The Jungle
whom Elzbieta had made friends in her neighborhood, and he set out to
make Socialists of them by wholesale, and several times he all but got
into a fight.
It was all so painfully obvious to Jurgis! It was so incomprehensible
how a man could fail to see it! Here were all the opportunities of the
country, the land, and the buildings upon the land, the railroads, the
mines, the factories, and the stores, all in the hands of a few private
individuals, called capitalists, for whom the people were obliged to
work for wages. The whole balance of what the people produced went to
heap up the fortunes of these capitalists, to heap, and heap again, and
yet again—and that in spite of the fact that they, and every one about
them, lived in unthinkable luxury! And was it not plain that if the
people cut off the share of those who merely “owned,” the share of
those who worked would be much greater? That was as plain as two and
two makes four; and it was the whole of it, absolutely the whole of it;
and yet there were people who could not see it, who would argue about
everything else in the world. They would tell you that governments
could not manage things as economically as private individuals; they
would repeat and repeat that, and think they were saying something!
They could not see that “economical” management by masters meant simply
that they, the people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid
less! They were wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters
whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible; and they
were taking an interest in the process, were anxious lest it should not
be done thoroughly enough! Was it not honestly a trial to listen to an
argument such as that?
And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to some
poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and
had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six
o’clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to
take his clothes off; who had never had a week’s vacation in his life,
had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything,
never hoped anything—and when you started to tell him about Socialism
he would sniff and say, “I’m not interested in that—I’m an
individualist!” And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was
“paternalism,” and that if it ever had its way the world would stop
progressing. It was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like
that; and yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out—for how many
millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been
so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what freedom was! And
they really thought that it was “individualism” for tens of thousands
of them to herd together and obey the orders of a steel magnate, and
produce hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for him, and then let
him give them libraries; while for them to take the industry, and run
it to suit themselves, and build their own libraries—that would have
been “Paternalism”!
Sometimes the agony of such things as this was almost more than Jurgis
could bear; yet there was no way of escape from it, there was nothing
to do but to dig away at the base of this mountain of ignorance and
prejudice. You must keep at the poor fellow; you must hold your temper,
and argue with him, and watch for your chance to stick an idea or two
into his head. And the rest of the time you must sharpen up your
weapons—you must think out new replies to his objections, and provide
yourself with new facts to prove to him the folly of his ways.
So Jurgis acquired the reading habit. He would carry in his pocket a
tract or a pamphlet which some one had loaned him, and whenever he had
an idle moment during the day he would plod through a paragraph, and
then think about it while he worked. Also he read the newspapers, and
asked questions about them. One of the other porters at Hinds’s was a
sharp little Irishman, who knew everything that Jurgis wanted to know;
and while they were busy he would explain to him the geography of
America, and its history, its constitution and its laws; also he gave
him an idea of the business system of the country, the great railroads
and corporations, and who owned them, and the labor unions, and the big
strikes, and the men who had led them. Then at night, when he could get
off, Jurgis would attend the Socialist meetings. During the campaign
one was not dependent upon the street corner affairs, where the weather
and the quality of the orator were equally uncertain; there were hall
meetings every night, and one could hear speakers of national
prominence. These discussed the political situation from every point of
view, and all that troubled Jurgis was the impossibility of carrying
off but a small part of the treasures they offered him.
There was a man who was known in the party as the “Little Giant.” The
Lord had used up so much material in the making of his head that there
had not been enough to complete his legs; but he got about on the
platform, and when he shook his raven whiskers the pillars of
capitalism rocked. He had written a veritable encyclopedia upon the
subject, a book that was nearly as big as himself—And then there was a
young author, who came from California, and had been a salmon fisher,
an oyster-pirate, a longshoreman, a sailor; who had tramped the country
and been sent to jail, had lived in the Whitechapel slums, and been to
the Klondike in search of gold. All these things he pictured in his
books, and because he was a man of genius he forced the world to hear
him. Now he was famous, but wherever he went he still preached the
gospel of the poor. And then there was one who was known at the
“millionaire Socialist.” He had made a fortune in business, and spent
nearly all of it in building up a magazine, which the post office
department had tried to suppress, and had driven to Canada. He was a
quiet-mannered man, whom you would have taken for anything in the world
but a Socialist agitator. His speech was simple and informal—he could
not understand why any one should get excited about these things. It
was a process of economic evolution, he said, and he exhibited its laws
and methods. Life was a struggle for existence, and the strong overcame
the weak, and in turn were overcome by the strongest. Those who lost in
the struggle were generally exterminated; but now and then they had
been known to save themselves by combination—which was a new and higher
kind of strength. It was so that the gregarious animals had overcome
the predaceous; it was so, in human history, that the people had
mastered the kings. The workers were simply the citizens of industry,
and the Socialist movement was the expression of their will to survive.
