On the surface, American meat appears to be an equalizer. Nearly every American — the workers, students, the elites, and even many vegetarians — have indulged in a dirty water dog or Mc-something at least once. But first impressions are deceiving: Perched above the common squabble of the street sits the steakhouse — the classic crown of American cuisine. Here, heaping plates signify success — a graduation, a business deal, or an anniversary — and market themselves towards the suited group that embodies that most American value. Equality is left out on the street — here serves a demographic only defined by exclusivity.
These meals of excess, often enjoyed by the nation’s exploitative elite, trace a different angle of American history — one that exposes the great lies of exceptionalism and the ongoing reality of exploitation. There is nothing more American than steak — and that’s a bad thing.
The early United States inherited its food culture from the makeup of its colonizers, predominantly a wide smattering of Brits ranging from the dispossessed and oppressed to the landed elite. To them, cattle meant freedom, independence, and even luxury: Beefsteak was a food these famine-stricken refugees could have only dreamed of in the old world, and a reminder of home for those more well-off. As this colonial relationship turned into sour revolution, the frontier farmers were publicly raised up as representatives of the nation’s values — while privately ignored and exploited. This dichotomy became more potent as the frontier moved westward, and cattle-wrangling cowboys were appointed the new epitome of freedom on the edge. Underlying this stage of the myth was a double-sided exploitation: Cowboys and their cattle served as the foot soldiers of colonization, while the workers themselves were being exploited by disaffected employers and market forces. Even against the urbanization of the 20th century, cattle and steak still served as a cultural touchstone — and key voting issue. In the newly globalized world, the strong American man was defined by his strength, self-reliance, and diet of red meat. Crowning this culture was the sleek American businessman, providing the cleanest contrast of American capitalist excess against the Soviet Union. Cattle traces the history of defining the American man at each of these stages.
Looking past the deeply American perspective of uniqueness and exceptionalism, one must remember that America is ultimately an amalgam of disparate cultural traditions — most notably the British empire. Similarly, because American land was fertile and most early settlers lived near the coast, cattle — while still being a prominent fixture of agriculture — had many competitors: other livestock, the grains of the midland colonies, the fish of New England, and cash crops of the south. But the colonies notably inherited many of their cultural norms and divisions from the British, including a special association of beefsteak with strength and manliness, and the nobility — it was, after all, almost exclusively consumed by the landed elite. In the colonies, much more sparsely populated and less urbanized than Britain, these cultural connotations took on a distinct material importance. Owning cattle afforded one the ability to live off their own means: it could provide you with milk, be the force behind a plow, collateral for loans and bartering, and eventually quite a few hearty meals. To the American colonists, many of whom fled repressive governments, chaotic economies, or famines, this independence was tantamount to the very purpose of the American experiment. If beefsteak was initially cut for the noble Brits, cattle in the colonies made small but proud kings out of Americans, in their personalized conquest of the land. The American Revolution then codified this narrative into the nation’s founding myth. Despite the revolution’s origin with intellectual landowning elites, the conflict was branded as lowly farmers against an overseas empire. Having won the war, the yeoman — the term of art for these small farmers — was uplifted as the torch bearers for the spirit of the independent nation. Jefferson called them the “most valuable citizens”; De Tocqueville depicted a democracy built bottom-up from farming communities; and Emerson and Thoreau would translate this self-reliance into the nation’s first great works of literature. Or at least, that’s how the classic story goes. Carole Shammas, historian of early American history at USC, writes that “letters from alleged ‘farmers’ complaining about societal vice and luxury crowded the pages of the early American press” coming from “rich gentlemen, deeply involved in politics, who assumed the classical literary persona of a humble farmer to attest to their love of simplicity and lack of guile.” Rooted in these letters, the rhetorical exploitation of farm labor echoes throughout American history.
As the 19th century chugged on, the east coast industrialized, the farmer was cast to the frontier, and cattle became indispensably American. For one, the west was more arid than the coast — making previous staple crops much less viable. But these farmers were also the grunts of a political, imperial agenda. Joshua Specht, professor at Notre Dame and author of the excellent Red Meat Republic told The Politic that more than being accidental to conquest “cattle became a tool to occupy the land.” In light of the problems facing crop farming out west, claiming the land — as the pastures of the east had done, proved much more difficult. Cattle provided a unique solution as they were triply self-contained, mobile, and consumed large tracks of land. The synthesis of these qualities brought extensive tracks of land under the constant purview of enterprising farmers, eager to protect their livelihoods: Cattle represented the perfect beachhead for continental conquest. Handling these cattle was the western march’s protagonist, the cowboy — whose rugged life, steed, and gun-toting provided an even sleeker embodiment of self-reliance.
In a very ironic twist of fate, the cowboys — pinnacles of self-reliance and rugged living — were themselves simultaneously dependent on the government-subsidized infrastructure and subject to exploitative working conditions. By the era of cattlemen and cowboys, the west was no longer isolated. Instead, these ranches were spatially preceded by the US army’s extensive fort infrastructure and the nation’s burgeoning railway networks. The Navajo people’s attempts to defend their land were not some great clash between cowboys and Indians, with the former operating as civilizational vanguard; they were massacred by the encroaching US army. With threats to imperial sovereignty eliminated, these millions of acres were envisioned as the integral medium between the East and West Coasts on which the railroads would run. Thousands of cattle stranded on the prairie meant little, so the railroads were necessary to transport them to slaughterhouses in the cities and translate them into cash. In the West, government-subsidized railways and military expansion asterisked self-reliance.
