The Jungle

his capacity as delicatessen vender, Jokubas Szedvilas had many
acquaintances. Among these was one of the special policemen employed by
Durham, whose duty it frequently was to pick out men for employment.
Jokubas had never tried it, but he expressed a certainty that he could
get some of his friends a job through this man. It was agreed, after
consultation, that he should make the effort with old Antanas and with
Jonas. Jurgis was confident of his ability to get work for himself,
unassisted by any one. As we have said before, he was not mistaken in
this. He had gone to Brown’s and stood there not more than half an hour
before one of the bosses noticed his form towering above the rest, and
signaled to him. The colloquy which followed was brief and to the
point:

“Speak English?”

“No; Lit-uanian.” (Jurgis had studied this word carefully.)

“Job?”

“Je.” (A nod.)

“Worked here before?”

“No ’stand.”

(Signals and gesticulations on the part of the boss. Vigorous shakes of
the head by Jurgis.)

“Shovel guts?”

“No ’stand.” (More shakes of the head.)

“Zarnos. Pagaiksztis. Szluofa!” (Imitative motions.)

“Je.”

“See door. Durys?” (Pointing.)

“Je.”

“To-morrow, seven o’clock. Understand? Rytoj! Prieszpietys! Septyni!”

“Dekui, tamistai!” (Thank you, sir.) And that was all. Jurgis turned
away, and then in a sudden rush the full realization of his triumph
swept over him, and he gave a yell and a jump, and started off on a
run. He had a job! He had a job! And he went all the way home as if
upon wings, and burst into the house like a cyclone, to the rage of the
numerous lodgers who had just turned in for their daily sleep.

Meantime Jokubas had been to see his friend the policeman, and received
encouragement, so it was a happy party. There being no more to be done
that day, the shop was left under the care of Lucija, and her husband
sallied forth to show his friends the sights of Packingtown. Jokubas
did this with the air of a country gentleman escorting a party of
visitors over his estate; he was an old-time resident, and all these
wonders had grown up under his eyes, and he had a personal pride in
them. The packers might own the land, but he claimed the landscape, and
there was no one to say nay to this.

They passed down the busy street that led to the yards. It was still
early morning, and everything was at its high tide of activity. A
steady stream of employees was pouring through the gate—employees of
the higher sort, at this hour, clerks and stenographers and such. For
the women there were waiting big two-horse wagons, which set off at a
gallop as fast as they were filled. In the distance there was heard
again the lowing of the cattle, a sound as of a far-off ocean calling.
They followed it, this time, as eager as children in sight of a circus
menagerie—which, indeed, the scene a good deal resembled. They crossed
the railroad tracks, and then on each side of the street were the pens
full of cattle; they would have stopped to look, but Jokubas hurried
them on, to where there was a stairway and a raised gallery, from which
everything could be seen. Here they stood, staring, breathless with
wonder.

There is over a square mile of space in the yards, and more than half
of it is occupied by cattle pens; north and south as far as the eye can
reach there stretches a sea of pens. And they were all filled—so many
cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the world. Red cattle, black,
white, and yellow cattle; old cattle and young cattle; great bellowing
bulls and little calves not an hour born; meek-eyed milch cows and
fierce, long-horned Texas steers. The sound of them here was as of all
the barnyards of the universe; and as for counting them—it would have
taken all day simply to count the pens. Here and there ran long alleys,
blocked at intervals by gates; and Jokubas told them that the number of
these gates was twenty-five thousand. Jokubas had recently been reading
a newspaper article which was full of statistics such as that, and he
was very proud as he repeated them and made his guests cry out with
wonder. Jurgis too had a little of this sense of pride. Had he not just
gotten a job, and become a sharer in all this activity, a cog in this
marvelous machine? Here and there about the alleys galloped men upon
horseback, booted, and carrying long whips; they were very busy,
calling to each other, and to those who were driving the cattle. They
were drovers and stock raisers, who had come from far states, and
brokers and commission merchants, and buyers for all the big packing
houses.

