The Jungle

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There were weeks at a time when Jurgis went home after such a day as
this with not more than two hours' work to his credit--which meant about
thirty-five cents. There were many days when the total was less than
half an hour, and others when there was none at all. The general average
was six hours a day, which meant for Jurgis about six dollars a week;
and this six hours of work would be done after standing on the killing
bed till one o'clock, or perhaps even three or four o'clock, in the
afternoon. Like as not there would come a rush of cattle at the very
end of the day, which the men would have to dispose of before they went
home, often working by electric light till nine or ten, or even twelve
or one o'clock, and without a single instant for a bite of supper. The
men were at the mercy of the cattle. Perhaps the buyers would be holding
off for better prices--if they could scare the shippers into thinking
that they meant to buy nothing that day, they could get their own terms.
For some reason the cost of fodder for cattle in the yards was much
above the market price--and you were not allowed to bring your own
fodder! Then, too, a number of cars were apt to arrive late in the day,
now that the roads were blocked with snow, and the packers would buy
their cattle that night, to get them cheaper, and then would come into
play their ironclad rule, that all cattle must be killed the same day
they were bought. There was no use kicking about this--there had been
one delegation after another to see the packers about it, only to be
told that it was the rule, and that there was not the slightest chance
of its ever being altered. And so on Christmas Eve Jurgis worked till
nearly one o'clock in the morning, and on Christmas Day he was on the
killing bed at seven o'clock.

All this was bad; and yet it was not the worst. For after all the hard
work a man did, he was paid for only part of it. Jurgis had once been
among those who scoffed at the idea of these huge concerns cheating;
and so now he could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was
precisely their size which enabled them to do it with impunity. One of
the rules on the killing beds was that a man who was one minute late
was docked an hour; and this was economical, for he was made to work the
balance of the hour--he was not allowed to stand round and wait. And on
the other hand if he came ahead of time he got no pay for that--though
often the bosses would start up the gang ten or fifteen minutes before
the whistle. And this same custom they carried over to the end of the
day; they did not pay for any fraction of an hour--for "broken time." A
man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no work to fill out
the hour, there was no pay for him. Thus the end of every day was a
sort of lottery--a struggle, all but breaking into open war between
the bosses and the men, the former trying to rush a job through and
the latter trying to stretch it out. Jurgis blamed the bosses for this,
though the truth to be told it was not always their fault; for the
packers kept them frightened for their lives--and when one was in danger
of falling behind the standard, what was easier than to catch up
by making the gang work awhile "for the church"? This was a savage
witticism the men had, which Jurgis had to have explained to him. Old
man Jones was great on missions and such things, and so whenever they
were doing some particularly disreputable job, the men would wink at
each other and say, "Now we're working for the church!"

One of the consequences of all these things was that Jurgis was no
longer perplexed when he heard men talk of fighting for their rights.
He felt like fighting now himself; and when the Irish delegate of the
butcher-helpers' union came to him a second time, he received him in a
far different spirit. A wonderful idea it now seemed to Jurgis, this
of the men--that by combining they might be able to make a stand and
conquer the packers! Jurgis wondered who had first thought of it; and
when he was told that it was a common thing for men to do in America, he
got the first inkling of a meaning in the phrase "a free country." The
delegate explained to him how it depended upon their being able to get
every man to join and stand by the organization, and so Jurgis signified
that he was willing to do his share. Before another month was by, all
the working members of his family had union cards, and wore their union
buttons conspicuously and with pride. For fully a week they were quite
blissfully happy, thinking that belonging to a union meant an end to all
their troubles.

