The Jungle

urgis 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! ‘Écrasez l’Infâme!’” 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 business-men’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.

That was Amos Struver; and then there was Harry Adams, the assistant
clerk, a pale, scholarly-looking man, who came from Massachusetts, of
Pilgrim stock. Adams had been a cotton operative in Fall River, and the
continued depression in the industry had worn him and his family out,
and he had emigrated to South Carolina. In Massachusetts the percentage
of white illiteracy is eight-tenths of one per cent, while in South
Carolina it is thirteen and six-tenths per cent; also in South Carolina
there is a property qualification for voters—and for these and other
reasons child labor is the rule, and so the cotton mills were driving
those of Massachusetts out of the business. Adams did not know this, he
only knew that the Southern mills were running; but when he got there
he found that if he was to live, all his family would have to work, and
from six o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. So he had set
to work to organize the mill hands, after the fashion in Massachusetts,
and had been discharged; but he had gotten other work, and stuck at it,
and at last there had been a strike for shorter hours, and Harry Adams
had attempted to address a street meeting, which was the end of him. In
the states of the far South the labor of convicts is leased to
contractors, and when there are not convicts enough they have to be
supplied. Harry Adams was sent up by a judge who was a cousin of the
mill owner with whose business he had interfered; and though the life
had nearly killed him, he had been wise enough not to murmur, and at
the end of his term he and his family had left the state of South
Carolina—hell’s back yard, as he called it. He had no money for
carfare, but it was harvest-time, and they walked one day and worked
the next; and so Adams got at last to Chicago, and joined the Socialist
party. He was a studious man, reserved, and nothing of an orator; but
he always had a pile of books under his desk in the hotel, and articles
from his pen were beginning to attract attention in the party press.

Contrary to what one would have expected, all this radicalism did not
hurt the hotel business; the radicals flocked to it, and the commercial
travelers all found it diverting. Of late, also, the hotel had become a
favorite stopping place for Western cattlemen. Now that the Beef Trust
had adopted the trick of raising prices to induce enormous shipments of
cattle, and then dropping them again and scooping in all they needed, a
stock raiser was very apt to find himself in Chicago without money
enough to pay his freight bill; and so he had to go to a cheap hotel,
and it was no drawback to him if there was an agitator talking in the
lobby. These Western fellows were just “meat” for Tommy Hinds—he would
get a dozen of them around him and paint little pictures of “the
System.” Of course, it was not a week before he had heard Jurgis’s
story, and after that he would not have let his new porter go for the
world. “See here,” he would say, in the middle of an argument, “I’ve
got a fellow right here in my place who’s worked there and seen every
bit of it!” And then Jurgis would drop his work, whatever it was, and
come, and the other would say, “Comrade Jurgis, just tell these
gentlemen what you saw on the killing-beds.” At first this request
caused poor Jurgis the most acute agony, and it was like pulling teeth
to get him to talk; but gradually he found out what was wanted, and in
the end he learned to stand up and speak his piece with enthusiasm. His
employer would sit by and encourage him with exclamations and shakes of
the head; when Jurgis would give the formula for “potted ham,” or tell
about the condemned hogs that were dropped into the “destructors” at
the top and immediately taken out again at the bottom, to be shipped
into another state and made into lard, Tommy Hinds would bang his knee
and cry, “Do you think a man could make up a thing like that out of his
head?”

And then the hotel-keeper would go on to show how the Socialists had
the only real remedy for such evils, how they alone “meant business”
with the Beef Trust. And when, in answer to this, the victim would say
that the whole country was getting stirred up, that the newspapers were
full of denunciations of it, and the government taking action against
it, Tommy Hinds had a knock-out blow all ready. “Yes,” he would say,
“all that is true—but what do you suppose is the reason for it? Are you
foolish enough to believe that it’s done for the public? There are
other trusts in the country just as illegal and extortionate as the
Beef Trust: there is the Coal Trust, that freezes the poor in
winter—there is the Steel Trust, that doubles the price of every nail
in your shoes—there is the Oil Trust, that keeps you from reading at
night—and why do you suppose it is that all the fury of the press and
the government is directed against the Beef Trust?” And when to this
the victim would reply that there was clamor enough over the Oil Trust,
the other would continue: “Ten years ago Henry D. Lloyd told all the
truth about the Standard Oil Company in his Wealth versus Commonwealth;
and the book was allowed to die, and you hardly ever hear of it. And
now, at last, two magazines have the courage to tackle ‘Standard Oil’
again, and what happens? The newspapers ridicule the authors, the
churches defend the criminals, and the government—does nothing. And
now, why is it all so different with the Beef Trust?”