Here and there they would stop to inspect a bunch of cattle, and there
would be a parley, brief and businesslike. The buyer would nod or drop
his whip, and that would mean a bargain; and he would note it in his
little book, along with hundreds of others he had made that morning.
Then Jokubas pointed out the place where the cattle were driven to be
weighed, upon a great scale that would weigh a hundred thousand pounds
at once and record it automatically. It was near to the east entrance
that they stood, and all along this east side of the yards ran the
railroad tracks, into which the cars were run, loaded with cattle. All
night long this had been going on, and now the pens were full; by
tonight they would all be empty, and the same thing would be done
again.

“And what will become of all these creatures?” cried Teta Elzbieta.

“By tonight,” Jokubas answered, “they will all be killed and cut up;
and over there on the other side of the packing houses are more
railroad tracks, where the cars come to take them away.”

There were two hundred and fifty miles of track within the yards, their
guide went on to tell them. They brought about ten thousand head of
cattle every day, and as many hogs, and half as many sheep—which meant
some eight or ten million live creatures turned into food every year.
One stood and watched, and little by little caught the drift of the
tide, as it set in the direction of the packing houses. There were
groups of cattle being driven to the chutes, which were roadways about
fifteen feet wide, raised high above the pens. In these chutes the
stream of animals was continuous; it was quite uncanny to watch them,
pressing on to their fate, all unsuspicious a very river of death. Our
friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors
of human destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it
all. The chutes into which the hogs went climbed high up—to the very
top of the distant buildings; and Jokubas explained that the hogs went
up by the power of their own legs, and then their weight carried them
back through all the processes necessary to make them into pork.

“They don’t waste anything here,” said the guide, and then he laughed
and added a witticism, which he was pleased that his unsophisticated
friends should take to be his own: “They use everything about the hog
except the squeal.” In front of Brown’s General Office building there
grows a tiny plot of grass, and this, you may learn, is the only bit of
green thing in Packingtown; likewise this jest about the hog and his
squeal, the stock in trade of all the guides, is the one gleam of humor
that you will find there.

After they had seen enough of the pens, the party went up the street,
to the mass of buildings which occupy the center of the yards. These
buildings, made of brick and stained with innumerable layers of
Packingtown smoke, were painted all over with advertising signs, from
which the visitor realized suddenly that he had come to the home of
many of the torments of his life. It was here that they made those
products with the wonders of which they pestered him so—by placards
that defaced the landscape when he traveled, and by staring
advertisements in the newspapers and magazines—by silly little jingles
that he could not get out of his mind, and gaudy pictures that lurked
for him around every street corner. Here was where they made Brown’s
Imperial Hams and Bacon, Brown’s Dressed Beef, Brown’s Excelsior
Sausages! Here was the headquarters of Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard, of
Durham’s Breakfast Bacon, Durham’s Canned Beef, Potted Ham, Deviled
Chicken, Peerless Fertilizer!

Entering one of the Durham buildings, they found a number of other
visitors waiting; and before long there came a guide, to escort them
through the place. They make a great feature of showing strangers
through the packing plants, for it is a good advertisement. But Ponas
Jokubas whispered maliciously that the visitors did not see any more
than the packers wanted them to. They climbed a long series of
stairways outside of the building, to the top of its five or six
stories. Here was the chute, with its river of hogs, all patiently
toiling upward; there was a place for them to rest to cool off, and
then through another passageway they went into a room from which there
is no returning for hogs.

It was a long, narrow room, with a gallery along it for visitors. At
the head there was a great iron wheel, about twenty feet in
circumference, with rings here and there along its edge. Upon both
sides of this wheel there was a narrow space, into which came the hogs
at the end of their journey; in the midst of them stood a great burly
Negro, bare-armed and bare-chested. He was resting for the moment, for
the wheel had stopped while men were cleaning up. In a minute or two,
however, it began slowly to revolve, and then the men upon each side of
it sprang to work. They had chains which they fastened about the leg of
the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of
the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly
jerked off his feet and borne aloft.