But only ten days after she had joined, Marija's canning factory closed
down, and that blow quite staggered them. They could not understand why
the union had not prevented it, and the very first time she attended
a meeting Marija got up and made a speech about it. It was a business
meeting, and was transacted in English, but that made no difference to
Marija; she said what was in her, and all the pounding of the chairman's
gavel and all the uproar and confusion in the room could not prevail.
Quite apart from her own troubles she was boiling over with a general
sense of the injustice of it, and she told what she thought of the
packers, and what she thought of a world where such things were allowed
to happen; and then, while the echoes of the hall rang with the shock
of her terrible voice, she sat down again and fanned herself, and the
meeting gathered itself together and proceeded to discuss the election
of a recording secretary.

Jurgis too had an adventure the first time he attended a union meeting,
but it was not of his own seeking. Jurgis had gone with the desire
to get into an inconspicuous corner and see what was done; but this
attitude of silent and open-eyed attention had marked him out for a
victim. Tommy Finnegan was a little Irishman, with big staring eyes and
a wild aspect, a "hoister" by trade, and badly cracked. Somewhere back
in the far-distant past Tommy Finnegan had had a strange experience,
and the burden of it rested upon him. All the balance of his life he had
done nothing but try to make it understood. When he talked he caught
his victim by the buttonhole, and his face kept coming closer and
closer--which was trying, because his teeth were so bad. Jurgis did not
mind that, only he was frightened. The method of operation of the higher
intelligences was Tom Finnegan's theme, and he desired to find out if
Jurgis had ever considered that the representation of things in their
present similarity might be altogether unintelligible upon a more
elevated plane. There were assuredly wonderful mysteries about the
developing of these things; and then, becoming confidential, Mr.
Finnegan proceeded to tell of some discoveries of his own. "If ye have
iver had onything to do wid shperrits," said he, and looked inquiringly
at Jurgis, who kept shaking his head. "Niver mind, niver mind,"
continued the other, "but their influences may be operatin' upon ye;
it's shure as I'm tellin' ye, it's them that has the reference to the
immejit surroundin's that has the most of power. It was vouchsafed to
me in me youthful days to be acquainted with shperrits" and so
Tommy Finnegan went on, expounding a system of philosophy, while the
perspiration came out on Jurgis' forehead, so great was his agitation
and embarrassment. In the end one of the men, seeing his plight, came
over and rescued him; but it was some time before he was able to find
any one to explain things to him, and meanwhile his fear lest the
strange little Irishman should get him cornered again was enough to keep
him dodging about the room the whole evening.

He never missed a meeting, however. He had picked up a few words of
English by this time, and friends would help him to understand. They
were often very turbulent meetings, with half a dozen men declaiming
at once, in as many dialects of English; but the speakers were all
desperately in earnest, and Jurgis was in earnest too, for he understood
that a fight was on, and that it was his fight. Since the time of his
disillusionment, Jurgis had sworn to trust no man, except in his own
family; but here he discovered that he had brothers in affliction, and
allies. Their one chance for life was in union, and so the struggle
became a kind of crusade. Jurgis had always been a member of the church,
because it was the right thing to be, but the church had never
touched him, he left all that for the women. Here, however, was a new
religion--one that did touch him, that took hold of every fiber of him;
and with all the zeal and fury of a convert he went out as a missionary.
There were many nonunion men among the Lithuanians, and with these
he would labor and wrestle in prayer, trying to show them the right.
Sometimes they would be obstinate and refuse to see it, and Jurgis,
alas, was not always patient! He forgot how he himself had been blind,
a short time ago--after the fashion of all crusaders since the original
ones, who set out to spread the gospel of Brotherhood by force of arms.



Chapter 9


One of the first consequences of the discovery of the union was that
Jurgis became desirous of learning English. He wanted to know what was
going on at the meetings, and to be able to take part in them, and so he
began to look about him, and to try to pick up words. The children, who
were at school, and learning fast, would teach him a few; and a friend
loaned him a little book that had some in it, and Ona would read them to
him. Then Jurgis became sorry that he could not read himself; and later
on in the winter, when some one told him that there was a night school
that was free, he went and enrolled. After that, every evening that he
got home from the yards in time, he would go to the school; he would go
even if he were in time for only half an hour. They were teaching him
both to read and to speak English--and they would have taught him other
things, if only he had had a little time.