Here the other would generally admit that he was “stuck”; and Tommy
Hinds would explain to him, and it was fun to see his eyes open. “If
you were a Socialist,” the hotel-keeper would say, “you would
understand that the power which really governs the United States today
is the Railroad Trust. It is the Railroad Trust that runs your state
government, wherever you live, and that runs the United States Senate.
And all of the trusts that I have named are railroad trusts—save only
the Beef Trust! The Beef Trust has defied the railroads—it is
plundering them day by day through the Private Car; and so the public
is roused to fury, and the papers clamor for action, and the government
goes on the war-path! And you poor common people watch and applaud the
job, and think it’s all done for you, and never dream that it is really
the grand climax of the century-long battle of commercial
competition—the final death grapple between the chiefs of the Beef
Trust and ‘Standard Oil,’ for the prize of the mastery and ownership of
the United States of America!”

Such was the new home in which Jurgis lived and worked, and in which
his education was completed. Perhaps you would imagine that he did not
do much work there, but that would be a great mistake. He would have
cut off one hand for Tommy Hinds; and to keep Hinds’s hotel a thing of
beauty was his joy in life. That he had a score of Socialist arguments
chasing through his brain in the meantime did not interfere with this;
on the contrary, Jurgis scrubbed the spittoons and polished the
banisters all the more vehemently because at the same time he was
wrestling inwardly with an imaginary recalcitrant. It would be pleasant
to record that he swore off drinking immediately, and all the rest of
his bad habits with it; but that would hardly be exact. These
revolutionists were not angels; they were men, and men who had come up
from the social pit, and with the mire of it smeared over them. Some of
them drank, and some of them swore, and some of them ate pie with their
knives; there was only one difference between them and all the rest of
the populace—that they were men with a hope, with a cause to fight for
and suffer for. There came times to Jurgis when the vision seemed
far-off and pale, and a glass of beer loomed large in comparison; but
if the glass led to another glass, and to too many glasses, he had
something to spur him to remorse and resolution on the morrow. It was
so evidently a wicked thing to spend one’s pennies for drink, when the
working class was wandering in darkness, and waiting to be delivered;
the price of a glass of beer would buy fifty copies of a leaflet, and
one could hand these out to the unregenerate, and then get drunk upon
the thought of the good that was being accomplished. That was the way
the movement had been made, and it was the only way it would progress;
it availed nothing to know of it, without fighting for it—it was a
thing for all, not for a few! A corollary of this proposition of course
was, that any one who refused to receive the new gospel was personally
responsible for keeping Jurgis from his heart’s desire; and this, alas,
made him uncomfortable as an acquaintance. He met some neighbors with
whom Elzbieta had made friends in her neighborhood, and he set out to
make Socialists of them by wholesale, and several times he all but got
into a fight.

It was all so painfully obvious to Jurgis! It was so incomprehensible
how a man could fail to see it! Here were all the opportunities of the
country, the land, and the buildings upon the land, the railroads, the
mines, the factories, and the stores, all in the hands of a few private
individuals, called capitalists, for whom the people were obliged to
work for wages. The whole balance of what the people produced went to
heap up the fortunes of these capitalists, to heap, and heap again, and
yet again—and that in spite of the fact that they, and every one about
them, lived in unthinkable luxury! And was it not plain that if the
people cut off the share of those who merely “owned,” the share of
those who worked would be much greater? That was as plain as two and
two makes four; and it was the whole of it, absolutely the whole of it;
and yet there were people who could not see it, who would argue about
everything else in the world. They would tell you that governments
could not manage things as economically as private individuals; they
would repeat and repeat that, and think they were saying something!
They could not see that “economical” management by masters meant simply
that they, the people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid
less! They were wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters
whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible; and they
were taking an interest in the process, were anxious lest it should not
be done thoroughly enough! Was it not honestly a trial to listen to an
argument such as that?

And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to some
poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and
had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six
o’clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to
take his clothes off; who had never had a week’s vacation in his life,
had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything,
never hoped anything—and when you started to tell him about Socialism
he would sniff and say, “I’m not interested in that—I’m an
individualist!” And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was
“paternalism,” and that if it ever had its way the world would stop
progressing. It was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like
that; and yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out—for how many
millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been
so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what freedom was! And
they really thought that it was “individualism” for tens of thousands
of them to herd together and obey the orders of a steel magnate, and
produce hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for him, and then let
him give them libraries; while for them to take the industry, and run
it to suit themselves, and build their own libraries—that would have
been “Paternalism”!

