Use of the phrase in American burlesque was adopted after the turn of the 20th century (around 1909) by Billy Watson (né Isaac Levy; 1852–1945), a comedian, theater manager, and stock company entrepreneur.
"[1] Watson conceived and introduced the "Beef Trust" show in an era that followed a sobering reality encapsulated in a 1906 novel, The Jungle – Upton Sinclair's exposé of the Chicago stockyards,[2] which followed a 1905 Supreme Court decision in favor of the U.S. Government – re: Swift & Co. v. United States – a decision that destroyed a monopolistic consortium (or syndicate) of large meatpacking concerns, led by the "Big Six" (Swift, Armour, Morris, Cudahy, Wilson, and Schwartzchild), known as a Beef Trust.
Watson debuted his Beef Trust act – "a chorus of thirty of the largest women ever seen on stage" – May 17, 1909, at the Bijou Theatre, Philadelphia, as an addition to his popular three-act vaudeville skit, Krausemeyer's Alley[3] – a comedy that he had been producing, in various renditions, since 1903, when he introduced it with another of his popular skits, Life in Japan.
The play was originally in two acts:[4] From about 1916 to about 1928, Watson produced the "Chicken Trust," a chorus line composed thin and reportedly beautiful women.
Rather, it was a contemporaneous phrase, a double entendred satirical word play that essentially branded a popular segment of Watson's production that featured large, beautiful women.
York University theater scholar Marlis Schweitzer in her 2015 book, Transatlantic Broadway: The Infrastructural Politics of Global Performance, highlights examples of warring vaudeville trusts across Europe and the U.S. (circa 1897).