SLOVENIAN HISTORY, CULTURE, RELIGION AND HERITAGE Part 3

 

A Diverse Workforce

            The meat packing facilities in the Armourdale district of Kansas City, Kansas had a deep history tied to regional railroads and meatpacking plants and served as a major industrial hub for the nation's dominant meatpacking operations.  But, they needed enormous amounts of labor-- much of it hard, dangerous, and low paid. The packing plants drew waves of recent European immigrants and African Americans to Kansas City, Kansas, creating a vibrant, multi-ethnic working-class community in surrounding neighborhoods. Croatians, Slovenians, Poles, Russians, Lithuanians, and other Europeans settled in neighborhoods like Strawberry Hill and Armourdale.

Mexican immigrants came to work in the plants and on the railroads, building communities in Argentine and Armourdale. African American workers were part of the workforce as well.

            This influx gave Kansas City, Kansas, in particular its deeply ethnic, working-class character, visible to this day in its churches, festivals, and food traditions.

The Demographics of the West Bottoms Neighborhoods

            The rapid growth of the Kansas City stockyards transformed the geography around the confluence of the Kansas (Kaw) and Missouri rivers. At its peak, up to 20,000 workers packed into the region. Because the West Bottoms floor itself was largely swallowed up by massive industrial complexes, rail lines, and livestock pens, distinct working-class neighborhoods emerged on the floor and the surrounding bluffs. These neighborhoods developed unique demographic blueprints shaped by wave after wave of global migration.

1.      The Industrial Floor: Hell's Half Acre and 'The Patch'

            The earliest and poorest workers lived directly on the low-lying floodplain, right up against the stench, noise, and soot of the slaughterhouses.  Located in the West Bottoms near the meeting point of the rivers, this area became a densely packed ghetto in the 1870s and 1880s. It was a melting pot of poor African Americans and Irish immigrants living in squalid, makeshift shacks and crowded boarding houses without running water or sewage.

            Situated on the flats near the riverbanks, this area became the landing pad for thousands of Central and Eastern European immigrants arriving in the late 19th century. It was notorious for its severe overcrowding until a devastating flood in 1903 wiped out many of the shanties, forcing residents to look for higher ground.

2.      Strawberry Hill: The Slavic Enclave

            When workers fled the floods and filth of "The Patch," they moved straight up the steep bluffs onto Splitlog's Hill on the Kansas side, which became known as Strawberry Hill.  Between 1890 and 1930, Strawberry Hill grew into a tightly knit powerhouse of Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, and Polish immigrants.

            The neighborhood subdivided into distinct ethnic blocks, each anchored by its own church, which served as the literal and cultural center of life (such as St. John the Baptist for the Croatians and Holy Family for the Slovenians). They built narrow shotgun houses and small cottages tightly packed together, creating an ‘Old World’ village feel overlooking the sprawling packing plants below.

3.      Armourdale: The Flatland Suburb

            Directly west of the West Bottoms, nestled in a massive oxbow curve of the Kansas River, sat Armourdale. It was explicitly named after the Armour Packing Company, which drove the area’s economic engine.  Unlike the heavy Slavic concentrations on the hill, Armourdale was a sprawling flatland neighborhood inhabited by a mix of native-born white Americans, German and Irish laborers, and a growing Black population.

            Armourdale was repeatedly battered by industrial floods (most notably in 1903 and 1951). Following the catastrophic 1951 flood, the neighborhood's demographics shifted dramatically. As older European-American families utilized post-WWII housing credits to move to outer suburbs, Armourdale transitioned into a vibrant center for Mexican-American families, who became the backbone of the late-era packing houses and rail yards.

4.      The West Side: The Latino and Irish Pivot

            On the Missouri side of the bluffs, just above the West Bottoms, sat the West Side neighborhood.  Originally home to Irish immigrants (with family names like Casey, Dalton, and Scanlon) who walked down the bluff paths to work every morning, the neighborhood began to change in the 1910s.

            Recruited heavily by the Santa Fe Railroad and the meatpacking giants during WWI labor shortages, a massive wave of Mexican immigrants settled into the West Side. By the 1920s, it had evolved into the cultural heart of Kansas City’s Latino community, full of businesses and restaurants that directly catered to the shifts coming off the killing floors.

Labor Strife and Unions

            Industry giants included Swift and Company, Armour, Wilson & Co. (which took over the former Schwarzschild & Sulzberger facility), and Morris & Company which operated massive slaughter and processing facilities along the Kansas Riverfront.

