The Jungle
positions he had on hand, he could only shake his head sorrowfully and
say that he had not the necessary dollar to deposit; when it was
explained to him what “big money” he and all his family could make by
coloring photographs, he could only promise to come in again when he
had two dollars to invest in the outfit.
In the end Jurgis got a chance through an accidental meeting with an
old-time acquaintance of his union days. He met this man on his way to
work in the giant factories of the Harvester Trust; and his friend told
him to come along and he would speak a good word for him to his boss,
whom he knew well. So Jurgis trudged four or five miles, and passed
through a waiting throng of unemployed at the gate under the escort of
his friend. His knees nearly gave way beneath him when the foreman,
after looking him over and questioning him, told him that he could find
an opening for him.
How much this accident meant to Jurgis he realized only by stages; for
he found that the harvester works were the sort of place to which
philanthropists and reformers pointed with pride. It had some thought
for its employees; its workshops were big and roomy, it provided a
restaurant where the workmen could buy good food at cost, it had even a
reading room, and decent places where its girl-hands could rest; also
the work was free from many of the elements of filth and repulsiveness
that prevailed at the stockyards. Day after day Jurgis discovered these
things—things never expected nor dreamed of by him—until this new place
came to seem a kind of a heaven to him.
It was an enormous establishment, covering a hundred and sixty acres of
ground, employing five thousand people, and turning out over three
hundred thousand machines every year—a good part of all the harvesting
and mowing machines used in the country. Jurgis saw very little of it,
of course—it was all specialized work, the same as at the stockyards;
each one of the hundreds of parts of a mowing machine was made
separately, and sometimes handled by hundreds of men. Where Jurgis
worked there was a machine which cut and stamped a certain piece of
steel about two square inches in size; the pieces came tumbling out
upon a tray, and all that human hands had to do was to pile them in
regular rows, and change the trays at intervals. This was done by a
single boy, who stood with eyes and thought centered upon it, and
fingers flying so fast that the sounds of the bits of steel striking
upon each other was like the music of an express train as one hears it
in a sleeping car at night. This was “piece-work,” of course; and
besides it was made certain that the boy did not idle, by setting the
machine to match the highest possible speed of human hands. Thirty
thousand of these pieces he handled every day, nine or ten million
every year—how many in a lifetime it rested with the gods to say. Near
by him men sat bending over whirling grindstones, putting the finishing
touches to the steel knives of the reaper; picking them out of a basket
with the right hand, pressing first one side and then the other against
the stone and finally dropping them with the left hand into another
basket. One of these men told Jurgis that he had sharpened three
thousand pieces of steel a day for thirteen years. In the next room
were wonderful machines that ate up long steel rods by slow stages,
cutting them off, seizing the pieces, stamping heads upon them,
grinding them and polishing them, threading them, and finally dropping
them into a basket, all ready to bolt the harvesters together. From yet
another machine came tens of thousands of steel burs to fit upon these
bolts. In other places all these various parts were dipped into troughs
of paint and hung up to dry, and then slid along on trolleys to a room
where men streaked them with red and yellow, so that they might look
cheerful in the harvest fields.
Jurgis’s friend worked upstairs in the casting rooms, and his task was
to make the molds of a certain part. He shoveled black sand into an
iron receptacle and pounded it tight and set it aside to harden; then
it would be taken out, and molten iron poured into it. This man, too,
was paid by the mold—or rather for perfect castings, nearly half his
work going for naught. You might see him, along with dozens of others,
toiling like one possessed by a whole community of demons; his arms
working like the driving rods of an engine, his long, black hair flying
wild, his eyes starting out, the sweat rolling in rivers down his face.
When he had shoveled the mold full of sand, and reached for the pounder
to pound it with, it was after the manner of a canoeist running rapids
and seizing a pole at sight of a submerged rock. All day long this man
would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making
twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then
his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant
captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling
how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other
country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it
would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our
wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy; though there are a few other
things that are great among us including our drink-bill, which is a
billion and a quarter of dollars a year, and doubling itself every
decade.
There was a machine which stamped out the iron plates, and then another
which, with a mighty thud, mashed them to the shape of the sitting-down
portion of the American farmer. Then they were piled upon a truck, and
it was Jurgis’s task to wheel them to the room where the machines were
“assembled.” This was child’s play for him, and he got a dollar and
seventy-five cents a day for it; on Saturday he paid Aniele the
seventy-five cents a week he owed her for the use of her garret, and
also redeemed his overcoat, which Elzbieta had put in pawn when he was
in jail.
