The Jungle
power; they could tell within one per cent what the vote of their
district would be, and they could change it at an hour’s notice.
A month ago Jurgis had all but perished of starvation upon the streets;
and now suddenly, as by the gift of a magic key, he had entered into a
world where money and all the good things of life came freely. He was
introduced by his friend to an Irishman named “Buck” Halloran, who was
a political “worker” and on the inside of things. This man talked with
Jurgis for a while, and then told him that he had a little plan by
which a man who looked like a workingman might make some easy money;
but it was a private affair, and had to be kept quiet. Jurgis expressed
himself as agreeable, and the other took him that afternoon (it was
Saturday) to a place where city laborers were being paid off. The
paymaster sat in a little booth, with a pile of envelopes before him,
and two policemen standing by. Jurgis went, according to directions,
and gave the name of “Michael O’Flaherty,” and received an envelope,
which he took around the corner and delivered to Halloran, who was
waiting for him in a saloon. Then he went again; and gave the name of
“Johann Schmidt,” and a third time, and give the name of “Serge
Reminitsky.” Halloran had quite a list of imaginary workingmen, and
Jurgis got an envelope for each one. For this work he received five
dollars, and was told that he might have it every week, so long as he
kept quiet. As Jurgis was excellent at keeping quiet, he soon won the
trust of “Buck” Halloran, and was introduced to others as a man who
could be depended upon.
This acquaintance was useful to him in another way, also before long
Jurgis made his discovery of the meaning of “pull,” and just why his
boss, Connor, and also the pugilist bartender, had been able to send
him to jail. One night there was given a ball, the “benefit” of
“One-eyed Larry,” a lame man who played the violin in one of the big
“high-class” houses of prostitution on Clark Street, and was a wag and
a popular character on the “Lêvée.” This ball was held in a big dance
hall, and was one of the occasions when the city’s powers of debauchery
gave themselves up to madness. Jurgis attended and got half insane with
drink, and began quarreling over a girl; his arm was pretty strong by
then, and he set to work to clean out the place, and ended in a cell in
the police station. The police station being crowded to the doors, and
stinking with “bums,” Jurgis did not relish staying there to sleep off
his liquor, and sent for Halloran, who called up the district leader
and had Jurgis bailed out by telephone at four o’clock in the morning.
When he was arraigned that same morning, the district leader had
already seen the clerk of the court and explained that Jurgis Rudkus
was a decent fellow, who had been indiscreet; and so Jurgis was fined
ten dollars and the fine was “suspended”—which meant that he did not
have to pay for it, and never would have to pay it, unless somebody
chose to bring it up against him in the future.
Among the people Jurgis lived with now money was valued according to an
entirely different standard from that of the people of Packingtown;
yet, strange as it may seem, he did a great deal less drinking than he
had as a workingman. He had not the same provocations of exhaustion and
hopelessness; he had now something to work for, to struggle for. He
soon found that if he kept his wits about him, he would come upon new
opportunities; and being naturally an active man, he not only kept
sober himself, but helped to steady his friend, who was a good deal
fonder of both wine and women than he.
One thing led to another. In the saloon where Jurgis met “Buck”
Halloran he was sitting late one night with Duane, when a “country
customer” (a buyer for an out-of-town merchant) came in, a little more
than half “piped.” There was no one else in the place but the
bartender, and as the man went out again Jurgis and Duane followed him;
he went round the corner, and in a dark place made by a combination of
the elevated railroad and an unrented building, Jurgis leaped forward
and shoved a revolver under his nose, while Duane, with his hat pulled
over his eyes, went through the man’s pockets with lightning fingers.
They got his watch and his “wad,” and were round the corner again and
into the saloon before he could shout more than once. The bartender, to
whom they had tipped the wink, had the cellar door open for them, and
they vanished, making their way by a secret entrance to a brothel next
door. From the roof of this there was access to three similar places
beyond. By means of these passages the customers of any one place could
be gotten out of the way, in case a falling out with the police chanced
to lead to a raid; and also it was necessary to have a way of getting a
girl out of reach in case of an emergency. Thousands of them came to
Chicago answering advertisements for “servants” and “factory hands,”
and found themselves trapped by fake employment agencies, and locked up
in a bawdy-house. It was generally enough to take all their clothes
away from them; but sometimes they would have to be “doped” and kept
prisoners for weeks; and meantime their parents might be telegraphing
the police, and even coming on to see why nothing was done.
Occasionally there was no way of satisfying them but to let them search
the place to which the girl had been traced.
