor had exceeded his authority, and the plants reopened, staffed by hundreds of new strikebreakers. Arbitration ultimately ended the strike, with union members losing on most substantive issues but winning back their jobs.
The 1959 conflict was a pivotal event in then-14-year-old Cheri Register’s life. Although she watched mostly from the sidelines, Register recalled that “I was a proud and angry packinghouse kid living, if only momentarily, at the center of the world.” The strike represented for Register “a classic loss-of-innocence, a jarring into consciousness of the blurry boundaries of right and wrong.” Her sensitive and balanced account gives voice to union leaders and packinghouse supervisors alike, and addresses the strike’s physical and psychological toll on the community. While her loyalties remain unhesitatingly with the UPWA, she remains throughout appreciative of the broader ambiguities inherent in any moral and political conflict.
Over the next several decades, automation substantially reduced the number of packinghouse jobs, hard times forced the democratic UPWA to merge with rival unions for survival, Wilson & Co. went bankrupt and the plant changed ownership several times. Wages and benefits for the remaining workers were substantially lower than they were in the 1950s.
“The meatpacking industry has become unrecognizable to those who knew it in the days of the UPWA,” Register concludes. There was no forward march of progress for workers in modern packinghouses; rather, the industry had turned back the clock. ” ‘The New Jungle’ is investigative journalists’ term for the modern packinghouse.”
While she hardly sentimentalizes the earlier, more economically robust Albert Lea, Register laments the passing of the old order. When the U.S. “lost the secure, stable blue-collar communities that made it possible for families like ours to thrive and for children like us to aspire to jobs less harsh or tedious than those our parents performed,” it lost something of value, she writes. Not only are “many of its hard-working citizens . . . materially poorer than they would have been in the heyday of the meatpacking industry, with a strong, focused union to defend their interests,” but “[t]he country is spiritually poorer for it” as well.
Prepared from an early age for social mobility, Register and her cohort escaped from the plant, and from Albert Lea, before the downward spiral began. Two-thirds of her graduating high school class eventually moved out of the area, many presumably climbing the educational and economic ladder into better jobs somewhere–anywhere–else. “We belong to a generation of working-class children propelled into the middle class by postwar prosperity, higher education, and our parents’ determination to spare us the spirit-wrenching disappointments they endured as the youth of the Great Depression,” she says.
But there is a painful trade-off involved. “[T]o be successful, which means free from grueling labor, the children of blue-collar families must be driven from home, away from the familiar and secure. We make our parents proud, yet also mystify them with our alien ways.” Register may have escaped the harsh world of packinghouse work, but she cannot leave it fully behind, for she bears the imprint of its values–the importance of family and honorable labor and a sense of justice and fairness–in her life away from Albert Lea.
“Packinghouse Daughter” deserves a wide readership, for it succeeds on many levels: as a memoir, community history, literature and social analysis.
Issues of social class and class identity are subtly and skillfully explored in Cheri Register’s provocative and often beautifully written memoir, `Packinghouse Daughter.’
