1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Armour, Ogden

ARMOUR [Jonathan], OGDEN (1863-), American merchant and capitalist, was born in Milwaukee, Wis., Nov. 11 1863. Preparing for college in Chicago, where his father, Philip D. Armour (see 2.578), was a pioneer in the meat-packing industry, he entered Yale in 1881 but did not finish his course. In 1883 he entered the business of Armour & Co., and was made a partner the following year. After the death of his father in 1901 he became president and general manager of Armour & Co., which had been incorporated in Illinois in 1900. Under his guidance the business widely expanded. In 1918 in the United States alone it owned 14 slaughtering plants and 392 branch houses, with refrigeration capacity of 15,170 tons per day; the sum paid for live stock in one year was $517,951,026. The company was also engaged in the preparation of by-products, such as fertilizer, glue, soap and hair. Total sales grew from about $250,000,000 in 1910 to about $1,038,000,000 in 1919; total net income from $9,808,303 to $27,186,124. On Feb. 27 1920 an agreement with the Government, resulting from a threatened suit, was filed in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia requiring Armour & Co. (as well as Swift & Co., Morris & Co., Wilson & Co. and the Cudahy Packing Company, all together popularly called the “Big Five” packers) to begin immediately and within two years finish the sale of “all their holdings in public stock-yards, stock-yard railroads and terminals, and their interests in market newspapers and public cold-storage warehouses, and forever to dissociate themselves from the retail meat business and food lines unrelated to meat packing.” This would restrict them to wholesale business in meat, poultry, eggs, butter and cheese.