The Jungle
poor, the lowest of the low, hunger-driven and miserable—and yet how
much he knew, how much he had dared and achieved, what a hero he had
been! There were others like him, too—thousands like him, and all of
them workingmen! That all this wonderful machinery of progress had been
created by his fellows—Jurgis could not believe it, it seemed too good
to be true.
That was always the way, said Ostrinski; when a man was first converted
to Socialism he was like a crazy person—he could not understand how
others could fail to see it, and he expected to convert all the world
the first week. After a while he would realize how hard a task it was;
and then it would be fortunate that other new hands kept coming, to
save him from settling down into a rut. Just now Jurgis would have
plenty of chance to vent his excitement, for a presidential campaign
was on, and everybody was talking politics. Ostrinski would take him to
the next meeting of the branch local, and introduce him, and he might
join the party. The dues were five cents a week, but any one who could
not afford this might be excused from paying. The Socialist party was a
really democratic political organization—it was controlled absolutely
by its own membership, and had no bosses. All of these things Ostrinski
explained, as also the principles of the party. You might say that
there was really but one Socialist principle—that of “no compromise,”
which was the essence of the proletarian movement all over the world.
When a Socialist was elected to office he voted with old party
legislators for any measure that was likely to be of help to the
working class, but he never forgot that these concessions, whatever
they might be, were trifles compared with the great purpose—the
organizing of the working class for the revolution. So far, the rule in
America had been that one Socialist made another Socialist once every
two years; and if they should maintain the same rate they would carry
the country in 1912—though not all of them expected to succeed as
quickly as that.
The Socialists were organized in every civilized nation; it was an
international political party, said Ostrinski, the greatest the world
had ever known. It numbered thirty million of adherents, and it cast
eight million votes. It had started its first newspaper in Japan, and
elected its first deputy in Argentina; in France it named members of
cabinets, and in Italy and Australia it held the balance of power and
turned out ministries. In Germany, where its vote was more than a third
of the total vote of the empire, all other parties and powers had
united to fight it. It would not do, Ostrinski explained, for the
proletariat of one nation to achieve the victory, for that nation would
be crushed by the military power of the others; and so the Socialist
movement was a world movement, an organization of all mankind to
establish liberty and fraternity. It was the new religion of
humanity—or you might say it was the fulfillment of the old religion,
since it implied but the literal application of all the teachings of
Christ.
Until long after midnight Jurgis sat lost in the conversation of his
new acquaintance. It was a most wonderful experience to him—an almost
supernatural experience. It was like encountering an inhabitant of the
fourth dimension of space, a being who was free from all one’s own
limitations. For four years, now, Jurgis had been wondering and
blundering in the depths of a wilderness; and here, suddenly, a hand
reached down and seized him, and lifted him out of it, and set him upon
a mountain-top, from which he could survey it all—could see the paths
from which he had wandered, the morasses into which he had stumbled,
the hiding places of the beasts of prey that had fallen upon him. There
were his Packingtown experiences, for instance—what was there about
Packingtown that Ostrinski could not explain! To Jurgis the packers had
been equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef
Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed
all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying
upon the people. Jurgis recollected how, when he had first come to
Packingtown, he had stood and watched the hog-killing, and thought how
cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he
was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just
what he had been—one of the packers’ hogs. What they wanted from a hog
was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what
they wanted from the workingman, and also that was what they wanted
from the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were
not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the
purchaser of meat. That was true everywhere in the world, but it was
especially true in Packingtown; there seemed to be something about the
work of slaughtering that tended to ruthlessness and ferocity—it was
literally the fact that in the methods of the packers a hundred human
lives did not balance a penny of profit. When Jurgis had made himself
familiar with the Socialist literature, as he would very quickly, he
would get glimpses of the Beef Trust from all sorts of aspects, and he
would find it everywhere the same; it was the incarnation of blind and
insensate Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths,
trampling with a thousand hoofs; it was the Great Butcher—it was the
spirit of Capitalism made flesh. Upon the ocean of commerce it sailed
as a pirate ship; it had hoisted the black flag and declared war upon
civilization. Bribery and corruption were its everyday methods. In
Chicago the city government was simply one of its branch offices; it
stole billions of gallons of city water openly, it dictated to the
courts the sentences of disorderly strikers, it forbade the mayor to
enforce the building laws against it. In the national capital it had
power to prevent inspection of its product, and to falsify government
reports; it violated the rebate laws, and when an investigation was
threatened it burned its books and sent its criminal agents out of the
country. In the commercial world it was a Juggernaut car; it wiped out
thousands of businesses every year, it drove men to madness and
suicide. It had forced the price of cattle so low as to destroy the
stock-raising industry, an occupation upon which whole states existed;
it had ruined thousands of butchers who had refused to handle its
products. It divided the country into districts, and fixed the price of
meat in all of them; and it owned all the refrigerator cars, and levied
an enormous tribute upon all poultry and eggs and fruit and vegetables.