Also the union made another great difference with him--it made him begin
to pay attention to the country. It was the beginning of democracy with
him. It was a little state, the union, a miniature republic; its affairs
were every man's affairs, and every man had a real say about them. In
other words, in the union Jurgis learned to talk politics. In the place
where he had come from there had not been any politics--in Russia one
thought of the government as an affliction like the lightning and the
hail. "Duck, little brother, duck," the wise old peasants would whisper;
"everything passes away." And when Jurgis had first come to America he
had supposed that it was the same. He had heard people say that it was
a free country--but what did that mean? He found that here, precisely
as in Russia, there were rich men who owned everything; and if one could
not find any work, was not the hunger he began to feel the same sort of
hunger?

When Jurgis had been working about three weeks at Brown's, there had
come to him one noontime a man who was employed as a night watchman, and
who asked him if he would not like to take out naturalization papers
and become a citizen. Jurgis did not know what that meant, but the man
explained the advantages. In the first place, it would not cost him
anything, and it would get him half a day off, with his pay just the
same; and then when election time came he would be able to vote--and
there was something in that. Jurgis was naturally glad to accept, and so
the night watchman said a few words to the boss, and he was excused for
the rest of the day. When, later on, he wanted a holiday to get married
he could not get it; and as for a holiday with pay just the same--what
power had wrought that miracle heaven only knew! However, he went with
the man, who picked up several other newly landed immigrants, Poles,
Lithuanians, and Slovaks, and took them all outside, where stood a great
four-horse tallyho coach, with fifteen or twenty men already in it. It
was a fine chance to see the sights of the city, and the party had a
merry time, with plenty of beer handed up from inside. So they drove
downtown and stopped before an imposing granite building, in which they
interviewed an official, who had the papers all ready, with only the
names to be filled in. So each man in turn took an oath of which he did
not understand a word, and then was presented with a handsome ornamented
document with a big red seal and the shield of the United States upon
it, and was told that he had become a citizen of the Republic and the
equal of the President himself.

A month or two later Jurgis had another interview with this same man,
who told him where to go to "register." And then finally, when election
day came, the packing houses posted a notice that men who desired to
vote might remain away until nine that morning, and the same night
watchman took Jurgis and the rest of his flock into the back room of a
saloon, and showed each of them where and how to mark a ballot, and then
gave each two dollars, and took them to the polling place, where there
was a policeman on duty especially to see that they got through all
right. Jurgis felt quite proud of this good luck till he got home and
met Jonas, who had taken the leader aside and whispered to him, offering
to vote three times for four dollars, which offer had been accepted.

