A Strange Sense of Deja Vu: The Packers and the Feds, 1915-82

On 23 November 1981, the Packers Consent Decree of 1920 was terminated on the joint motion of the Justice Department and Swift Independent Packing Company. This ended a long legal battle that began shortly after the decree was signed. The decree, agreed to by the old Big Five (Armour, Cudahy, Morris, Swift, and Wilson), became progressively less effective as the meatpacking industry evolved. By 1956 conditions in the industry had changed so dramatically that the court should have set aside all of the decree's provisions upstream from packing (See [1 and 2]). Swift was the leader in seven attempts to modify the decree, and these attempts proved increasingly successful. In 1971, 1975, and 1980, major modifications were approved. As a result of the 1980 proceedings, the decree was scheduled to be dissolved in 1985 unless the Justice Department objected. Justice saw no reason to wait. The old Big Five, which became the Big Four when Morris joined Armour in the 1920s, no longer comprise the top firms in the meat industry. Only Swift remains one of the four top firms, and only Swift remains in Chicago. Armour is a unit of Greyhound Corp. of Phoenix; Cudahy is a unit of General Host Corp. of Phoenix; and Wilson is now Wilson Foods Corp. of Oklahoma City. Swift Independent Packing Company was created in late 1980 from all the major fresh meats assets of Esmark, Inc. of Chicago. New firms, not restricted by the 1920 Consent Decree, have grown and replaced the old Big Five, the firms that the FTC claimed in 1917 were in a position to monopolize all the nation's food supply. The new Big Four (Iowa Beef Processors, Swift, Missouri Beef, and Dubuque Packing) are now attracting the attention once received by their predecessors. A 1979 study released by the House Small Business Committee (the Williams report) argued that