When WPA writers traveled through the Arkansas Ozarks in the 1930s, they saw something new: chickens, raised on a large scale. “Modern methods have elevated broiler-raising into an industry,” one writer observed. “The young chicks are confined in coops from the day of their hatching, stuffed with feed carried on conveyor belts, permitted no exercise, and shipped to market hardly able to stand on their feet but tender and succulent.”
The US chicken industry of the 1930s and early 1940s was just a sketch of what it would become two decades later, when Arkansas businessmen like John Tyson began to produce chickens on a truly massive scale—and created a new sort of gargantuan, vertically integrated agribusiness in the process. This paper focuses on the seeming contradictions and political compromises that the growing chicken industry carved out in Arkansas. Attached to governor Orval Faubus since his very first campaign because he supported the elimination of sales tax on chicken feed and fertilizer, the industry didn’t drop its support after Faubus’s refusal to integrate Central High made the state a national laughingstock. But the poultry industry was also invested in an image of itself as a beacon of economic progress, something modern and scientific. The industry was “raising chickens,” a traditional agrarian practice, but it was doing so with newly technological methods of feeding, housing, and watering them, and with government, educational, and industry investment in breeding new varieties that matured more quickly to a bigger size. As chicken became big business, it toed the line between agrarianism and modernization, a politically useful posture that would have consequences for the way American farmers and consumers worked and ate in the 20th century.