            The labor history of the Kansas City stockyards is a dramatic story of extreme working conditions, deep multi-ethnic solidarity, and brutal institutional pushback. Because meatpacking was Kansas City's core engine of wealth, the West Bottoms became a fierce battleground for workers trying to secure livable wages and humane hours.

            As a result of the challenges inherent in stockyard labor, the factories relied heavily on a malleable working class. Census data reveals that recent arrivals from Ireland, France, and Germany worked alongside Dutch, Scandinavian, and Italian laborers. The British Empire was well represented with Australian, Canadian, Indian, Scot, and Welsh workers filling many different roles throughout the industry. After plant managers sent recruiters to eastern Europe, the trickle of workers from Russia, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, and especially Croatia became a steady flow.

            Even as Kansas City meatpackers publicly proclaimed that "nationality makes very little difference" in their labor force, they maintained a labor hierarchy. Germans and Swedes were considered "superior" and, of the more recent immigrants, "the Russians are regarded as much more efficient than the Poles, and the Greeks are considered more efficient than the Italians, but not as good as the Croatians, Slovaks, and Lithuanians." Most employers approved of the Japanese "on account of their quickness and quietness while at work," and everyone agreed that the Greeks and the ever-troublesome Italians were "unsatisfactory."

            But in many ways the most significant minority cohort of Kansas City meatpacking laborers were was African Americans. Blacks began arriving in the city in large numbers in the 1870s and were immediately drawn into livestock processing, a stark contrast to the later entrance of black labor into other meatpacking centers. In the early decades of the 20th century, the packinghouses were the single largest employer of African American laborers in Kansas City. Nearly 25 percent of meatpacking workers were black.

            Before unionization took hold, labor in the packing houses was incredibly taxing. Workers endured 16-to-18-hour shifts in intense heat, freezing cold, or damp, hazardous conditions. Despite these conditions, the meatpacking giants actively weaponized race and nationality to prevent workers from organizing. A spokesman for one large packing interest explained that company policy directed black workers to the most unpleasant jobs on the killing floor, where "the heat is intense and the smell uncongenial to men of more sensitive disposition." In a congressional employment investigation, one manager reported, "Negro laborers seem to take quite naturally to packing-house work, especially in the occupations where the hours are irregular." Perhaps just as important, packers also maintained that a sizable percentage of black workers on the killing floor would inhibit worker solidarity. Owners counted on the barriers of language, custom, and especially, race, to keep labor interests divided and weak Management frequently hired waves of new European immigrants and African Americans, hoping that language barriers and racial tensions would keep the workforce divided. Instead, the shared hardship of the killing floors fostered an unexpected multi-ethnic labor coalition.

            Meatpacking emerged as one of the main sites of labor agitation in the city. First in 1893, then again in 1894 and 1895, workers in the factories pushed back against owner attempts to reduce wages and speed up production. These collective actions were small in scale and did not lead to the unionization of meatpacking labor in Kansas City, but unions were coming to the yards. First under the Knights of Labor, then later the American Federation of Labor, attempts to band together were more successful as the 19th century ended. Even as organizing remained difficult in the city, by 1897 the nation’s largest meatpacking union, Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, was drawing Kansas City workers to their banner.

            In 1902, stockyard workers walked off the job demanding overtime pay and higher wages. The strike became a powerful demonstration of working-class solidarity when allied industries—including railroad workers, ice wagon drivers, express company drivers, and refrigeration coal workers—refused to touch anything bound for the meatpacking plants, temporarily crippling the district.

            After several years of consolidation, in 1904 Amalgamated called a nationwide strike of packinghouse laborers that impacted racial solidarity in the city. In response to wage cuts and the continued use of immigrant labor to replace union workers, more than 7,000 Amalgamated members, black and white, walked off the job in July.

            Meatpackers tried to keep their plants open by recruiting new workers from the city and the surrounding rural communities. They also began importing non-union labor from other midwestern packing cities. In response, the union assigned members to watch the main railway stops, including Union Depot, in an effort to keep strikebreakers from entering the city. The strikers did their best to disrupt operations and created special patrols to keep strikebreakers away from the plants. Owners, in turn, began housing strikebreakers inside the factories and, in an example of the extreme divisiveness of the strike, stepped up their efforts to recruit African American scabs and provide them with weapons. As historian Sherry Schirmer dryly noted, "In a strike-torn city with a southern heritage, arming black workers was an unusual tactic." But as the strike wore on, packinghouse managers proved "willing to risk a race riot" to alienate strikers and scabs.