For his help in this little job, the bartender received twenty out of
the hundred and thirty odd dollars that the pair secured; and naturally
this put them on friendly terms with him, and a few days later he
introduced them to a little “sheeny” named Goldberger, one of the
“runners” of the “sporting house” where they had been hidden. After a
few drinks Goldberger began, with some hesitation, to narrate how he
had had a quarrel over his best girl with a professional “cardsharp,”
who had hit him in the jaw. The fellow was a stranger in Chicago, and
if he was found some night with his head cracked there would be no one
to care very much. Jurgis, who by this time would cheerfully have
cracked the heads of all the gamblers in Chicago, inquired what would
be coming to him; at which the Jew became still more confidential, and
said that he had some tips on the New Orleans races, which he got
direct from the police captain of the district, whom he had got out of
a bad scrape, and who “stood in” with a big syndicate of horse owners.
Duane took all this in at once, but Jurgis had to have the whole
race-track situation explained to him before he realized the importance
of such an opportunity.
There was the gigantic Racing Trust. It owned the legislatures in every
state in which it did business; it even owned some of the big
newspapers, and made public opinion—there was no power in the land that
could oppose it unless, perhaps, it were the Poolroom Trust. It built
magnificent racing parks all over the country, and by means of enormous
purses it lured the people to come, and then it organized a gigantic
shell game, whereby it plundered them of hundreds of millions of
dollars every year. Horse racing had once been a sport, but nowadays it
was a business; a horse could be “doped” and doctored, undertrained or
overtrained; it could be made to fall at any moment—or its gait could
be broken by lashing it with the whip, which all the spectators would
take to be a desperate effort to keep it in the lead. There were scores
of such tricks; and sometimes it was the owners who played them and
made fortunes, sometimes it was the jockeys and trainers, sometimes it
was outsiders, who bribed them—but most of the time it was the chiefs
of the trust. Now for instance, they were having winter racing in New
Orleans and a syndicate was laying out each day’s program in advance,
and its agents in all the Northern cities were “milking” the poolrooms.
The word came by long-distance telephone in a cipher code, just a
little while before each race; and any man who could get the secret had
as good as a fortune. If Jurgis did not believe it, he could try it,
said the little Jew—let them meet at a certain house on the morrow and
make a test. Jurgis was willing, and so was Duane, and so they went to
one of the high-class poolrooms where brokers and merchants gambled
(with society women in a private room), and they put up ten dollars
each upon a horse called “Black Beldame,” a six to one shot, and won.
For a secret like that they would have done a good many sluggings—but
the next day Goldberger informed them that the offending gambler had
got wind of what was coming to him, and had skipped the town.
There were ups and downs at the business; but there was always a
living, inside of a jail, if not out of it. Early in April the city
elections were due, and that meant prosperity for all the powers of
graft. Jurgis, hanging round in dives and gambling houses and brothels,
met with the heelers of both parties, and from their conversation he
came to understand all the ins and outs of the game, and to hear of a
number of ways in which he could make himself useful about election
time. “Buck” Halloran was a “Democrat,” and so Jurgis became a Democrat
also; but he was not a bitter one—the Republicans were good fellows,
too, and were to have a pile of money in this next campaign. At the
last election the Republicans had paid four dollars a vote to the
Democrats’ three; and “Buck” Halloran sat one night playing cards with
Jurgis and another man, who told how Halloran had been charged with the
job voting a “bunch” of thirty-seven newly landed Italians, and how he,
the narrator, had met the Republican worker who was after the very same
gang, and how the three had effected a bargain, whereby the Italians
were to vote half and half, for a glass of beer apiece, while the
balance of the fund went to the conspirators!
Not long after this, Jurgis, wearying of the risks and vicissitudes of
miscellaneous crime, was moved to give up the career for that of a
politician. Just at this time there was a tremendous uproar being
raised concerning the alliance between the criminals and the police.
For the criminal graft was one in which the business men had no direct
part—it was what is called a “side line,” carried by the police. “Wide
open” gambling and debauchery made the city pleasing to “trade,” but
burglaries and holdups did not. One night it chanced that while Jack
Duane was drilling a safe in a clothing store he was caught red-handed
by the night watchman, and turned over to a policeman, who chanced to
know him well, and who took the responsibility of letting him make his
escape. Such a howl from the newspapers followed this that Duane was
slated for sacrifice, and barely got out of town in time. And just at
that juncture it happened that Jurgis was introduced to a man named
Harper whom he recognized as the night watchman at Brown’s, who had
been instrumental in making him an American citizen, the first year of
his arrival at the yards. The other was interested in the coincidence,
but did not remember Jurgis—he had handled too many “green ones” in his
time, he said. He sat in a dance hall with Jurgis and Halloran until
one or two in the morning, exchanging experiences. He had a long story
to tell of his quarrel with the superintendent of his department, and
how he was now a plain workingman, and a good union man as well. It was
not until some months afterward that Jurgis understood that the quarrel
with the superintendent had been prearranged, and that Harper was in
reality drawing a salary of twenty dollars a week from the packers for
an inside report of his union’s secret proceedings. The yards were
seething with agitation just then, said the man, speaking as a
unionist. The people of Packingtown had borne about all that they would