At the same instant the car was assailed by a most terrifying shriek;
the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back.
The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing—for
once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of
the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing down the
room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another,
until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and
kicking in frenzy—and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous to
the eardrums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to
hold—that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high
squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony; there would come a
momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever, surging up
to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the visitors—the men
would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand
with hands clenched, and the blood rushing to their faces, and the
tears starting in their eyes.

Meantime, heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were
going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors
made any difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs, and
one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a
long line of hogs, with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away together;
until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a
huge vat of boiling water.

It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was
porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics. And yet
somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the
hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they
were so very human in their protests—and so perfectly within their
rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult
to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this
cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense of apology, without
the homage of a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this
slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some
horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried
out of sight and of memory.

One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical,
without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog
squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was
nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where
they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a
separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were
brown, some were spotted; some were old, some young; some were long and
lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his
own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of
self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And
trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while
a black shadow hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway.
Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg.
Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were
nothing to it—it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his
feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched
him gasp out his life. And now was one to believe that there was
nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog personality was precious, to
whom these hog squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this
hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done,
and show him the meaning of his sacrifice? Perhaps some glimpse of all
this was in the thoughts of our humble-minded Jurgis, as he turned to
go on with the rest of the party, and muttered: “Dieve—but I’m glad I’m
not a hog!”

The carcass hog was scooped out of the vat by machinery, and then it
fell to the second floor, passing on the way through a wonderful
machine with numerous scrapers, which adjusted themselves to the size
and shape of the animal, and sent it out at the other end with nearly
all of its bristles removed. It was then again strung up by machinery,
and sent upon another trolley ride; this time passing between two lines
of men, who sat upon a raised platform, each doing a certain single
thing to the carcass as it came to him. One scraped the outside of a
leg; another scraped the inside of the same leg. One with a swift
stroke cut the throat; another with two swift strokes severed the head,
which fell to the floor and vanished through a hole. Another made a
slit down the body; a second opened the body wider; a third with a saw
cut the breastbone; a fourth loosened the entrails; a fifth pulled them
out—and they also slid through a hole in the floor. There were men to
scrape each side and men to scrape the back; there were men to clean
the carcass inside, to trim it and wash it. Looking down this room, one
saw, creeping slowly, a line of dangling hogs a hundred yards in
length; and for every yard there was a man, working as if a demon were
after him. At the end of this hog’s progress every inch of the carcass
had been gone over several times; and then it was rolled into the
chilling room, where it stayed for twenty-four hours, and where a
stranger might lose himself in a forest of freezing hogs.

Before the carcass was admitted here, however, it had to pass a
government inspector, who sat in the doorway and felt of the glands in
the neck for tuberculosis. This government inspector did not have the
manner of a man who was worked to death; he was apparently not haunted
by a fear that the hog might get by him before he had finished his
testing. If you were a sociable person, he was quite willing to enter
into conversation with you, and to explain to you the deadly nature of
the ptomaines which are found in tubercular pork; and while he was
talking with you you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a
dozen carcasses were passing him untouched. This inspector wore a blue
uniform, with brass buttons, and he gave an atmosphere of authority to
the scene, and, as it were, put the stamp of official approval upon the
things which were done in Durham’s.

Jurgis went down the line with the rest of the visitors, staring
open-mouthed, lost in wonder. He had dressed hogs himself in the forest
of Lithuania; but he had never expected to live to see one hog dressed
by several hundred men. It was like a wonderful poem to him, and he
took it all in guilelessly—even to the conspicuous signs demanding
immaculate cleanliness of the employees. Jurgis was vexed when the
cynical Jokubas translated these signs with sarcastic comments,
offering to take them to the secret rooms where the spoiled meats went
to be doctored.

