page_title: Armour and Company
section_title: 1863 to 1970
hierarchical_section_title: Armour and Company / History / 1863 to 1970
caption_attribution_description: English: Miss Oak Ridge Oak Ridge Tennessee 12-26-1947.
context_page_description: Armour & Company was an American company and was one of the five leading firms in the meat packing industry. It was founded in Chicago, in 1867, by the Armour brothers led by Philip Danforth Armour. By 1880, the company had become Chicago's most important business and had helped make Chicago and its Union Stock Yards the center of America's meatpacking industry. During the same period, its facility in Omaha, Nebraska, boomed, making the city's meatpacking industry the largest in the nation by 1959. In connection with its meatpacking operations, the company also ventured into pharmaceuticals and soap manufacturing, introducing Dial soap in 1948.
  Presently, the Armour food brands are split between refrigerated meat and canned shelf-stable meat products. The Armour pharmaceutical brand is owned by Forest Laboratories. Dial soap is now owned by Henkel.
context_section_description: Armour and Company had its roots in Milwaukee, where in 1863 Philip D. Armour joined with John Plankinton (the founder of the Layton and Plankinton Packing Company in 1852) to establish Plankinton, Armour and Company. Together, the partners expanded Plankinton's Milwaukee meat packing operation and established branches in Chicago and Kansas City and an exporting house in New York City. Armour and Plankinton dissolved their partnership in 1884 with the Milwaukee operation eventually becoming the Cudahy Packing Company.
  In its early years, Armour sold every kind of consumer product made from animals: meats, glue, oil, fertilizer, hairbrushes, buttons, oleomargarine, and drugs, made from slaughterhouse byproducts. Armour operated in an environment without labor unions, health inspections, or government regulation. Accidents were commonplace. Armour was notorious for the low pay it offered its line workers. It fought unionization by banning known union activists and breaking strikes in 1904 and 1921 by employing African Americans and new immigrants as strikebreakers. The company did not become fully unionized until the late 1930s when the meatpacking union succeeded in creating an interracial industrial union as part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
  During the Spanish–American War (1898), Armour sold 500,000 pounds of beef to the US Army. An army inspector tested the meat two months later and found that 751 cases were rotten and had contributed to the food poisoning of thousands of soldiers.
  In the first decade of the 20th century, a young Dale Carnegie, representing the South Omaha sales region, became the company's highest-selling salesman, an experience he drew on in his best-selling book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
  In the early 1920s, Armour encountered financial troubles and the family sold its majority interest to financier Frederick H. Prince. The firm retained its position as one of the largest American firms through the Great Depression and the sharp increase in demand during World War II. During this period, it expanded its operations across the United States; at its peak, the company employed just under 50,000 people.
  In 1948, Armour, which had made soap for years as a byproduct of the meatpacking process, developed a deodorant soap by adding the germicidal agent AT-7 to soap. This limited body odor by reducing bacteria on the skin. The new soap was named Dial because of its 24-hour protection against the odor-causing bacteria. Armour introduced the soap with a full-page advertisement using scented ink in the Chicago Tribune. During the 1950s, Dial became the best-selling deodorant soap in the US. The company adopted the slogan "Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everybody did?" in 1953. In the 1960s, the Dial brand was expanded to include deodorants and shaving creams. Because of the popularity and strong sales of Dial brand, fueled by magazine, radio, and television advertising, Armour's consumer-products business was incorporated as Armour-Dial, Inc. in 1967.
  In 1958, William Wood-Prince, a cousin of Frederick H. Prince, became president of Armour and Company.
caption: Miss Oak Ridge Tennessee 1947 wins an Armour smoked ham
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "2321", "Image ImageLength": "2840", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "1", "Image ImageDescription": "4166   Miss Oak Ridge Edith Richmond, Jim Scott  12-26-1947", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "4", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2012:04:30 12:08:34", "Image ExifOffset": "304", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "454", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5794", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2321", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2840"}