The Jungle

U >> Upton Sinclair >> The Jungle


He kept his eyes fixed on the orator, who sat in an armchair, his head
leaning on his hand and his attitude indicating exhaustion. But suddenly
he stood up again, and Jurgis heard the chairman of the meeting saying
that the speaker would now answer any questions which the audience might
care to put to him. The man came forward, and some one--a woman--arose
and asked about some opinion the speaker had expressed concerning
Tolstoy. Jurgis had never heard of Tolstoy, and did not care anything
about him. Why should any one want to ask such questions, after an
address like that? The thing was not to talk, but to do; the thing was
to get bold of others and rouse them, to organize them and prepare for
the fight! But still the discussion went on, in ordinary conversational
tones, and it brought Jurgis back to the everyday world. A few minutes
ago he had felt like seizing the hand of the beautiful lady by his side,
and kissing it; he had felt like flinging his arms about the neck of the
man on the other side of him. And now he began to realize again that he
was a "hobo," that he was ragged and dirty, and smelled bad, and had no
place to sleep that night!

And so, at last, when the meeting broke up, and the audience started to
leave, poor Jurgis was in an agony of uncertainty. He had not thought of
leaving--he had thought that the vision must last forever, that he had
found comrades and brothers. But now he would go out, and the thing
would fade away, and he would never be able to find it again! He sat in
his seat, frightened and wondering; but others in the same row wanted to
get out, and so he had to stand up and move along. As he was swept down
the aisle he looked from one person to another, wistfully; they were all
excitedly discussing the address--but there was nobody who offered to
discuss it with him. He was near enough to the door to feel the night
air, when desperation seized him. He knew nothing at all about that
speech he had heard, not even the name of the orator; and he was to go
away--no, no, it was preposterous, he must speak to some one; he must
find that man himself and tell him. He would not despise him, tramp as
he was!

So he stepped into an empty row of seats and watched, and when the crowd
had thinned out, he started toward the platform. The speaker was gone;
but there was a stage door that stood open, with people passing in and
out, and no one on guard. Jurgis summoned up his courage and went in,
and down a hallway, and to the door of a room where many people were
crowded. No one paid any attention to him, and he pushed in, and in a
corner he saw the man he sought. The orator sat in a chair, with his
shoulders sunk together and his eyes half closed; his face was ghastly
pale, almost greenish in hue, and one arm lay limp at his side. A big
man with spectacles on stood near him, and kept pushing back the crowd,
saying, "Stand away a little, please; can't you see the comrade is worn
out?"

So Jurgis stood watching, while five or ten minutes passed. Now and then
the man would look up, and address a word or two to those who were
near him; and, at last, on one of these occasions, his glance rested
on Jurgis. There seemed to be a slight hint of inquiry about it, and a
sudden impulse seized the other. He stepped forward.

"I wanted to thank you, sir!" he began, in breathless haste. "I could
not go away without telling you how much--how glad I am I heard you.
I--I didn't know anything about it all--"

The big man with the spectacles, who had moved away, came back at this
moment. "The comrade is too tired to talk to any one--" he began; but
the other held up his hand.

"Wait," he said. "He has something to say to me." And then he looked
into Jurgis's face. "You want to know more about Socialism?" he asked.

Jurgis started. "I--I--" he stammered. "Is it Socialism? I didn't know.
I want to know about what you spoke of--I want to help. I have been
through all that."

"Where do you live?" asked the other.

"I have no home," said Jurgis, "I am out of work."

"You are a foreigner, are you not?"

"Lithuanian, sir."

The man thought for a moment, and then turned to his friend. "Who is
there, Walters?" he asked. "There is Ostrinski--but he is a Pole--"

"Ostrinski speaks Lithuanian," said the other. "All right, then; would
you mind seeing if he has gone yet?"

The other started away, and the speaker looked at Jurgis again. He had
deep, black eyes, and a face full of gentleness and pain. "You must
excuse me, comrade," he said. "I am just tired out--I have spoken every
day for the last month. I will introduce you to some one who will be
able to help you as well as I could--"

The messenger had had to go no further than the door, he came back,
followed by a man whom he introduced to Jurgis as "Comrade Ostrinski."
Comrade Ostrinski was a little man, scarcely up to Jurgis's shoulder,
wizened and wrinkled, very ugly, and slightly lame. He had on a
long-tailed black coat, worn green at the seams and the buttonholes; his
eyes must have been weak, for he wore green spectacles that gave him
a grotesque appearance. But his handclasp was hearty, and he spoke in
Lithuanian, which warmed Jurgis to him.