The party descended to the next floor, where the various waste
materials were treated. Here came the entrails, to be scraped and
washed clean for sausage casings; men and women worked here in the
midst of a sickening stench, which caused the visitors to hasten by,
gasping. To another room came all the scraps to be “tanked,” which
meant boiling and pumping off the grease to make soap and lard; below
they took out the refuse, and this, too, was a region in which the
visitors did not linger. In still other places men were engaged in
cutting up the carcasses that had been through the chilling rooms.
First there were the “splitters,” the most expert workmen in the plant,
who earned as high as fifty cents an hour, and did not a thing all day
except chop hogs down the middle. Then there were “cleaver men,” great
giants with muscles of iron; each had two men to attend him—to slide
the half carcass in front of him on the table, and hold it while he
chopped it, and then turn each piece so that he might chop it once
more. His cleaver had a blade about two feet long, and he never made
but one cut; he made it so neatly, too, that his implement did not
smite through and dull itself—there was just enough force for a perfect
cut, and no more. So through various yawning holes there slipped to the
floor below—to one room hams, to another forequarters, to another sides
of pork. One might go down to this floor and see the pickling rooms,
where the hams were put into vats, and the great smoke rooms, with
their airtight iron doors. In other rooms they prepared salt pork—there
were whole cellars full of it, built up in great towers to the ceiling.
In yet other rooms they were putting up meats in boxes and barrels, and
wrapping hams and bacon in oiled paper, sealing and labeling and sewing
them. From the doors of these rooms went men with loaded trucks, to the
platform where freight cars were waiting to be filled; and one went out
there and realized with a start that he had come at last to the ground
floor of this enormous building.

Then the party went across the street to where they did the killing of
beef—where every hour they turned four or five hundred cattle into
meat. Unlike the place they had left, all this work was done on one
floor; and instead of there being one line of carcasses which moved to
the workmen, there were fifteen or twenty lines, and the men moved from
one to another of these. This made a scene of intense activity, a
picture of human power wonderful to watch. It was all in one great
room, like a circus amphitheater, with a gallery for visitors running
over the center.

Along one side of the room ran a narrow gallery, a few feet from the
floor; into which gallery the cattle were driven by men with goads
which gave them electric shocks. Once crowded in here, the creatures
were prisoned, each in a separate pen, by gates that shut, leaving them
no room to turn around; and while they stood bellowing and plunging,
over the top of the pen there leaned one of the “knockers,” armed with
a sledge hammer, and watching for a chance to deal a blow. The room
echoed with the thuds in quick succession, and the stamping and kicking
of the steers. The instant the animal had fallen, the “knocker” passed
on to another; while a second man raised a lever, and the side of the
pen was raised, and the animal, still kicking and struggling, slid out
to the “killing bed.” Here a man put shackles about one leg, and
pressed another lever, and the body was jerked up into the air. There
were fifteen or twenty such pens, and it was a matter of only a couple
of minutes to knock fifteen or twenty cattle and roll them out. Then
once more the gates were opened, and another lot rushed in; and so out
of each pen there rolled a steady stream of carcasses, which the men
upon the killing beds had to get out of the way.

The manner in which they did this was something to be seen and never
forgotten. They worked with furious intensity, literally upon the
run—at a pace with which there is nothing to be compared except a
football game. It was all highly specialized labor, each man having his
task to do; generally this would consist of only two or three specific
cuts, and he would pass down the line of fifteen or twenty carcasses,
making these cuts upon each. First there came the “butcher,” to bleed
them; this meant one swift stroke, so swift that you could not see
it—only the flash of the knife; and before you could realize it, the
man had darted on to the next line, and a stream of bright red was
pouring out upon the floor. This floor was half an inch deep with
blood, in spite of the best efforts of men who kept shoveling it
through holes; it must have made the floor slippery, but no one could
have guessed this by watching the men at work.

The carcass hung for a few minutes to bleed; there was no time lost,
however, for there were several hanging in each line, and one was
always ready. It was let down to the ground, and there came the
“headsman,” whose task it was to sever the head, with two or three
swift strokes. Then came the “floorsman,” to make the first cut in the
skin; and then another to finish ripping the skin down the center; and
then half a dozen more in swift succession, to finish the skinning.
After they were through, the carcass was again swung up; and while a
man with a stick examined the skin, to make sure that it had not been
cut, and another rolled it up and tumbled it through one of the
inevitable holes in the floor, the beef proceeded on its journey. There
were men to cut it, and men to split it, and men to gut it and scrape
it clean inside. There were some with hose which threw jets of boiling
water upon it, and others who removed the feet and added the final
touches. In the end, as with the hogs, the finished beef was run into
the chilling room, to hang its appointed time.

