The Jungle
his own old age. Whenever it rained, the rheumatism would get into his
joints, and then he would screw up his face and mutter: “Capitalism, my
boy, capitalism! ‘_Écrasez l’Infâme!_’” He had one unfailing remedy for
all the evils of this world, and he preached it to every one; no matter
whether the person’s trouble was failure in business, or dyspepsia, or
a quarrelsome mother-in-law, a twinkle would come into his eyes and he
would say, “You know what to do about it—vote the Socialist ticket!”
Tommy Hinds had set out upon the trail of the Octopus as soon as the
war was over. He had gone into business, and found himself in
competition with the fortunes of those who had been stealing while he
had been fighting. The city government was in their hands and the
railroads were in league with them, and honest business was driven to
the wall; and so Hinds had put all his savings into Chicago real
estate, and set out singlehanded to dam the river of graft. He had been
a reform member of the city council, he had been a Greenbacker, a Labor
Unionist, a Populist, a Bryanite—and after thirty years of fighting,
the year 1896 had served to convince him that the power of concentrated
wealth could never be controlled, but could only be destroyed. He had
published a pamphlet about it, and set out to organize a party of his
own, when a stray Socialist leaflet had revealed to him that others had
been ahead of him. Now for eight years he had been fighting for the
party, anywhere, everywhere—whether it was a G.A.R. reunion, or a
hotel-keepers’ convention, or an Afro-American business-men’s banquet,
or a Bible society picnic, Tommy Hinds would manage to get himself
invited to explain the relations of Socialism to the subject in hand.
After that he would start off upon a tour of his own, ending at some
place between New York and Oregon; and when he came back from there, he
would go out to organize new locals for the state committee; and
finally he would come home to rest—and talk Socialism in Chicago.
Hinds’s hotel was a very hot-bed of the propaganda; all the employees
were party men, and if they were not when they came, they were quite
certain to be before they went away. The proprietor would get into a
discussion with some one in the lobby, and as the conversation grew
animated, others would gather about to listen, until finally every one
in the place would be crowded into a group, and a regular debate would
be under way. This went on every night—when Tommy Hinds was not there
to do it, his clerk did it; and when his clerk was away campaigning,
the assistant attended to it, while Mrs. Hinds sat behind the desk and
did the work. The clerk was an old crony of the proprietor’s, an
awkward, rawboned giant of a man, with a lean, sallow face, a broad
mouth, and whiskers under his chin, the very type and body of a prairie
farmer. He had been that all his life—he had fought the railroads in
Kansas for fifty years, a Granger, a Farmers’ Alliance man, a
“middle-of-the-road” Populist. Finally, Tommy Hinds had revealed to him
the wonderful idea of using the trusts instead of destroying them, and
he had sold his farm and come to Chicago.
That was Amos Struver; and then there was Harry Adams, the assistant
clerk, a pale, scholarly-looking man, who came from Massachusetts, of
Pilgrim stock. Adams had been a cotton operative in Fall River, and the
continued depression in the industry had worn him and his family out,
and he had emigrated to South Carolina. In Massachusetts the percentage
of white illiteracy is eight-tenths of one per cent, while in South
Carolina it is thirteen and six-tenths per cent; also in South Carolina
there is a property qualification for voters—and for these and other
reasons child labor is the rule, and so the cotton mills were driving
those of Massachusetts out of the business. Adams did not know this, he
only knew that the Southern mills were running; but when he got there
he found that if he was to live, all his family would have to work, and
from six o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. So he had set
to work to organize the mill hands, after the fashion in Massachusetts,
and had been discharged; but he had gotten other work, and stuck at it,
and at last there had been a strike for shorter hours, and Harry Adams
had attempted to address a street meeting, which was the end of him. In
the states of the far South the labor of convicts is leased to
contractors, and when there are not convicts enough they have to be
supplied. Harry Adams was sent up by a judge who was a cousin of the
mill owner with whose business he had interfered; and though the life
had nearly killed him, he had been wise enough not to murmur, and at
the end of his term he and his family had left the state of South
Carolina—hell’s back yard, as he called it. He had no money for
carfare, but it was harvest-time, and they walked one day and worked
the next; and so Adams got at last to Chicago, and joined the Socialist
party. He was a studious man, reserved, and nothing of an orator; but
he always had a pile of books under his desk in the hotel, and articles
from his pen were beginning to attract attention in the party press.