"You want to know about Socialism?" he said. "Surely. Let us go out and
take a stroll, where we can be quiet and talk some."

And so Jurgis bade farewell to the master wizard, and went out.
Ostrinski asked where he lived, offering to walk in that direction;
and so he had to explain once more that he was without a home. At the
other's request he told his story; how he had come to America, and
what had happened to him in the stockyards, and how his family had been
broken up, and how he had become a wanderer. So much the little man
heard, and then he pressed Jurgis's arm tightly. "You have been through
the mill, comrade!" he said. "We will make a fighter out of you!"

Then Ostrinski in turn explained his circumstances. He would have asked
Jurgis to his home--but he had only two rooms, and had no bed to offer.
He would have given up his own bed, but his wife was ill. Later on, when
he understood that otherwise Jurgis would have to sleep in a hallway,
he offered him his kitchen floor, a chance which the other was only too
glad to accept. "Perhaps tomorrow we can do better," said Ostrinski. "We
try not to let a comrade starve."

Ostrinski's home was in the Ghetto district, where he had two rooms in
the basement of a tenement. There was a baby crying as they entered,
and he closed the door leading into the bedroom. He had three young
children, he explained, and a baby had just come. He drew up two chairs
near the kitchen stove, adding that Jurgis must excuse the disorder of
the place, since at such a time one's domestic arrangements were upset.
Half of the kitchen was given up to a workbench, which was piled with
clothing, and Ostrinski explained that he was a "pants finisher." He
brought great bundles of clothing here to his home, where he and his
wife worked on them. He made a living at it, but it was getting harder
all the time, because his eyes were failing. What would come when they
gave out he could not tell; there had been no saving anything--a man
could barely keep alive by twelve or fourteen hours' work a day. The
finishing of pants did not take much skill, and anybody could learn it,
and so the pay was forever getting less. That was the competitive wage
system; and if Jurgis wanted to understand what Socialism was, it was
there he had best begin. The workers were dependent upon a job to exist
from day to day, and so they bid against each other, and no man could
get more than the lowest man would consent to work for. And thus
the mass of the people were always in a life-and-death struggle with
poverty. That was "competition," so far as it concerned the wage-earner,
the man who had only his labor to sell; to those on top, the exploiters,
it appeared very differently, of course--there were few of them, and
they could combine and dominate, and their power would be unbreakable.
And so all over the world two classes were forming, with an unbridged
chasm between them--the capitalist class, with its enormous fortunes,
and the proletariat, bound into slavery by unseen chains. The latter
were a thousand to one in numbers, but they were ignorant and helpless,
and they would remain at the mercy of their exploiters until they were
organized--until they had become "class-conscious." It was a slow
and weary process, but it would go on--it was like the movement of a
glacier, once it was started it could never be stopped. Every
Socialist did his share, and lived upon the vision of the "good time
coming,"--when the working class should go to the polls and seize the
powers of government, and put an end to private property in the means
of production. No matter how poor a man was, or how much he suffered, he
could never be really unhappy while he knew of that future; even if he
did not live to see it himself, his children would, and, to a Socialist,
the victory of his class was his victory. Also he had always the
progress to encourage him; here in Chicago, for instance, the movement
was growing by leaps and bounds. Chicago was the industrial center
of the country, and nowhere else were the unions so strong; but their
organizations did the workers little good, for the employers were
organized, also; and so the strikes generally failed, and as fast as the
unions were broken up the men were coming over to the Socialists.

Ostrinski explained the organization of the party, the machinery by
which the proletariat was educating itself. There were "locals" in every
big city and town, and they were being organized rapidly in the smaller
places; a local had anywhere from six to a thousand members, and there
were fourteen hundred of them in all, with a total of about twenty-five
thousand members, who paid dues to support the organization. "Local Cook
County," as the city organization was called, had eighty branch locals,
and it alone was spending several thousand dollars in the campaign. It
published a weekly in English, and one each in Bohemian and German; also
there was a monthly published in Chicago, and a cooperative publishing
house, that issued a million and a half of Socialist books and pamphlets
every year. All this was the growth of the last few years--there had
been almost nothing of it when Ostrinski first came to Chicago.