With the millions of dollars a week that poured in upon it, it was
reaching out for the control of other interests, railroads and trolley
lines, gas and electric light franchises—it already owned the leather
and the grain business of the country. The people were tremendously
stirred up over its encroachments, but nobody had any remedy to
suggest; it was the task of Socialists to teach and organize them, and
prepare them for the time when they were to seize the huge machine
called the Beef Trust, and use it to produce food for human beings and
not to heap up fortunes for a band of pirates. It was long after
midnight when Jurgis lay down upon the floor of Ostrinski’s kitchen;
and yet it was an hour before he could get to sleep, for the glory of
that joyful vision of the people of Packingtown marching in and taking
possession of the Union Stockyards!
CHAPTER XXX
Jurgis had breakfast with Ostrinski and his family, and then he went
home to Elzbieta. He was no longer shy about it—when he went in,
instead of saying all the things he had been planning to say, he
started to tell Elzbieta about the revolution! At first she thought he
was out of his mind, and it was hours before she could really feel
certain that he was himself. When, however, she had satisfied herself
that he was sane upon all subjects except politics, she troubled
herself no further about it. Jurgis was destined to find that
Elzbieta’s armor was absolutely impervious to Socialism. Her soul had
been baked hard in the fire of adversity, and there was no altering it
now; life to her was the hunt for daily bread, and ideas existed for
her only as they bore upon that. All that interested her in regard to
this new frenzy which had seized hold of her son-in-law was whether or
not it had a tendency to make him sober and industrious; and when she
found he intended to look for work and to contribute his share to the
family fund, she gave him full rein to convince her of anything. A
wonderfully wise little woman was Elzbieta; she could think as quickly
as a hunted rabbit, and in half an hour she had chosen her
life-attitude to the Socialist movement. She agreed in everything with
Jurgis, except the need of his paying his dues; and she would even go
to a meeting with him now and then, and sit and plan her next day’s
dinner amid the storm.
For a week after he became a convert Jurgis continued to wander about
all day, looking for work; until at last he met with a strange fortune.
He was passing one of Chicago’s innumerable small hotels, and after
some hesitation he concluded to go in. A man he took for the proprietor
was standing in the lobby, and he went up to him and tackled him for a
job.
“What can you do?” the man asked.
“Anything, sir,” said Jurgis, and added quickly: “I’ve been out of work
for a long time, sir. I’m an honest man, and I’m strong and willing—”
The other was eying him narrowly. “Do you drink?” he asked.
“No, sir,” said Jurgis.
“Well, I’ve been employing a man as a porter, and he drinks. I’ve
discharged him seven times now, and I’ve about made up my mind that’s
enough. Would you be a porter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s hard work. You’ll have to clean floors and wash spittoons and
fill lamps and handle trunks—”
“I’m willing, sir.”
“All right. I’ll pay you thirty a month and board, and you can begin
now, if you feel like it. You can put on the other fellow’s rig.”
And so Jurgis fell to work, and toiled like a Trojan till night. Then
he went and told Elzbieta, and also, late as it was, he paid a visit to
Ostrinski to let him know of his good fortune. Here he received a great
surprise, for when he was describing the location of the hotel
Ostrinski interrupted suddenly, “Not Hinds’s!”
“Yes,” said Jurgis, “that’s the name.”
To which the other replied, “Then you’ve got the best boss in
Chicago—he’s a state organizer of our party, and one of our best-known
speakers!”
So the next morning Jurgis went to his employer and told him; and the
man seized him by the hand and shook it. “By Jove!” he cried, “that
lets me out. I didn’t sleep all last night because I had discharged a
good Socialist!”
So, after that, Jurgis was known to his “boss” as “Comrade Jurgis,” and
in return he was expected to call him “Comrade Hinds.” “Tommy” Hinds,
as he was known to his intimates, was a squat little man, with broad
shoulders and a florid face, decorated with gray side whiskers. He was
the kindest-hearted man that ever lived, and the
liveliest—inexhaustible in his enthusiasm, and talking Socialism all
day and all night. He was a great fellow to jolly along a crowd, and
would keep a meeting in an uproar; when once he got really waked up,
the torrent of his eloquence could be compared with nothing save
Niagara.
Tommy Hinds had begun life as a blacksmith’s helper, and had run away
to join the Union army, where he had made his first acquaintance with
“graft,” in the shape of rotten muskets and shoddy blankets. To a
musket that broke in a crisis he always attributed the death of his
only brother, and upon worthless blankets he blamed all the agonies of