Making Machines of Animals: The International Livestock ExhibitionBy NealKnapp, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. 202 pp. $60.00 (hardcover) ISBN: 978‐1421446554

The introduction to Neal Knapp's Making Machines of Animals positions a fundamental role of conspicuousness essential to understanding the social worth of the International Livestock Exhibition during the early twentieth century. Rather than hide the brutality of slaughterhouses and butchering in general, the industrial force of cattle agriculture was normalized due to being witnessed and promoted. Using the Exhibition as a case study, Knapp analyzes the livestock improvement movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through a focus on standardization—as the movers and shakers in Chicago stockyards set livestock norms through canons that disseminated to the nation, and later throughout world agricultural markets. The modern indicators of proper and improved livestock agriculture were promoted out of Chicago, placing specific standards of meats on dinner tables throughout the nation. Focusing on the rhetorical and material spaces between producers and consumers, the places of packers, professors, and animals, allows Knapp to explore networks of supposed efficiency created in the name of purportedly improved American agriculture. The detailed work consequently pairs well with recent cultural histories on cattle, discourse, and American identity within John Ryan Fischer's Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai'i (2015) and Joshua Specht's Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (2019). The specific combination of readings concerning Chapters 2 and 3 would also correspond well with Thomas Rath's The Dread Plague and the Cow Killers: The Politics of Animal Disease in Mexico and the World (2022). As the introduction to Making Machines of Animals details, from 1900 to 1975, different versions of a large International Livestock Exhibition took place at the stockyards in Chicago. The centralization of industrial agriculture at the site each year linked the public and private sectors of the American economy in the search for finer meats. A promotion of Chicago meatpacking industries above many other concerns, the Exhibition began as a way to overcome supply issues of the late nineteenth century, as demand soared for a growing nation of burgeoning immigration and increasing ascendancy of meat-eating promised by quick shipments on western rails. Chapter 1 explores how Chicago became the primary base for American meatpacking through the initial organization of the Exhibition, and why packers and professors both came to understand promoting engagement with livestock improvement as vital for the causes of both of their disciplines and the growth of meat markets. The goals of increasing income for farmers and packers, and stability on the supply lines for consumers, drove the expansion of the Exhibition's influence and material size into the early twentieth century. Focusing on refining feed and improved husbandry linked more colleges and scientists to the Exhibition into the age of American eugenics into the 1910s and 1920s, as questions of soil fertility, animal ancestries, and patterns of breeding began to dominate links between land grant universities and the Exhibition's leadership. Tied through many of those links, as Chapter 2 argues, reformers both at the packing sites and in colleges focused on agricultural improvement that worked through eugenicist movements to homogenize supposedly better breeds for greater production of meats. American packers and professors focused on highly racialized terms through bringing British cattle to the fore of American markets and then medicalized the southern border through preventing cattle from Central and South America significant entrance into homogenizing livestock bloodlines. The ideal of the purebred cattle machine was centralized through the Exhibition and then became a national motive under “breeding up” and “better sire” campaigns promoted in diverse breeders' magazines and academic journals. Chapter 3 then focuses on how these campaigns linked with earlier European ideals of improvement to turn animals into technical machines through specialization. To alter the meanings of animality through more technical language, judges at the Exhibition focused on efficiency while standardizing rules for the best of beasts based on the width, depth, and formation of bodies for the finest production of prime meats, as often based on the judging manuals of Charles Plumb and Robert Curtis. At the Exhibition, due to these increasingly numerical adjudicating trends, the most important technology became the animal itself, emerging as a machine within the entire production regime, including the plugging in of purebred sires to improve less efficient lines. Both as metaphor and reality, the ideal of the animal as a machine became an organizing principle as well for numerous members of the public who toured the stockyards at each Exhibition. The penultimate chapter takes this discussion to policy issues related to land grant university funding and expertise, especially linking student contests on breeding and feeding to goals of more prominent uniformity across the industry. The final chapter then looks at the successes and failures of the Exhibition to achieve its goals, pushing the timeline of earlier chapters that generally end in 1920 to later twentieth-century concerns of professors, producers, and packers. Even as homogeneity became a goal for creating purebred cattle within these handpicked meat production regimes, the Exhibition generally failed in its ability to keep the entire market uniform as diverse producers ran to extremes to often challenge the centrality of the Exhibitions' preferences. As well, in the later twentieth century, producers often also turned away from eugenics in favor of promoting heterogeneity to protect a healthy supply of beef after diverse pestilences threatened homogenous bloodlines of cattle during the middle of the twentieth century. On American CAFOs today, technocratic language placed upon animals is commonly used to normalize increasing brutality for the advantage of profit. Turning livestock into machines rather than animals allows for public willingness to turn a blind eye from the disgust behind the abattoir walls, as hair and blood and bile circle drains and find their way increasingly into American meat supplies. Promoting livestock history like Making Machines of Animals is essential for understanding current issues of human health, links between academic knowledge and capitalist processes of commodification, coming pandemics, and the rise of even greater global warming arriving with each passing year. Yet, as with many current political topics, critiquing American farmers or the consumption regime in general is generally met with disdain from the domineering Right. Shedding all critique of meat-eating as inherently feminine, the Livestock Industrial Complex continues to grow in both domestic settings and through large import and export markets. Knapp shows where such livestock promotion was often situated in the twentieth century when American meat solidified as essential to the national character through the International Livestock Exhibition. As such, this work should be read widely in courses on the history of capitalism and agricultural history.