The Jungle

hey had bought their home. It was hard for them to realize that the
wonderful house was theirs to move into whenever they chose. They spent
all their time thinking about it, and what they were going to put into
it. As their week with Aniele was up in three days, they lost no time
in getting ready. They had to make some shift to furnish it, and every
instant of their leisure was given to discussing this.

A person who had such a task before him would not need to look very far
in Packingtown—he had only to walk up the avenue and read the signs, or
get into a streetcar, to obtain full information as to pretty much
everything a human creature could need. It was quite touching, the zeal
of people to see that his health and happiness were provided for. Did
the person wish to smoke? There was a little discourse about cigars,
showing him exactly why the Thomas Jefferson Five-cent Perfecto was the
only cigar worthy of the name. Had he, on the other hand, smoked too
much? Here was a remedy for the smoking habit, twenty-five doses for a
quarter, and a cure absolutely guaranteed in ten doses. In innumerable
ways such as this, the traveler found that somebody had been busied to
make smooth his paths through the world, and to let him know what had
been done for him. In Packingtown the advertisements had a style all of
their own, adapted to the peculiar population. One would be tenderly
solicitous. “Is your wife pale?” it would inquire. “Is she discouraged,
does she drag herself about the house and find fault with everything?
Why do you not tell her to try Dr. Lanahan’s Life Preservers?” Another
would be jocular in tone, slapping you on the back, so to speak. “Don’t
be a chump!” it would exclaim. “Go and get the Goliath Bunion Cure.”
“Get a move on you!” would chime in another. “It’s easy, if you wear
the Eureka Two-fifty Shoe.”

Among these importunate signs was one that had caught the attention of
the family by its pictures. It showed two very pretty little birds
building themselves a home; and Marija had asked an acquaintance to
read it to her, and told them that it related to the furnishing of a
house. “Feather your nest,” it ran—and went on to say that it could
furnish all the necessary feathers for a four-room nest for the
ludicrously small sum of seventy-five dollars. The particularly
important thing about this offer was that only a small part of the
money need be had at once—the rest one might pay a few dollars every
month. Our friends had to have some furniture, there was no getting
away from that; but their little fund of money had sunk so low that
they could hardly get to sleep at night, and so they fled to this as
their deliverance. There was more agony and another paper for Elzbieta
to sign, and then one night when Jurgis came home, he was told the
breathless tidings that the furniture had arrived and was safely stowed
in the house: a parlor set of four pieces, a bedroom set of three
pieces, a dining room table and four chairs, a toilet set with
beautiful pink roses painted all over it, an assortment of crockery,
also with pink roses—and so on. One of the plates in the set had been
found broken when they unpacked it, and Ona was going to the store the
first thing in the morning to make them change it; also they had
promised three saucepans, and there had only two come, and did Jurgis
think that they were trying to cheat them?

The next day they went to the house; and when the men came from work
they ate a few hurried mouthfuls at Aniele’s, and then set to work at
the task of carrying their belongings to their new home. The distance
was in reality over two miles, but Jurgis made two trips that night,
each time with a huge pile of mattresses and bedding on his head, with
bundles of clothing and bags and things tied up inside. Anywhere else
in Chicago he would have stood a good chance of being arrested; but the
policemen in Packingtown were apparently used to these informal
movings, and contented themselves with a cursory examination now and
then. It was quite wonderful to see how fine the house looked, with all
the things in it, even by the dim light of a lamp: it was really home,
and almost as exciting as the placard had described it. Ona was fairly
dancing, and she and Cousin Marija took Jurgis by the arm and escorted
him from room to room, sitting in each chair by turns, and then
insisting that he should do the same. One chair squeaked with his great
weight, and they screamed with fright, and woke the baby and brought
everybody running. Altogether it was a great day; and tired as they
were, Jurgis and Ona sat up late, contented simply to hold each other
and gaze in rapture about the room. They were going to be married as
soon as they could get everything settled, and a little spare money put
by; and this was to be their home—that little room yonder would be
theirs!

