The Jungle

ne 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 ice-house 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 Café—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![2] 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.

[2] 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.

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!

There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might
have gathered in Packingtown—those of the various afflictions of the
workers. When Jurgis had first inspected the packing plants with
Szedvilas, he had marveled while he listened to the tale of all the
things that were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the
lesser industries that were maintained there; now he found that each
one of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its
way as horrible as the killing beds, the source and fountain of them
all. The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases. And
the wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he
could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence of
them about on his own person—generally he had only to hold out his
hand.

There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas
had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of
horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a
truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him
out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the
acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and
trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a
person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it
had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the
man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be
criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count
them or to trace them. They would have no nails,—they had worn them off
pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread
out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the
midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms
the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was
renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried
two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind
of work, that began at four o’clock in the morning, and that wore out
the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in
the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time
limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five
years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even
sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had
to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had
to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten
their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned
meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut
represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping
machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the
pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part
of his hand chopped off. There were the “hoisters,” as they were
called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead
cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down
through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham’s architects had not
built the killing room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every
few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the
one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in
a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any,
however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking
rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,—for the odor of
a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards,
and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and
in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor,
their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they
were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth
exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but
the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!