And now in the union Jurgis met men who explained all this mystery
to him; and he learned that America differed from Russia in that its
government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who
ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there
were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one
got the office which bought the most votes. Now and then, the election
was very close, and that was the time the poor man came in. In the
stockyards this was only in national and state elections, for in local
elections the Democratic Party always carried everything. The ruler of
the district was therefore the Democratic boss, a little Irishman named
Mike Scully. Scully held an important party office in the state, and
bossed even the mayor of the city, it was said; it was his boast that he
carried the stockyards in his pocket. He was an enormously rich man--he
had a hand in all the big graft in the neighborhood. It was Scully, for
instance, who owned that dump which Jurgis and Ona had seen the first
day of their arrival. Not only did he own the dump, but he owned the
brick factory as well, and first he took out the clay and made it into
bricks, and then he had the city bring garbage to fill up the hole, so
that he could build houses to sell to the people. Then, too, he sold the
bricks to the city, at his own price, and the city came and got them
in its own wagons. And also he owned the other hole near by, where the
stagnant water was; and it was he who cut the ice and sold it; and what
was more, if the men told truth, he had not had to pay any taxes for the
water, and he had built the icehouse out of city lumber, and had not had
to pay anything for that. The newspapers had got hold of that story, and
there had been a scandal; but Scully had hired somebody to confess and
take all the blame, and then skip the country. It was said, too, that he
had built his brick-kiln in the same way, and that the workmen were on
the city payroll while they did it; however, one had to press closely to
get these things out of the men, for it was not their business, and Mike
Scully was a good man to stand in with. A note signed by him was equal
to a job any time at the packing houses; and also he employed a good
many men himself, and worked them only eight hours a day, and paid them
the highest wages. This gave him many friends--all of whom he had gotten
together into the "War Whoop League," whose clubhouse you might see
just outside of the yards. It was the biggest clubhouse, and the biggest
club, in all Chicago; and they had prizefights every now and then,
and cockfights and even dogfights. The policemen in the district all
belonged to the league, and instead of suppressing the fights, they sold
tickets for them. The man that had taken Jurgis to be naturalized was
one of these "Indians," as they were called; and on election day there
would be hundreds of them out, and all with big wads of money in their
pockets and free drinks at every saloon in the district. That was
another thing, the men said--all the saloon-keepers had to be "Indians,"
and to put up on demand, otherwise they could not do business on
Sundays, nor have any gambling at all. In the same way Scully had all
the jobs in the fire department at his disposal, and all the rest of the
city graft in the stockyards district; he was building a block of flats
somewhere up on Ashland Avenue, and the man who was overseeing it for
him was drawing pay as a city inspector of sewers. The city inspector of
water pipes had been dead and buried for over a year, but somebody was
still drawing his pay. The city inspector of sidewalks was a barkeeper
at the War Whoop Cafe--and maybe he could make it uncomfortable for any
tradesman who did not stand in with Scully!

Even the packers were in awe of him, so the men said. It gave them
pleasure to believe this, for Scully stood as the people's man, and
boasted of it boldly when election day came. The packers had wanted a
bridge at Ashland Avenue, but they had not been able to get it till they
had seen Scully; and it was the same with "Bubbly Creek," which the city
had threatened to make the packers cover over, till Scully had come to
their aid. "Bubbly Creek" is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms the
southern boundary of the yards: all the drainage of the square mile of
packing houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open sewer
a hundred or two feet wide. One long arm of it is blind, and the filth
stays there forever and a day. The grease and chemicals that are poured
into it undergo all sorts of strange transformations, which are the
cause of its name; it is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were
feeding in it, or great leviathans disporting themselves in its depths.
Bubbles of carbonic acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and
make rings two or three feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth
have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk
about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to
stroll across, and vanished temporarily. The packers used to leave the
creek that way, till every now and then the surface would catch on fire
and burn furiously, and the fire department would have to come and put
it out. Once, however, an ingenious stranger came and started to gather
this filth in scows, to make lard out of; then the packers took the
cue, and got out an injunction to stop him, and afterward gathered it
themselves. The banks of "Bubbly Creek" are plastered thick with hairs,
and this also the packers gather and clean.

And there were things even stranger than this, according to the gossip
of the men. The packers had secret mains, through which they stole
billions of gallons of the city's water. The newspapers had been full of
this scandal--once there had even been an investigation, and an actual
uncovering of the pipes; but nobody had been punished, and the thing
went right on. And then there was the condemned meat industry, with its
endless horrors. The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors
in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected
from diseased meat; they did not understand that these hundred and
sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of the packers,
and that they were paid by the United States government to certify
that all the diseased meat was kept in the state. They had no authority
beyond that; for the inspection of meat to be sold in the city and state
the whole force in Packingtown consisted of three henchmen of the local
political machine!*

(*Rules and Regulations for the Inspection of Livestock and
Their Products. United States Department of Agriculture,
Bureau of Animal Industries, Order No. 125:--

Section 1. Proprietors of slaughterhouses, canning, salting,
packing, or rendering establishments engaged in the
slaughtering of cattle, sheep. or swine, or the packing of
any of their products, the carcasses or products of which
are to become subjects of interstate or foreign commerce,
shall make application to the Secretary of Agriculture for
inspection of said animals and their products....