Ostrinski was a Pole, about fifty years of age. He had lived in Silesia,
a member of a despised and persecuted race, and had taken part in the
proletarian movement in the early seventies, when Bismarck, having
conquered France, had turned his policy of blood and iron upon the
"International." Ostrinski himself had twice been in jail, but he had
been young then, and had not cared. He had had more of his share of the
fight, though, for just when Socialism had broken all its barriers and
become the great political force of the empire, he had come to America,
and begun all over again. In America every one had laughed at the mere
idea of Socialism then--in America all men were free. As if political
liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable! said Ostrinski.

The little tailor sat tilted back in his stiff kitchen chair, with his
feet stretched out upon the empty stove, and speaking in low whispers,
so as not to waken those in the next room. To Jurgis he seemed a
scarcely less wonderful person than the speaker at the meeting; he was
poor, the lowest of the low, hunger-driven and miserable--and yet how
much he knew, how much he had dared and achieved, what a hero he had
been! There were others like him, too--thousands like him, and all of
them workingmen! That all this wonderful machinery of progress had been
created by his fellows--Jurgis could not believe it, it seemed too good
to be true.

That was always the way, said Ostrinski; when a man was first converted
to Socialism he was like a crazy person--he could not' understand how
others could fail to see it, and he expected to convert all the world
the first week. After a while he would realize how hard a task it was;
and then it would be fortunate that other new hands kept coming, to save
him from settling down into a rut. Just now Jurgis would have plenty of
chance to vent his excitement, for a presidential campaign was on, and
everybody was talking politics. Ostrinski would take him to the next
meeting of the branch local, and introduce him, and he might join the
party. The dues were five cents a week, but any one who could not afford
this might be excused from paying. The Socialist party was a really
democratic political organization--it was controlled absolutely by
its own membership, and had no bosses. All of these things Ostrinski
explained, as also the principles of the party. You might say that there
was really but one Socialist principle--that of "no compromise," which
was the essence of the proletarian movement all over the world. When a
Socialist was elected to office he voted with old party legislators for
any measure that was likely to be of help to the working class, but
he never forgot that these concessions, whatever they might be, were
trifles compared with the great purpose--the organizing of the working
class for the revolution. So far, the rule in America had been that
one Socialist made another Socialist once every two years; and if
they should maintain the same rate they would carry the country in
1912--though not all of them expected to succeed as quickly as that.

The Socialists were organized in every civilized nation; it was an
international political party, said Ostrinski, the greatest the world
had ever known. It numbered thirty million of adherents, and it cast
eight million votes. It had started its first newspaper in Japan, and
elected its first deputy in Argentina; in France it named members of
cabinets, and in Italy and Australia it held the balance of power and
turned out ministries. In Germany, where its vote was more than a third
of the total vote of the empire, all other parties and powers had united
to fight it. It would not do, Ostrinski explained, for the proletariat
of one nation to achieve the victory, for that nation would be crushed
by the military power of the others; and so the Socialist movement was a
world movement, an organization of all mankind to establish liberty and
fraternity. It was the new religion of humanity--or you might say it was
the fulfillment of the old religion, since it implied but the literal
application of all the teachings of Christ.