Contrary to what one would have expected, all this radicalism did not
hurt the hotel business; the radicals flocked to it, and the commercial
travelers all found it diverting. Of late, also, the hotel had become a
favorite stopping place for Western cattlemen. Now that the Beef Trust
had adopted the trick of raising prices to induce enormous shipments of
cattle, and then dropping them again and scooping in all they needed, a
stock raiser was very apt to find himself in Chicago without money
enough to pay his freight bill; and so he had to go to a cheap hotel,
and it was no drawback to him if there was an agitator talking in the
lobby. These Western fellows were just “meat” for Tommy Hinds—he would
get a dozen of them around him and paint little pictures of “the
System.” Of course, it was not a week before he had heard Jurgis’s
story, and after that he would not have let his new porter go for the
world. “See here,” he would say, in the middle of an argument, “I’ve
got a fellow right here in my place who’s worked there and seen every
bit of it!” And then Jurgis would drop his work, whatever it was, and
come, and the other would say, “Comrade Jurgis, just tell these
gentlemen what you saw on the killing-beds.” At first this request
caused poor Jurgis the most acute agony, and it was like pulling teeth
to get him to talk; but gradually he found out what was wanted, and in
the end he learned to stand up and speak his piece with enthusiasm. His
employer would sit by and encourage him with exclamations and shakes of
the head; when Jurgis would give the formula for “potted ham,” or tell
about the condemned hogs that were dropped into the “destructors” at
the top and immediately taken out again at the bottom, to be shipped
into another state and made into lard, Tommy Hinds would bang his knee
and cry, “Do you think a man could make up a thing like that out of his
head?”
And then the hotel-keeper would go on to show how the Socialists had
the only real remedy for such evils, how they alone “meant business”
with the Beef Trust. And when, in answer to this, the victim would say
that the whole country was getting stirred up, that the newspapers were
full of denunciations of it, and the government taking action against
it, Tommy Hinds had a knock-out blow all ready. “Yes,” he would say,
“all that is true—but what do you suppose is the reason for it? Are you
foolish enough to believe that it’s done for the public? There are
other trusts in the country just as illegal and extortionate as the
Beef Trust: there is the Coal Trust, that freezes the poor in
winter—there is the Steel Trust, that doubles the price of every nail
in your shoes—there is the Oil Trust, that keeps you from reading at
night—and why do you suppose it is that all the fury of the press and
the government is directed against the Beef Trust?” And when to this
the victim would reply that there was clamor enough over the Oil Trust,
the other would continue: “Ten years ago Henry D. Lloyd told all the
truth about the Standard Oil Company in his Wealth versus Commonwealth;
and the book was allowed to die, and you hardly ever hear of it. And
now, at last, two magazines have the courage to tackle ‘Standard Oil’
again, and what happens? The newspapers ridicule the authors, the
churches defend the criminals, and the government—does nothing. And
now, why is it all so different with the Beef Trust?”
Here the other would generally admit that he was “stuck”; and Tommy
Hinds would explain to him, and it was fun to see his eyes open. “If
you were a Socialist,” the hotel-keeper would say, “you would
understand that the power which really governs the United States today
is the Railroad Trust. It is the Railroad Trust that runs your state
government, wherever you live, and that runs the United States Senate.
And all of the trusts that I have named are railroad trusts—save only
the Beef Trust! The Beef Trust has defied the railroads—it is
plundering them day by day through the Private Car; and so the public
is roused to fury, and the papers clamor for action, and the government
goes on the war-path! And you poor common people watch and applaud the
job, and think it’s all done for you, and never dream that it is really
the grand climax of the century-long battle of commercial
competition—the final death grapple between the chiefs of the Beef
Trust and ‘Standard Oil,’ for the prize of the mastery and ownership of
the United States of America!”
Such was the new home in which Jurgis lived and worked, and in which
his education was completed. Perhaps you would imagine that he did not
do much work there, but that would be a great mistake. He would have
cut off one hand for Tommy Hinds; and to keep Hinds’s hotel a thing of
beauty was his joy in life. That he had a score of Socialist arguments
chasing through his brain in the meantime did not interfere with this;
on the contrary, Jurgis scrubbed the spittoons and polished the
banisters all the more vehemently because at the same time he was
wrestling inwardly with an imaginary recalcitrant. It would be pleasant
to record that he swore off drinking immediately, and all the rest of
his bad habits with it; but that would hardly be exact. These
revolutionists were not angels; they were men, and men who had come up
from the social pit, and with the mire of it smeared over them. Some of
them drank, and some of them swore, and some of them ate pie with their
knives; there was only one difference between them and all the rest of
the populace—that they were men with a hope, with a cause to fight for
and suffer for. There came times to Jurgis when the vision seemed
far-off and pale, and a glass of beer loomed large in comparison; but
if the glass led to another glass, and to too many glasses, he had
something to spur him to remorse and resolution on the morrow. It was
so evidently a wicked thing to spend one’s pennies for drink, when the
working class was wandering in darkness, and waiting to be delivered;
the price of a glass of beer would buy fifty copies of a leaflet, and
one could hand these out to the unregenerate, and then get drunk upon
the thought of the good that was being accomplished. That was the way
the movement had been made, and it was the only way it would progress;
it availed nothing to know of it, without fighting for it—it was a
thing for all, not for a few! A corollary of this proposition of course
was, that any one who refused to receive the new gospel was personally
responsible for keeping Jurgis from his heart’s desire; and this, alas,
made him uncomfortable as an acquaintance. He met some neighbors with