Section 15. Such rejected or condemned animals shall at once
be removed by the owners from the pens containing animals
which have been inspected and found to be free from disease
and fit for human food, and shall be disposed of in
accordance with the laws, ordinances, and regulations of the
state and municipality in which said rejected or condemned
animals are located....

Section 25. A microscopic examination for trichinae shall be
made of all swine products exported to countries requiring
such examination. No microscopic examination will be made of
hogs slaughtered for interstate trade, but this examination
shall be confined to those intended for the export trade.)

And shortly afterward one of these, a physician, made the discovery that
the carcasses of steers which had been condemned as tubercular by the
government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomaines, which
are deadly poisons, were left upon an open platform and carted away to
be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be treated
with an injection of kerosene--and was ordered to resign the same week!
So indignant were the packers that they went farther, and compelled
the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection; so that since then
there has not been even a pretense of any interference with the graft.
There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush money from the
tubercular steers alone; and as much again from the hogs which had died
of cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded
into boxcars and hauled away to a place called Globe, in Indiana, where
they made a fancy grade of lard.

Jurgis heard of these things little by little, in the gossip of those
who were obliged to perpetrate them. It seemed as if every time you
met a person from a new department, you heard of new swindles and new
crimes. There was, for instance, a Lithuanian who was a cattle butcher
for the plant where Marija had worked, which killed meat for canning
only; and to hear this man describe the animals which came to his place
would have been worthwhile for a Dante or a Zola. It seemed that they
must have agencies all over the country, to hunt out old and crippled
and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed
on "whisky-malt," the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the
men called "steerly"--which means covered with boils. It was a nasty
job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would
burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man's
sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he
ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could see? It was
stuff such as this that made the "embalmed beef" that had killed
several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the
Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was old
stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars.

Then one Sunday evening, Jurgis sat puffing his pipe by the kitchen
stove, and talking with an old fellow whom Jonas had introduced, and
who worked in the canning rooms at Durham's; and so Jurgis learned a few
things about the great and only Durham canned goods, which had become
a national institution. They were regular alchemists at Durham's; they
advertised a mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it did not know what
a mushroom looked like. They advertised "potted chicken,"--and it was
like the boardinghouse soup of the comic papers, through which a chicken
had walked with rubbers on. Perhaps they had a secret process for making
chickens chemically--who knows? said Jurgis' friend; the things that
went into the mixture were tripe, and the fat of pork, and beef suet,
and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal, when they had
any. They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several
prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper.
And then there was "potted game" and "potted grouse," "potted ham," and
"deviled ham"--de-vyled, as the men called it. "De-vyled" ham was made
out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be sliced by
the machines; and also tripe, dyed with chemicals so that it would not
show white; and trimmings of hams and corned beef; and potatoes, skins
and all; and finally the hard cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the
tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and
flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Anybody who could
invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said
Jurgis' informant; but it was hard to think of anything new in a
place where so many sharp wits had been at work for so long; where men
welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because it made
them fatten more quickly; and where they bought up all the old rancid
butter left over in the grocery stores of a continent, and "oxidized" it
by a forced-air process, to take away the odor, rechurned it with skim
milk, and sold it in bricks in the cities! Up to a year or two ago
it had been the custom to kill horses in the yards--ostensibly for
fertilizer; but after long agitation the newspapers had been able to
make the public realize that the horses were being canned. Now it was
against the law to kill horses in Packingtown, and the law was really
complied with--for the present, at any rate. Any day, however, one might
see sharp-horned and shaggy-haired creatures running with the sheep and
yet what a job you would have to get the public to believe that a good
part of what it buys for lamb and mutton is really goat's flesh!