Sometimes the agony of such things as this was almost more than Jurgis
could bear; yet there was no way of escape from it, there was nothing
to do but to dig away at the base of this mountain of ignorance and
prejudice. You must keep at the poor fellow; you must hold your temper,
and argue with him, and watch for your chance to stick an idea or two
into his head. And the rest of the time you must sharpen up your
weapons—you must think out new replies to his objections, and provide
yourself with new facts to prove to him the folly of his ways.

So Jurgis acquired the reading habit. He would carry in his pocket a
tract or a pamphlet which some one had loaned him, and whenever he had
an idle moment during the day he would plod through a paragraph, and
then think about it while he worked. Also he read the newspapers, and
asked questions about them. One of the other porters at Hinds’s was a
sharp little Irishman, who knew everything that Jurgis wanted to know;
and while they were busy he would explain to him the geography of
America, and its history, its constitution and its laws; also he gave
him an idea of the business system of the country, the great railroads
and corporations, and who owned them, and the labor unions, and the big
strikes, and the men who had led them. Then at night, when he could get
off, Jurgis would attend the Socialist meetings. During the campaign
one was not dependent upon the street corner affairs, where the weather
and the quality of the orator were equally uncertain; there were hall
meetings every night, and one could hear speakers of national
prominence. These discussed the political situation from every point of
view, and all that troubled Jurgis was the impossibility of carrying
off but a small part of the treasures they offered him.

There was a man who was known in the party as the “Little Giant.” The
Lord had used up so much material in the making of his head that there
had not been enough to complete his legs; but he got about on the
platform, and when he shook his raven whiskers the pillars of
capitalism rocked. He had written a veritable encyclopedia upon the
subject, a book that was nearly as big as himself—And then there was a
young author, who came from California, and had been a salmon fisher,
an oyster-pirate, a longshoreman, a sailor; who had tramped the country
and been sent to jail, had lived in the Whitechapel slums, and been to
the Klondike in search of gold. All these things he pictured in his
books, and because he was a man of genius he forced the world to hear
him. Now he was famous, but wherever he went he still preached the
gospel of the poor. And then there was one who was known at the
“millionaire Socialist.” He had made a fortune in business, and spent
nearly all of it in building up a magazine, which the post office
department had tried to suppress, and had driven to Canada. He was a
quiet-mannered man, whom you would have taken for anything in the world
but a Socialist agitator. His speech was simple and informal—he could
not understand why any one should get excited about these things. It
was a process of economic evolution, he said, and he exhibited its laws
and methods. Life was a struggle for existence, and the strong overcame
the weak, and in turn were overcome by the strongest. Those who lost in
the struggle were generally exterminated; but now and then they had
been known to save themselves by combination—which was a new and higher
kind of strength. It was so that the gregarious animals had overcome
the predaceous; it was so, in human history, that the people had
mastered the kings. The workers were simply the citizens of industry,
and the Socialist movement was the expression of their will to survive.
The inevitability of the revolution depended upon this fact, that they
had no choice but to unite or be exterminated; this fact, grim and
inexorable, depended upon no human will, it was the law of the economic
process, of which the editor showed the details with the most marvelous
precision.

And later on came the evening of the great meeting of the campaign,
when Jurgis heard the two standard-bearers of his party. Ten years
before there had been in Chicago a strike of a hundred and fifty
thousand railroad employees, and thugs had been hired by the railroads
to commit violence, and the President of the United States had sent in
troops to break the strike, by flinging the officers of the union into
jail without trial. The president of the union came out of his cell a
ruined man; but also he came out a Socialist; and now for just ten
years he had been traveling up and down the country, standing face to
face with the people, and pleading with them for justice. He was a man
of electric presence, tall and gaunt, with a face worn thin by struggle
and suffering. The fury of outraged manhood gleamed in it—and the tears
of suffering little children pleaded in his voice. When he spoke he
paced the stage, lithe and eager, like a panther. He leaned over,
reaching out for his audience; he pointed into their souls with an
insistent finger. His voice was husky from much speaking, but the great
auditorium was as still as death, and every one heard him.