            Violence would come to the city that summer as a series of small confrontations between workers and strikebreakers marred the West Bottoms, but unlike what occurred in other meatpacking cities such as Chicago and Omaha, racial conflict did not escalate in Kansas City. Despite labor’s pronouncement to "stay out until Christmas," the 1904 strike did not last, and workers returned to the factories without the wage guarantees and union protection they desired.            Although the strike failed to secure immediate demands, it marked a turning point for the community. Black and white union members successfully unified against corporate-hired strikebreakers, proving that racial divisions could be bridged for a collective cause. 

            On September 4, 1917, more than 50 canners, black and white and mostly women, left the line at the city’s Cudahy plant. With factories in several midwestern cities and an international distribution network, Cudahy was one of the largest meatpackers in the country. Common labor demands—a wage increase and an eight-hour day—precipitated the walkout, and by the late afternoon, more than 300 workers joined the campaign. These strikers paraded from plant to plant in the packinghouse district, calling for other laborers to support the walkout. The Kansas City Journal described the racial composition of the march, noting, "many in the procession were women, and nearly half the number were negroes."

            Two days after the walkout, more than 2,000 laborers, once again both black and white, lined the streets of Armourdale. Less than a week after the initial protest, sympathetic strikes spread to city railroad workers, freight handlers, and soap producers. A federal arbitrator ended the short strike by forcing Cudahy to rehire the strikers and agree to a pay increase for all laborers. A strike under similar circumstances less than a year later, in 1918, led to even more gains for black stockyard workers in Kansas City, including an eight-hour day and equitable rules for overtime.

            These were important victories for stockyard labor, and Kansas City’s African American packing workers were in an unusually strong position. World War I restricted immigration, limiting an important source of labor, while at the same moment, European demand for American meat reached record levels. With few options, the city’s packinghouse owners tried to keep labor peace with frequent concessions to workers. But if the war created a unique moment of political leverage, black workers must also be given credit for maximizing their opportunities. African American laborers created a working-class movement for shop control that altered the conventional narrative of racial politics in the city. And there is little question that a key element of this strategy was to engage black workers with organized labor. As an editor from the Kansas City Sun reminded readers, "Don’t be a scab…we advise you to belong to the working class." If the "unions offer to be fair with you, join hands with them in struggle, capital against labor."

            These successful protests bracket the opening of Kansas City’s important period of growth, and it would be a strike two decades later that would serve as a capstone to this era of change and tumult. The events of 1917 and 1918 occurred within the context of the First World War. Soon after, however, the federal labor apparatus designed to support worker rights was dismantled. Immigration returned to pre-war levels, and new arrivals, often less interested in old traditions and workplace politics, proved difficult to organize in the Kansas City yards. Further, the political constriction of the First Red Scare targeted unionists as unpatriotic communists, and the devastating race riots that rocked several midwestern packing cities eroded worker solidarity.

            Following the disruptions of World War I, national meatpacking unions pushed for major reforms. However, a series of bitter strikes in 1921 and 1922 ended poorly for local labor. The packers capitalized on the defeat by introducing corporate-controlled pensions, incentive wage programs, and stock benefits explicitly designed to bypass union influence. For nearly a decade after, local business leaders boasted that Kansas City labor was "settled and contented".  There "have been only seven strikes since 1898 and none since 1921." Here, all "industries operate on an open shop basis."

            The labor movement roared back during the Great Depression under the banner of the CIO's Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee. In late August 1938, Kansas City’s largest packing plant, Armour, raised the "kill," the quota for daily beef processing. The move was announced without worker consultation, and six hide cellar workers—five African Americans and one Croatian—complained to their stewards on the killing floor. The following morning, the men left the line to attend a grievance hearing with company managers. Jobs in the hide cellar were among the most menial and least desirable in the packing factories. After skinners removed the cow’s valuable hide, it traveled down a chute to the hide cellar below, where workers, most often African American, processed the leather. They shook, stretched, brushed, and salted the hides, allowing them to cure for several months. The stench in this part of the house was particularly oppressive, and chronic health problems plagued hide cellar workers.

