J. Ogden Armour

Jonathan Ogden Armour

• School Harvard University

• Born November 11, 1863 in Milwaukee, WI USA
• Died August 16, 1927 in London England

Biographical Information

J. Ogden Armour was a meatpacking magnate who was also a minority owner of the Chicago Cubs.

He became the President of Armour & Co., a meatpacking firm founded by his father, following the latter's death in 1901, greatly expanding the firm's scope of operations to make it the largest food company in the United States by the mid-1910s, with $1 billion in annual sales. However, the firm suffered badly from the post-World War I depression in the U.S. and lost somewhere around $125 million from 1919 to 1921. The company had begun to sell bonds in 1917, converted to stocks two years later, making Armour an extremely wealthy man, but it also made him vulnerable to the will of other stockholders, who ousted him from the presidency in 1923. He fell ill with typhoid an pneumonia while on a trip to England in 1927 and passed away there.

In 1916, he bought minority shares in the Cubs alongside William Wrigley Jr. to help finance Charles Weeghman's acquisition of the team. However, his business reversals, which followed Weeghman's by a short time, forced him to sell his shares a few years later and Wrigley emerged as the principal owner. Known for some of his extravagant spending when the going was good, he also owned a live bear cub which he named "JOA" (after his own initials) and which he paraded before the Cubs first game at Weeghman Park in 1916. The future "Wrigley Feld" had been built by Weeghman to host the Chicago Whales of the Federal League, and passed over to the Cubs when that league was dissolved after the 1915 season and Weeghman was allowed to buy the Cubs as compensation.

Upton Sinclair's classic 1904 novel, The Jungle, is based on Armour's meatpacking plant and a devastating 1904 strike that Armour broke by hiring African-American strikebreakers.