And then, as Jurgis came out from this meeting, some one handed him a
paper which he carried home with him and read; and so he became
acquainted with the “Appeal to Reason.” About twelve years previously a
Colorado real-estate speculator had made up his mind that it was wrong
to gamble in the necessities of life of human beings: and so he had
retired and begun the publication of a Socialist weekly. There had come
a time when he had to set his own type, but he had held on and won out,
and now his publication was an institution. It used a carload of paper
every week, and the mail trains would be hours loading up at the depot
of the little Kansas town. It was a four-page weekly, which sold for
less than half a cent a copy; its regular subscription list was a
quarter of a million, and it went to every crossroads post office in
America.

The “Appeal” was a “propaganda” paper. It had a manner all its own—it
was full of ginger and spice, of Western slang and hustle: It collected
news of the doings of the “plutes,” and served it up for the benefit of
the “American working-mule.” It would have columns of the deadly
parallel—the million dollars’ worth of diamonds, or the fancy
pet-poodle establishment of a society dame, beside the fate of Mrs.
Murphy of San Francisco, who had starved to death on the streets, or of
John Robinson, just out of the hospital, who had hanged himself in New
York because he could not find work. It collected the stories of graft
and misery from the daily press, and made a little pungent paragraphs
out of them. “Three banks of Bungtown, South Dakota, failed, and more
savings of the workers swallowed up!” “The mayor of Sandy Creek,
Oklahoma, has skipped with a hundred thousand dollars. That’s the kind
of rulers the old partyites give you!” “The president of the Florida
Flying Machine Company is in jail for bigamy. He was a prominent
opponent of Socialism, which he said would break up the home!” The
“Appeal” had what it called its “Army,” about thirty thousand of the
faithful, who did things for it; and it was always exhorting the “Army”
to keep its dander up, and occasionally encouraging it with a prize
competition, for anything from a gold watch to a private yacht or an
eighty-acre farm. Its office helpers were all known to the “Army” by
quaint titles—“Inky Ike,” “the Bald-headed Man,” “the Redheaded Girl,”
“the Bulldog,” “the Office Goat,” and “the One Hoss.”

But sometimes, again, the “Appeal” would be desperately serious. It
sent a correspondent to Colorado, and printed pages describing the
overthrow of American institutions in that state. In a certain city of
the country it had over forty of its “Army” in the headquarters of the
Telegraph Trust, and no message of importance to Socialists ever went
through that a copy of it did not go to the “Appeal.” It would print
great broadsides during the campaign; one copy that came to Jurgis was
a manifesto addressed to striking workingmen, of which nearly a million
copies had been distributed in the industrial centers, wherever the
employers’ associations had been carrying out their “open shop”
program. “You have lost the strike!” it was headed. “And now what are
you going to do about it?” It was what is called an “incendiary”
appeal—it was written by a man into whose soul the iron had entered.
When this edition appeared, twenty thousand copies were sent to the
stockyards district; and they were taken out and stowed away in the
rear of a little cigar store, and every evening, and on Sundays, the
members of the Packingtown locals would get armfuls and distribute them
on the streets and in the houses. The people of Packingtown had lost
their strike, if ever a people had, and so they read these papers
gladly, and twenty thousand were hardly enough to go round. Jurgis had
resolved not to go near his old home again, but when he heard of this
it was too much for him, and every night for a week he would get on the
car and ride out to the stockyards, and help to undo his work of the
previous year, when he had sent Mike Scully’s ten-pin setter to the
city Board of Aldermen.

It was quite marvelous to see what a difference twelve months had made
in Packingtown—the eyes of the people were getting opened! The
Socialists were literally sweeping everything before them that
election, and Scully and the Cook County machine were at their wits’
end for an “issue.” At the very close of the campaign they bethought
themselves of the fact that the strike had been broken by Negroes, and
so they sent for a South Carolina fire-eater, the “pitchfork senator,”
as he was called, a man who took off his coat when he talked to
workingmen, and damned and swore like a Hessian. This meeting they
advertised extensively, and the Socialists advertised it too—with the
result that about a thousand of them were on hand that evening. The
“pitchfork senator” stood their fusillade of questions for about an
hour, and then went home in disgust, and the balance of the meeting was
a strictly party affair. Jurgis, who had insisted upon coming, had the
time of his life that night; he danced about and waved his arms in his
excitement—and at the very climax he broke loose from his friends, and
got out into the aisle, and proceeded to make a speech himself! The
senator had been denying that the Democratic party was corrupt; it was
always the Republicans who bought the votes, he said—and here was
Jurgis shouting furiously, “It’s a lie! It’s a lie!” After which he
went on to tell them how he knew it—that he knew it because he had
bought them himself! And he would have told the “pitchfork senator” all
his experiences, had not Harry Adams and a friend grabbed him about the
neck and shoved him into a seat.