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 (Armour Pharmaceuticals) and soap manufacturing, introducing Dial soap in 1948. Presently, the Armour food brands are split between Smithfield Foods (for refrigerated meat — "Armour Meats") and ConAgra Brands (for canned shelf-stable meat products — "Armour Star"). The Armour pharmaceutical brand is owned by Forest Laboratories. Dial soap is now owned by Henkel. History 1863–1970 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 many types 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 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