It was in truth a never-ending delight, the fixing up of this house.
They had no money to spend for the pleasure of spending, but there were
a few absolutely necessary things, and the buying of these was a
perpetual adventure for Ona. It must always be done at night, so that
Jurgis could go along; and even if it were only a pepper cruet, or half
a dozen glasses for ten cents, that was enough for an expedition. On
Saturday night they came home with a great basketful of things, and
spread them out on the table, while every one stood round, and the
children climbed up on the chairs, or howled to be lifted up to see.
There were sugar and salt and tea and crackers, and a can of lard and a
milk pail, and a scrubbing brush, and a pair of shoes for the second
oldest boy, and a can of oil, and a tack hammer, and a pound of nails.
These last were to be driven into the walls of the kitchen and the
bedrooms, to hang things on; and there was a family discussion as to
the place where each one was to be driven. Then Jurgis would try to
hammer, and hit his fingers because the hammer was too small, and get
mad because Ona had refused to let him pay fifteen cents more and get a
bigger hammer; and Ona would be invited to try it herself, and hurt her
thumb, and cry out, which necessitated the thumb’s being kissed by
Jurgis. Finally, after every one had had a try, the nails would be
driven, and something hung up. Jurgis had come home with a big packing
box on his head, and he sent Jonas to get another that he had bought.
He meant to take one side out of these tomorrow, and put shelves in
them, and make them into bureaus and places to keep things for the
bedrooms. The nest which had been advertised had not included feathers
for quite so many birds as there were in this family.

They had, of course, put their dining table in the kitchen, and the
dining room was used as the bedroom of Teta Elzbieta and five of her
children. She and the two youngest slept in the only bed, and the other
three had a mattress on the floor. Ona and her cousin dragged a
mattress into the parlor and slept at night, and the three men and the
oldest boy slept in the other room, having nothing but the very level
floor to rest on for the present. Even so, however, they slept
soundly—it was necessary for Teta Elzbieta to pound more than once on
the door at a quarter past five every morning. She would have ready a
great pot full of steaming black coffee, and oatmeal and bread and
smoked sausages; and then she would fix them their dinner pails with
more thick slices of bread with lard between them—they could not afford
butter—and some onions and a piece of cheese, and so they would tramp
away to work.

This was the first time in his life that he had ever really worked, it
seemed to Jurgis; it was the first time that he had ever had anything
to do which took all he had in him. Jurgis had stood with the rest up
in the gallery and watched the men on the killing beds, marveling at
their speed and power as if they had been wonderful machines; it
somehow never occurred to one to think of the flesh-and-blood side of
it—that is, not until he actually got down into the pit and took off
his coat. Then he saw things in a different light, he got at the inside
of them. The pace they set here, it was one that called for every
faculty of a man—from the instant the first steer fell till the
sounding of the noon whistle, and again from half-past twelve till
heaven only knew what hour in the late afternoon or evening, there was
never one instant’s rest for a man, for his hand or his eye or his
brain. Jurgis saw how they managed it; there were portions of the work
which determined the pace of the rest, and for these they had picked
men whom they paid high wages, and whom they changed frequently. You
might easily pick out these pacemakers, for they worked under the eye
of the bosses, and they worked like men possessed. This was called
“speeding up the gang,” and if any man could not keep up with the pace,
there were hundreds outside begging to try.

Yet Jurgis did not mind it; he rather enjoyed it. It saved him the
necessity of flinging his arms about and fidgeting as he did in most
work. He would laugh to himself as he ran down the line, darting a
glance now and then at the man ahead of him. It was not the pleasantest
work one could think of, but it was necessary work; and what more had a
man the right to ask than a chance to do something useful, and to get
good pay for doing it?

