Ocean State Libraries

The horrifying conditions in the meatpacking industry in the early 1900's are revealed through the experiences of immigrants as they try to make a living by working in the Chicago stockyards.

"It all began when Pat LaFrieda's great-grandfather Anthony LaFrieda decided to pack up and move his family from Italy to New York in search of a better life, setting up the family's first retail butcher shop in 1922 in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Almost one hundred years later, Pat LaFrieda, a fourth-generation butcher and third-generation meat purveyor, is at the helm of a family-run business that has been providing meat to customers for decades, through...

"By the late nineteenth century, Americans rich and poor had come to expect high-quality fresh beef with almost every meal. Beef production in the United States had gone from small-scale, localised operations to a highly centralised industry spanning the country, with cattle bred on ranches in the rural West, slaughtered in Chicago, and consumed in the nation's rapidly growing cities. Red Meat Republic tells the remarkable story of the violent conflict...