The Jungle
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