So Jurgis thought, and so he spoke, in his bold, free way; very much to
his surprise, he found that it had a tendency to get him into trouble.
For most of the men here took a fearfully different view of the thing.
He was quite dismayed when he first began to find it out—that most of
the men hated their work. It seemed strange, it was even terrible,
when you came to find out the universality of the sentiment; but it was
certainly the fact—they hated their work. They hated the bosses and
they hated the owners; they hated the whole place, the whole
neighborhood—even the whole city, with an all-inclusive hatred, bitter
and fierce. Women and little children would fall to cursing about it;
it was rotten, rotten as hell—everything was rotten. When Jurgis would
ask them what they meant, they would begin to get suspicious, and
content themselves with saying, “Never mind, you stay here and see for
yourself.”

One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that of the unions.
He had had no experience with unions, and he had to have it explained
to him that the men were banded together for the purpose of fighting
for their rights. Jurgis asked them what they meant by their rights, a
question in which he was quite sincere, for he had not any idea of any
rights that he had, except the right to hunt for a job, and do as he
was told when he got it. Generally, however, this harmless question
would only make his fellow workingmen lose their tempers and call him a
fool. There was a delegate of the butcher-helpers’ union who came to
see Jurgis to enroll him; and when Jurgis found that this meant that he
would have to part with some of his money, he froze up directly, and
the delegate, who was an Irishman and only knew a few words of
Lithuanian, lost his temper and began to threaten him. In the end
Jurgis got into a fine rage, and made it sufficiently plain that it
would take more than one Irishman to scare him into a union. Little by
little he gathered that the main thing the men wanted was to put a stop
to the habit of “speeding-up”; they were trying their best to force a
lessening of the pace, for there were some, they said, who could not
keep up with it, whom it was killing. But Jurgis had no sympathy with
such ideas as this—he could do the work himself, and so could the rest
of them, he declared, if they were good for anything. If they couldn’t
do it, let them go somewhere else. Jurgis had not studied the books,
and he would not have known how to pronounce “laissez faire”; but he
had been round the world enough to know that a man has to shift for
himself in it, and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to
listen to him holler.

Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore by
Malthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief
fund in time of a famine. It was the same with Jurgis, who consigned
the unfit to destruction, while going about all day sick at heart
because of his poor old father, who was wandering somewhere in the
yards begging for a chance to earn his bread. Old Antanas had been a
worker ever since he was a child; he had run away from home when he was
twelve, because his father beat him for trying to learn to read. And he
was a faithful man, too; he was a man you might leave alone for a
month, if only you had made him understand what you wanted him to do in
the meantime. And now here he was, worn out in soul and body, and with
no more place in the world than a sick dog. He had his home, as it
happened, and some one who would care for him if he never got a job;
but his son could not help thinking, suppose this had not been the
case. Antanas Rudkus had been into every building in Packingtown by
this time, and into nearly every room; he had stood mornings among the
crowd of applicants till the very policemen had come to know his face
and to tell him to go home and give it up. He had been likewise to all
the stores and saloons for a mile about, begging for some little thing
to do; and everywhere they had ordered him out, sometimes with curses,
and not once even stopping to ask him a question.

So, after all, there was a crack in the fine structure of Jurgis’ faith
in things as they are. The crack was wide while Dede Antanas was
hunting a job—and it was yet wider when he finally got it. For one
evening the old man came home in a great state of excitement, with the
tale that he had been approached by a man in one of the corridors of
the pickle rooms of Durham’s, and asked what he would pay to get a job.
He had not known what to make of this at first; but the man had gone on
with matter-of-fact frankness to say that he could get him a job,
provided that he were willing to pay one-third of his wages for it. Was
he a boss? Antanas had asked; to which the man had replied that that
was nobody’s business, but that he could do what he said.