The visitors were taken there and shown them, all neatly hung in rows,
labeled conspicuously with the tags of the government inspectors—and
some, which had been killed by a special process, marked with the sign
of the kosher rabbi, certifying that it was fit for sale to the
orthodox. And then the visitors were taken to the other parts of the
building, to see what became of each particle of the waste material
that had vanished through the floor; and to the pickling rooms, and the
salting rooms, the canning rooms, and the packing rooms, where choice
meat was prepared for shipping in refrigerator cars, destined to be
eaten in all the four corners of civilization. Afterward they went
outside, wandering about among the mazes of buildings in which was done
the work auxiliary to this great industry. There was scarcely a thing
needed in the business that Durham and Company did not make for
themselves. There was a great steam power plant and an electricity
plant. There was a barrel factory, and a boiler-repair shop. There was
a building to which the grease was piped, and made into soap and lard;
and then there was a factory for making lard cans, and another for
making soap boxes. There was a building in which the bristles were
cleaned and dried, for the making of hair cushions and such things;
there was a building where the skins were dried and tanned, there was
another where heads and feet were made into glue, and another where
bones were made into fertilizer. No tiniest particle of organic matter
was wasted in Durham’s. Out of the horns of the cattle they made combs,
buttons, hairpins, and imitation ivory; out of the shinbones and other
big bones they cut knife and toothbrush handles, and mouthpieces for
pipes; out of the hoofs they cut hairpins and buttons, before they made
the rest into glue. From such things as feet, knuckles, hide clippings,
and sinews came such strange and unlikely products as gelatin,
isinglass, and phosphorus, bone black, shoe blacking, and bone oil.
They had curled-hair works for the cattle tails, and a “wool pullery”
for the sheepskins; they made pepsin from the stomachs of the pigs, and
albumen from the blood, and violin strings from the ill-smelling
entrails. When there was nothing else to be done with a thing, they
first put it into a tank and got out of it all the tallow and grease,
and then they made it into fertilizer. All these industries were
gathered into buildings near by, connected by galleries and railroads
with the main establishment; and it was estimated that they had handled
nearly a quarter of a billion of animals since the founding of the
plant by the elder Durham a generation and more ago. If you counted
with it the other big plants—and they were now really all one—it was,
so Jokubas informed them, the greatest aggregation of labor and capital
ever gathered in one place. It employed thirty thousand men; it
supported directly two hundred and fifty thousand people in its
neighborhood, and indirectly it supported half a million. It sent its
products to every country in the civilized world, and it furnished the
food for no less than thirty million people!

To all of these things our friends would listen open-mouthed—it seemed
to them impossible of belief that anything so stupendous could have
been devised by mortal man. That was why to Jurgis it seemed almost
profanity to speak about the place as did Jokubas, skeptically; it was
a thing as tremendous as the universe—the laws and ways of its working
no more than the universe to be questioned or understood. All that a
mere man could do, it seemed to Jurgis, was to take a thing like this
as he found it, and do as he was told; to be given a place in it and a
share in its wonderful activities was a blessing to be grateful for, as
one was grateful for the sunshine and the rain. Jurgis was even glad
that he had not seen the place before meeting with his triumph, for he
felt that the size of it would have overwhelmed him. But now he had
been admitted—he was a part of it all! He had the feeling that this
whole huge establishment had taken him under its protection, and had
become responsible for his welfare. So guileless was he, and ignorant
of the nature of business, that he did not even realize that he had
become an employee of Brown’s, and that Brown and Durham were supposed
by all the world to be deadly rivals—were even required to be deadly
rivals by the law of the land, and ordered to try to ruin each other
under penalty of fine and imprisonment!