            From 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., the workers met with plant officials and then returned to their positions in the factory. The following day, Armour officials not only rejected worker appeals to reduce the kill, but also docked the pay of the workers who attended the grievance meeting. The United Packing House Workers of America, Local Number 15 asked for $22.09, payment for the workers and their "6½ hours away from the line." Armour refused.

            At 10 a.m. on Saturday, September 10, after the chain was fully loaded with cattle, nearly 2,000 Armour workers left the killing line and occupied the plant. Under a headline banner that announced Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia, the Kansas City Star broke the news of "An Armour Sit Down." Reflecting the new emphasis on a single labor movement, the paper quoted a strike organizer who declared, "A grievance of one worker is a grievance of the entire union." Over the next four days, nearly 1,000 workers, including 400 African American laborers, remained in control of the plant. Inside the factory, workers reported a lively, even festive, atmosphere. Neighborhood families brought food in buckets to the workers perched at the locked factory gates. The strike ended in a decisive victory, with the company forced into mediation and mandated to pay back-wages.

            In the final compromise, the company and the union agreed to split the cost of the beef that workers left to rot on the line, but Armour agreed to accept the strikers back without punishment and award back pay to the hide cellar workers. The strike was costly to both management and the union. Armour lost nearly $100,000 in revenue, and the union share of the spoiled beef was almost $15,000, but it was the recovered $22 for six low-skilled ethnic and African American workers that was the most significant. The union stood firm behind them and, with the back pay concession, solidified control of the floor.

            Following World War II, the unions held significant sway in the West Bottoms, pushing wages up. However, this newfound leverage ultimately accelerated the industry's departure. Faced with high union labor costs in the city, rising urban real estate prices, and the devastating 1951 flood that crippled the infrastructure, meatpacking giants chose to shut down rather than rebuild. They decentralized their operations, moving to rural, non-unionized towns across the Great Plains to escape the formidable labor strongholds they had fought for decades.

The Tom Pendergast Era

            The Pendergast political machine interacted with Kansas City's labor unions through a complex, transactional relationship built on mutual survival, corporate negotiation, and electoral power. Rather than acting out of ideological solidarity with working-class labor, Boss Tom Pendergast operated with pure pragmatism, using labor unions as dependable voting blocks while positioning himself as the ultimate mediator between workers and industrial titans.

            The relationship evolved across three distinct phases:

            Roots in the West Bottoms Saloons (1890s–1910s):  The Pendergast machine actually began in the heart of the stockyards district. Jim Pendergast, Tom’s older brother, opened a salon and hotel in the industrial West Bottoms. To secure the loyalty of the multi-ethnic, low-wage meatpacking workforce, Jim Pendergast provided informal social safety nets. He offered free lunches, paid for workers' coal in the winter, and found jobs for newly arrived immigrants.  In return for this grassroots welfare, the packing house laborers overwhelmingly voted for Pendergast-backed candidates. This forged an early, unbreakable bond between the machine and the industrial working class.

            Pragmatic Co-optation and Strike Mediation (1920s–1930s):  When Tom Pendergast took control, he institutionalized this relationship. He recognized that independent, aggressive labor strikes threatened the economic stability of his "wide-open town". Pendergast frequently stepped in to settle labor disputes before they could cripple the stockyards. If a strike loomed, Pendergast would pressure corporate executives to grant minor concessions—such as incremental wage increases—to appease the workers. In exchange, he expected union leaders to keep their workers in line and deliver their blocks of votes on election day.

            While meatpacking unions remained somewhat autonomous, Pendergast completely dominated construction and trade unions. His Ready-Mixed Concrete company and allied construction firms were awarded nearly all city contracts. To work on these massive public projects, laborers had to join machine-friendly unions, effectively turning trade organizations into branches of his political apparatus.

            The New Deal and the Rise of the CIO (Late 1930s):  The relationship grew strained during the Great Depression. With the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) in 1935, workers gained federal protections to organize independently of local political bosses. New, aggressive industrial unions like the CIO's Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee began launching strikes—such as the 1938 Armour Sit-Down Strike—without seeking the machine's permission or blessings.

            Pendergast could no longer dictate terms to the packing house workers. Instead, his machine had to actively court the increasingly powerful CIO. The machine adjusted by passing local pro-labor resolutions and ensuring that city police did not violently crack down on union picket lines, desperate to keep the labor vote as the machine faced mounting federal investigations.