Jurgis had made some friends by this time, and he sought one of them
and asked what this meant. The friend, who was named Tamoszius
Kuszleika, was a sharp little man who folded hides on the killing beds,
and he listened to what Jurgis had to say without seeming at all
surprised. They were common enough, he said, such cases of petty graft.
It was simply some boss who proposed to add a little to his income.
After Jurgis had been there awhile he would know that the plants were
simply honeycombed with rottenness of that sort—the bosses grafted off
the men, and they grafted off each other; and some day the
superintendent would find out about the boss, and then he would graft
off the boss. Warming to the subject, Tamoszius went on to explain the
situation. Here was Durham’s, for instance, owned by a man who was
trying to make as much money out of it as he could, and did not care in
the least how he did it; and underneath him, ranged in ranks and grades
like an army, were managers and superintendents and foremen, each one
driving the man next below him and trying to squeeze out of him as much
work as possible. And all the men of the same rank were pitted against
each other; the accounts of each were kept separately, and every man
lived in terror of losing his job, if another made a better record than
he. So from top to bottom the place was simply a seething caldron of
jealousies and hatreds; there was no loyalty or decency anywhere about
it, there was no place in it where a man counted for anything against a
dollar. And worse than there being no decency, there was not even any
honesty. The reason for that? Who could say? It must have been old
Durham in the beginning; it was a heritage which the self-made merchant
had left to his son, along with his millions.

Jurgis would find out these things for himself, if he stayed there long
enough; it was the men who had to do all the dirty jobs, and so there
was no deceiving them; and they caught the spirit of the place, and did
like all the rest. Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going to
make himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would
soon find out his error—for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good
work. You could lay that down for a rule—if you met a man who was
rising in Packingtown, you met a knave. That man who had been sent to
Jurgis’ father by the boss, he would rise; the man who told tales and
spied upon his fellows would rise; but the man who minded his own
business and did his work—why, they would “speed him up” till they had
worn him out, and then they would throw him into the gutter.

Jurgis went home with his head buzzing. Yet he could not bring himself
to believe such things—no, it could not be so. Tamoszius was simply
another of the grumblers. He was a man who spent all his time fiddling;
and he would go to parties at night and not get home till sunrise, and
so of course he did not feel like work. Then, too, he was a puny little
chap; and so he had been left behind in the race, and that was why he
was sore. And yet so many strange things kept coming to Jurgis’ notice
every day!

He tried to persuade his father to have nothing to do with the offer.
But old Antanas had begged until he was worn out, and all his courage
was gone; he wanted a job, any sort of a job. So the next day he went
and found the man who had spoken to him, and promised to bring him a
third of all he earned; and that same day he was put to work in
Durham’s cellars. It was a “pickle room,” where there was never a dry
spot to stand upon, and so he had to take nearly the whole of his first
week’s earnings to buy him a pair of heavy-soled boots. He was a
“squeedgie” man; his job was to go about all day with a long-handled
mop, swabbing up the floor. Except that it was damp and dark, it was
not an unpleasant job, in summer.

Now Antanas Rudkus was the meekest man that God ever put on earth; and
so Jurgis found it a striking confirmation of what the men all said,
that his father had been at work only two days before he came home as
bitter as any of them, and cursing Durham’s with all the power of his
soul. For they had set him to cleaning out the traps; and the family
sat round and listened in wonder while he told them what that meant. It
seemed that he was working in the room where the men prepared the beef
for canning, and the beef had lain in vats full of chemicals, and men
with great forks speared it out and dumped it into trucks, to be taken
to the cooking room. When they had speared out all they could reach,
they emptied the vat on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up the
balance and dumped it into the truck. This floor was filthy, yet they
set Antanas with his mop slopping the “pickle” into a hole that
connected with a sink, where it was caught and used over again forever;
and if that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all
the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every
few days it was the old man’s task to clean these out, and shovel their
contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat!