This last was a great blessing. A man cannot go about in midwinter in
Chicago with no overcoat and not pay for it, and Jurgis had to walk or
ride five or six miles back and forth to his work. It so happened that
half of this was in one direction and half in another, necessitating a
change of cars; the law required that transfers be given at all
intersecting points, but the railway corporation had gotten round this
by arranging a pretense at separate ownership. So whenever he wished to
ride, he had to pay ten cents each way, or over ten per cent of his
income to this power, which had gotten its franchises long ago by
buying up the city council, in the face of popular clamor amounting
almost to a rebellion. Tired as he felt at night, and dark and bitter
cold as it was in the morning, Jurgis generally chose to walk; at the
hours other workmen were traveling, the streetcar monopoly saw fit to
put on so few cars that there would be men hanging to every foot of the
backs of them and often crouching upon the snow-covered roof. Of course
the doors could never be closed, and so the cars were as cold as
outdoors; Jurgis, like many others, found it better to spend his fare
for a drink and a free lunch, to give him strength to walk.
These, however, were all slight matters to a man who had escaped from
Durham’s fertilizer mill. Jurgis began to pick up heart again and to
make plans. He had lost his house but then the awful load of the rent
and interest was off his shoulders, and when Marija was well again they
could start over and save. In the shop where he worked was a man, a
Lithuanian like himself, whom the others spoke of in admiring whispers,
because of the mighty feats he was performing. All day he sat at a
machine turning bolts; and then in the evening he went to the public
school to study English and learn to read. In addition, because he had
a family of eight children to support and his earnings were not enough,
on Saturdays and Sundays he served as a watchman; he was required to
press two buttons at opposite ends of a building every five minutes,
and as the walk only took him two minutes, he had three minutes to
study between each trip. Jurgis felt jealous of this fellow; for that
was the sort of thing he himself had dreamed of, two or three years
ago. He might do it even yet, if he had a fair chance—he might attract
attention and become a skilled man or a boss, as some had done in this
place. Suppose that Marija could get a job in the big mill where they
made binder twine—then they would move into this neighborhood, and he
would really have a chance. With a hope like that, there was some use
in living; to find a place where you were treated like a human being—by
God! he would show them how he could appreciate it. He laughed to
himself as he thought how he would hang on to this job!
And then one afternoon, the ninth of his work in the place, when he
went to get his overcoat he saw a group of men crowded before a placard
on the door, and when he went over and asked what it was, they told him
that beginning with the morrow his department of the harvester works
would be closed until further notice!
CHAPTER XXI
That was the way they did it! There was not half an hour’s warning—the
works were closed! It had happened that way before, said the men, and
it would happen that way forever. They had made all the harvesting
machines that the world needed, and now they had to wait till some wore
out! It was nobody’s fault—that was the way of it; and thousands of men
and women were turned out in the dead of winter, to live upon their
savings if they had any, and otherwise to die. So many tens of
thousands already in the city, homeless and begging for work, and now
several thousand more added to them!
Jurgis walked home-with his pittance of pay in his pocket, heartbroken,
overwhelmed. One more bandage had been torn from his eyes, one more
pitfall was revealed to him! Of what help was kindness and decency on
the part of employers—when they could not keep a job for him, when
there were more harvesting machines made than the world was able to
buy! What a hellish mockery it was, anyway, that a man should slave to
make harvesting machines for the country, only to be turned out to
starve for doing his duty too well!
It took him two days to get over this heart-sickening disappointment.
He did not drink anything, because Elzbieta got his money for
safekeeping, and knew him too well to be in the least frightened by his
angry demands. He stayed up in the garret however, and sulked—what was
the use of a man’s hunting a job when it was taken from him before he
had time to learn the work? But then their money was going again, and
little Antanas was hungry, and crying with the bitter cold of the
garret. Also Madame Haupt, the midwife, was after him for some money.
So he went out once more.
For another ten days he roamed the streets and alleys of the huge city,
sick and hungry, begging for any work. He tried in stores and offices,
in restaurants and hotels, along the docks and in the railroad yards,
in warehouses and mills and factories where they made products that
went to every corner of the world. There were often one or two
chances—but there were always a hundred men for every chance, and his
turn would not come. At night he crept into sheds and cellars and
doorways—until there came a spell of belated winter weather, with a
raging gale, and the thermometer five degrees below zero at sundown and
falling all night. Then Jurgis fought like a wild beast to get into the
big Harrison Street police station, and slept down in a corridor,
crowded with two other men upon a single step.
He had to fight often in these days to fight for a place near the
factory gates, and now and again with gangs on the street. He found,