Cowboys were also subject to a more recognizable force: exploitative employers. While Specht laments the nuances of the ranching workplace have long been ignored by the process of myth-making, there was once a clear class distinction between cowboys and “cattlemen.” The latter actually owned and operated the ranches on which cowboys worked, a readily exploited asymmetry as the cowboys were forced to toil in horrible working conditions. Cowboys were not as simple as their whitewashed Hollywood portrayal, but instead reflected a wide range of backgrounds — including many Mexicans and other immigrants. When the cowboys fought back and attempted to unionize, the cattlemen broke them and the average American met them with vitriol. Cowboys were already a staple of pop culture back in the coastal cities, popularized through short novellas. In a time of increasing frustrations around the pace of urbanization, the stories of cowboys and the steaks their labor created allowed city dwellers “participate” in this more simple, masculine work. But the sheer geographic distance between east and west allowed for easy suppression of the reality of farmhands and the frontier: Once again, the laborers neither controlled their labor nor its story. Demands for unionization and easier work clashed with these imagined depictions of cowboys, and so their pleas fell on deaf ears. These contradictions were drawn in such a way as to not only gloss over the ongoing exploitation at the core of the country’s growth but also further enshrined the national story of self-reliance and simple farmer. While America’s decades-long distance from the boom of western movies has weakened the particulars of mythic cowboys, the unaddressed contradictions within this myth have found new hosts.
Businessman:
The 19th century’s thrust was westward: its culture defined by the frontier — chasing it, taming it, and grappling with its absence. But in those last few decades, as the frontier filled up, the pace and direction of expansion changed. The 20th century looked upwards: As the farmer fell from prominence, skyscrapers sprung up in place of their prarie-based opportunity, and many Americans had a tough time bridging the gap. If country estates, meat, and land made powerful men, then the cities were traditionally cast as shady and effeminate. Even when the cowboy was “real” — or at least some version of the myth — insecurity gripped the patriarchal urban elite. To many, eating steak represented a way to imagine yourself as the laborers whose struggle brought it to you. Even presidents fell prey to such insecurities: Teddy Roosevelt — the great outdoorsman and pinnacle of manhood — was born right smack in Manhattan.
But as the 20th century chugged along, America’s attention was dragged away by an increasingly international world and, most importantly, the Cold War. While previously Americans had mostly been involved in a conversation to define themselves primarily in constructive terms — the products of immigration, the frontier, empire — now they had a force to define themselves against, the Soviet Union. This manifested in a greater focus on what made America American. As a historical force, steak’s historical signifying of strength was very important in this reconnecting — the best qualities to win a war. These cultural notions were also substantiated by new quote-unquote food science that claimed meat and milk were key to a strong and healthy diet. With the end of WW2, meat rationing came to an end and prices shot up 70% — prompting price controls by President Truman. No longer kept at bay by the immediacy of war, the cattlemen shut down production nationwide. The reaction could not be more extreme: miners went on strike, supposedly unable to work without meat; citizens flooded all levels of government with complaints; and in the 1946 midterms, Democrats finally lost their sixteen-year New Deal mandate.
While these events testify to meat’s unifying quality, it also implicitly functioned as a tool to divide Americans. A disconnect in subject and speaker pervades the myth of American heroes: wealthy politicians spoke of yeoman farmers, and cattlemen enshrined the self-reliance of their employees. But in the 20th century, the business class attempted to merge these two roles and convince the populous of their own heroism, and it worked. While kids were not suddenly playing businessmen instead of cowboys, the former was clearly identified by all as the occupation of a made man, for whom everything really was golden. Able to afford anything they wanted, steakhouses became the obvious choice for this new class’s clubhouse. On Wall Street, a table at the best steakhouse money has to offer has gone from a rare moment of pleasure to the bare minimum for impressing clients. To make a steakhouse your haunt was a way to simultaneously place yourself within that wider American tradition and at the top of it.
This leveling — or summiting — of steak and the enshrining of its ubiquity has ironically undermined the intentions of self-definition. Picture it: a steakhouse filled with tables of identical patrons and plates: black suits, big steaks, and jobs no one particularly understands the purpose of — distinguished only in the shades of subtle off-white plates and vermillion steaks that adorn their tables. The post-war era is often retold as the golden age of American capitalism and domestic life centered on the new class of office workers and peaking with the businessman. Not all was steaks and skyscrapers: the businessman may have enjoyed a New York Strip, perhaps at his favorite steakhouse — segregated in spirit if not law — or maybe prepared by his doting wife — frustrated in her oppressively patriarchal society. Even to this day, the business class advances a fundamentally unsustainable lifestyle, most ironic with its steak consumption. ‘All must be grass-fed and all natural,’ may be uttered sans-irony at the same table where Exxon and Sachs dine, transforming all nature into capital. Ironically they invoke the struggle between cattlemen and cowboys: Their diets reach for the former but the resultant ubiquity cast them as cogs in the machine. And just as the early American elite sent the yeoman to their death, the cattlemen work cowboys to near the same fate, the business not only destroys himself but everything else around us.