This was the experience of Antanas; and then there came also Jonas and
Marija with tales to tell. Marija was working for one of the
independent packers, and was quite beside herself and outrageous with
triumph over the sums of money she was making as a painter of cans. But
one day she walked home with a pale-faced little woman who worked
opposite to her, Jadvyga Marcinkus by name, and Jadvyga told her how
she, Marija, had chanced to get her job. She had taken the place of an
Irishwoman who had been working in that factory ever since any one
could remember. For over fifteen years, so she declared. Mary Dennis
was her name, and a long time ago she had been seduced, and had a
little boy; he was a cripple, and an epileptic, but still he was all
that she had in the world to love, and they had lived in a little room
alone somewhere back of Halsted Street, where the Irish were. Mary had
had consumption, and all day long you might hear her coughing as she
worked; of late she had been going all to pieces, and when Marija came,
the “forelady” had suddenly decided to turn her off. The forelady had
to come up to a certain standard herself, and could not stop for sick
people, Jadvyga explained. The fact that Mary had been there so long
had not made any difference to her—it was doubtful if she even knew
that, for both the forelady and the superintendent were new people,
having only been there two or three years themselves. Jadvyga did not
know what had become of the poor creature; she would have gone to see
her, but had been sick herself. She had pains in her back all the time,
Jadvyga explained, and feared that she had womb trouble. It was not fit
work for a woman, handling fourteen-pound cans all day.

It was a striking circumstance that Jonas, too, had gotten his job by
the misfortune of some other person. Jonas pushed a truck loaded with
hams from the smoke rooms on to an elevator, and thence to the packing
rooms. The trucks were all of iron, and heavy, and they put about
threescore hams on each of them, a load of more than a quarter of a
ton. On the uneven floor it was a task for a man to start one of these
trucks, unless he was a giant; and when it was once started he
naturally tried his best to keep it going. There was always the boss
prowling about, and if there was a second’s delay he would fall to
cursing; Lithuanians and Slovaks and such, who could not understand
what was said to them, the bosses were wont to kick about the place
like so many dogs. Therefore these trucks went for the most part on the
run; and the predecessor of Jonas had been jammed against the wall by
one and crushed in a horrible and nameless manner.

All of these were sinister incidents; but they were trifles compared to
what Jurgis saw with his own eyes before long. One curious thing he had
noticed, the very first day, in his profession of shoveler of guts;
which was the sharp trick of the floor bosses whenever there chanced to
come a “slunk” calf. Any man who knows anything about butchering knows
that the flesh of a cow that is about to calve, or has just calved, is
not fit for food. A good many of these came every day to the packing
houses—and, of course, if they had chosen, it would have been an easy
matter for the packers to keep them till they were fit for food. But
for the saving of time and fodder, it was the law that cows of that
sort came along with the others, and whoever noticed it would tell the
boss, and the boss would start up a conversation with the government
inspector, and the two would stroll away. So in a trice the carcass of
the cow would be cleaned out, and entrails would have vanished; it was
Jurgis’ task to slide them into the trap, calves and all, and on the
floor below they took out these “slunk” calves, and butchered them for
meat, and used even the skins of them.

One day a man slipped and hurt his leg; and that afternoon, when the
last of the cattle had been disposed of, and the men were leaving,
Jurgis was ordered to remain and do some special work which this
injured man had usually done. It was late, almost dark, and the
government inspectors had all gone, and there were only a dozen or two
of men on the floor. That day they had killed about four thousand
cattle, and these cattle had come in freight trains from far states,
and some of them had got hurt. There were some with broken legs, and
some with gored sides; there were some that had died, from what cause
no one could say; and they were all to be disposed of, here in darkness
and silence. “Downers,” the men called them; and the packing house had
a special elevator upon which they were raised to the killing beds,
where the gang proceeded to handle them, with an air of businesslike
nonchalance which said plainer than any words that it was a matter of
everyday routine. It took a couple of hours to get them out of the way,
and in the end Jurgis saw them go into the chilling rooms with the rest
of the meat, being carefully scattered here and there so that they
could not be identified. When he came home that night he was in a very
somber mood, having begun to see at last how those might be right who
had laughed at him for his faith in America.