Until long after midnight Jurgis sat lost in the conversation of his
new acquaintance. It was a most wonderful experience to him--an almost
supernatural experience. It was like encountering an inhabitant of
the fourth dimension of space, a being who was free from all one's
own limitations. For four years, now, Jurgis had been wondering and
blundering in the depths of a wilderness; and here, suddenly, a hand
reached down and seized him, and lifted him out of it, and set him upon
a mountain-top, from which he could survey it all--could see the paths
from which he had wandered, the morasses into which he had stumbled, the
hiding places of the beasts of prey that had fallen upon him. There
were his Packingtown experiences, for instance--what was there about
Packingtown that Ostrinski could not explain! To Jurgis the packers had
been equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef
Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed
all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying
upon the people. Jurgis recollected how, when he had first come to
Packingtown, he had stood and watched the hog-killing, and thought how
cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he
was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just
what he had been--one of the packers' hogs. What they wanted from a hog
was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they
wanted from the workingman, and also that was what they wanted from
the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were
not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the
purchaser of meat. That was true everywhere in the world, but it was
especially true in Packingtown; there seemed to be something about the
work of slaughtering that tended to ruthlessness and ferocity--it was
literally the fact that in the methods of the packers a hundred human
lives did not balance a penny of profit. When Jurgis had made himself
familiar with the Socialist literature, as he would very quickly, he
would get glimpses of the Beef Trust from all sorts of aspects, and he
would find it everywhere the same; it was the incarnation of blind and
insensate Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths,
trampling with a thousand hoofs; it was the Great Butcher--it was the
spirit of Capitalism made flesh. Upon the ocean of commerce it sailed
as a pirate ship; it had hoisted the black flag and declared war upon
civilization. Bribery and corruption were its everyday methods. In
Chicago the city government was simply one of its branch offices; it
stole billions of gallons of city water openly, it dictated to the
courts the sentences of disorderly strikers, it forbade the mayor to
enforce the building laws against it. In the national capital it had
power to prevent inspection of its product, and to falsify government
reports; it violated the rebate laws, and when an investigation was
threatened it burned its books and sent its criminal agents out of the
country. In the commercial world it was a Juggernaut car; it wiped out
thousands of businesses every year, it drove men to madness and suicide.
It had forced the price of cattle so low as to destroy the stock-raising
industry, an occupation upon which whole states existed; it had ruined
thousands of butchers who had refused to handle its products. It divided
the country into districts, and fixed the price of meat in all of them;
and it owned all the refrigerator cars, and levied an enormous tribute
upon all poultry and eggs and fruit and vegetables. With the millions
of dollars a week that poured in upon it, it was reaching out for
the control of other interests, railroads and trolley lines, gas and
electric light franchises--it already owned the leather and the grain
business of the country. The people were tremendously stirred up over
its encroachments, but nobody had any remedy to suggest; it was the task
of Socialists to teach and organize them, and prepare them for the time
when they were to seize the huge machine called the Beef Trust, and use
it to produce food for human beings and not to heap up fortunes for a
band of pirates. It was long after midnight when Jurgis lay down upon
the floor of Ostrinski's kitchen; and yet it was an hour before he
could get to sleep, for the glory of that joyful vision of the people of
Packingtown marching in and taking possession of the Union Stockyards!


Chapter 30


Jurgis had breakfast with Ostrinski and his family, and then he went
home to Elzbieta. He was no longer shy about it--when he went in,
instead of saying all the things he had been planning to say, he started
to tell Elzbieta about the revolution! At first she thought he was out
of his mind, and it was hours before she could really feel certain that
he was himself. When, however, she had satisfied herself that he was
sane upon all subjects except politics, she troubled herself no
further about it. Jurgis was destined to find that Elzbieta's armor was
absolutely impervious to Socialism. Her soul had been baked hard in the
fire of adversity, and there was no altering it now; life to her was the
hunt for daily bread, and ideas existed for her only as they bore upon
that. All that interested her in regard to this new frenzy which had
seized hold of her son-in-law was whether or not it had a tendency to
make him sober and industrious; and when she found he intended to look
for work and to contribute his share to the family fund, she gave him
full rein to convince her of anything. A wonderfully wise little woman
was Elzbieta; she could think as quickly as a hunted rabbit, and in half
an hour she had chosen her life-attitude to the Socialist movement.
She agreed in everything with Jurgis, except the need of his paying his
dues; and she would even go to a meeting with him now and then, and sit
and plan her next day's dinner amid the storm.

For a week after he became a convert Jurgis continued to wander about
all day, looking for work; until at last he met with a strange fortune.
He was passing one of Chicago's innumerable small hotels, and after some
hesitation he concluded to go in. A man he took for the proprietor was
standing in the lobby, and he went up to him and tackled him for a job.

"What can you do?" the man asked.

"Anything, sir," said Jurgis, and added quickly: "I've been out of work
for a long time, sir. I'm an honest man, and I'm strong and willing--"

The other was eying him narrowly. "Do you drink?" he asked.

"No, sir," said Jurgis.

"Well, I've been employing a man as a porter, and he drinks. I've
discharged him seven times now, and I've about made up my mind that's
enough. Would you be a porter?"

"Yes, sir."

"It's hard work. You'll have to clean floors and wash spittoons and fill
lamps and handle trunks--"

"I'm willing, sir."

"All right. I'll pay you thirty a month and board, and you can begin
now, if you feel like it. You can put on the other fellow's rig."

And so Jurgis fell to work, and toiled like a Trojan till night. Then
he went and told Elzbieta, and also, late as it was, he paid a visit to
Ostrinski to let him know of his good fortune. Here he received a great
surprise, for when he was describing the location of the hotel Ostrinski
interrupted suddenly, "Not Hinds's!"

"Yes," said Jurgis, "that's the name."

To which the other replied, "Then you've got the best boss in
Chicago--he's a state organizer of our party, and one of our best-known
speakers!"

So the next morning Jurgis went to his employer and told him; and the
man seized him by the hand and shook it. "By Jove!" he cried, "that lets
me out. I didn't sleep all last night because I had discharged a good
Socialist!"

So, after that, Jurgis was known to his "boss" as "Comrade Jurgis," and
in return he was expected to call him "Comrade Hinds." "Tommy" Hinds,
as he was known to his intimates, was a squat little man, with broad
shoulders and a florid face, decorated with gray side whiskers.
He was the kindest-hearted man that ever lived, and the
liveliest--inexhaustible in his enthusiasm, and talking Socialism all
day and all night. He was a great fellow to jolly along a crowd, and
would keep a meeting in an uproar; when once he got really waked up, the
torrent of his eloquence could be compared with nothing save Niagara.

Tommy Hinds had begun life as a blacksmith's helper, and had run away
to join the Union army, where he had made his first acquaintance with
"graft," in the shape of rotten muskets and shoddy blankets. To a
musket that broke in a crisis he always attributed the death of his only
brother, and upon worthless blankets he blamed all the agonies of his
own old age. Whenever it rained, the rheumatism would get into his
joints, and then he would screw up his face and mutter: "Capitalism, my
boy, capitalism! 'Ecrasez l'infame!'" He had one unfailing remedy for
all the evils of this world, and he preached it to every one; no matter
whether the person's trouble was failure in business, or dyspepsia, or
a quarrelsome mother-in-law, a twinkle would come into his eyes and he
would say, "You know what to do about it--vote the Socialist ticket!"

Tommy Hinds had set out upon the trail of the Octopus as soon as the war
was over. He had gone into business, and found himself in competition
with the fortunes of those who had been stealing while he had been
fighting. The city government was in their hands and the railroads were
in league with them, and honest business was driven to the wall; and
so Hinds had put all his savings into Chicago real estate, and set out
singlehanded to dam the river of graft. He had been a reform member
of the city council, he had been a Greenbacker, a Labor Unionist, a
Populist, a Bryanite--and after thirty years of fighting, the year 1896
had served to convince him that the power of concentrated wealth could
never be controlled, but could only be destroyed. He had published a
pamphlet about it, and set out to organize a party of his own, when a
stray Socialist leaflet had revealed to him that others had been
ahead of him. Now for eight years he had been fighting for the
party, anywhere, everywhere--whether it was a G.A.R. reunion, or a
hotel-keepers' convention, or an Afro-American businessmen's banquet, or
a Bible society picnic, Tommy Hinds would manage to get himself invited
to explain the relations of Socialism to the subject in hand. After that
he would start off upon a tour of his own, ending at some place between
New York and Oregon; and when he came back from there, he would go out
to organize new locals for the state committee; and finally he would
come home to rest--and talk Socialism in Chicago. Hinds's hotel was a
very hot-bed of the propaganda; all the employees were party men, and if
they were not when they came, they were quite certain to be before they
went away. The proprietor would get into a discussion with some one in
the lobby, and as the conversation grew animated, others would gather
about to listen, until finally every one in the place would be crowded
into a group, and a regular debate would be under way. This went on
every night--when Tommy Hinds was not there to do it, his clerk did it;
and when his clerk was away campaigning, the assistant attended to it,
while Mrs. Hinds sat behind the desk and did the work. The clerk was an
old crony of the proprietor's, an awkward, rawboned giant of a man, with
a lean, sallow face, a broad mouth, and whiskers under his chin,
the very type and body of a prairie farmer. He had been that all his
life--he had fought the railroads in Kansas for fifty years, a Granger,
a Farmers' Alliance man, a "middle-of-the-road" Populist. Finally, Tommy
Hinds had revealed to him the wonderful idea of using the trusts instead
of destroying them, and he had sold his farm and come to Chicago.