The inevitability of the revolution depended upon this fact, that they
had no choice but to unite or be exterminated; this fact, grim and
inexorable, depended upon no human will, it was the law of the economic
process, of which the editor showed the details with the most marvelous
precision.
And later on came the evening of the great meeting of the campaign,
when Jurgis heard the two standard-bearers of his party. Ten years
before there had been in Chicago a strike of a hundred and fifty
thousand railroad employees, and thugs had been hired by the railroads
to commit violence, and the President of the United States had sent in
troops to break the strike, by flinging the officers of the union into
jail without trial. The president of the union came out of his cell a
ruined man; but also he came out a Socialist; and now for just ten
years he had been traveling up and down the country, standing face to
face with the people, and pleading with them for justice. He was a man
of electric presence, tall and gaunt, with a face worn thin by struggle
and suffering. The fury of outraged manhood gleamed in it—and the tears
of suffering little children pleaded in his voice. When he spoke he
paced the stage, lithe and eager, like a panther. He leaned over,
reaching out for his audience; he pointed into their souls with an
insistent finger. His voice was husky from much speaking, but the great
auditorium was as still as death, and every one heard him.
And then, as Jurgis came out from this meeting, some one handed him a
paper which he carried home with him and read; and so he became
acquainted with the “Appeal to Reason.” About twelve years previously a
Colorado real-estate speculator had made up his mind that it was wrong
to gamble in the necessities of life of human beings: and so he had
retired and begun the publication of a Socialist weekly. There had come
a time when he had to set his own type, but he had held on and won out,
and now his publication was an institution. It used a carload of paper
every week, and the mail trains would be hours loading up at the depot
of the little Kansas town. It was a four-page weekly, which sold for
less than half a cent a copy; its regular subscription list was a
quarter of a million, and it went to every crossroads post office in
America.
The “Appeal” was a “propaganda” paper. It had a manner all its own—it
was full of ginger and spice, of Western slang and hustle: It collected
news of the doings of the “plutes,” and served it up for the benefit of
the “American working-mule.” It would have columns of the deadly
parallel—the million dollars’ worth of diamonds, or the fancy
pet-poodle establishment of a society dame, beside the fate of Mrs.
Murphy of San Francisco, who had starved to death on the streets, or of
John Robinson, just out of the hospital, who had hanged himself in New
York because he could not find work. It collected the stories of graft
and misery from the daily press, and made a little pungent paragraphs
out of them. “Three banks of Bungtown, South Dakota, failed, and more
savings of the workers swallowed up!” “The mayor of Sandy Creek,
Oklahoma, has skipped with a hundred thousand dollars. That’s the kind
of rulers the old partyites give you!” “The president of the Florida
Flying Machine Company is in jail for bigamy. He was a prominent
opponent of Socialism, which he said would break up the home!” The
“Appeal” had what it called its “Army,” about thirty thousand of the
faithful, who did things for it; and it was always exhorting the “Army”
to keep its dander up, and occasionally encouraging it with a prize
competition, for anything from a gold watch to a private yacht or an
eighty-acre farm. Its office helpers were all known to the “Army” by
quaint titles—“Inky Ike,” “the Bald-headed Man,” “the Redheaded Girl,”
“the Bulldog,” “the Office Goat,” and “the One Hoss.”
But sometimes, again, the “Appeal” would be desperately serious. It
sent a correspondent to Colorado, and printed pages describing the
overthrow of American institutions in that state. In a certain city of
the country it had over forty of its “Army” in the headquarters of the
Telegraph Trust, and no message of importance to Socialists ever went
through that a copy of it did not go to the “Appeal.” It would print
great broadsides during the campaign; one copy that came to Jurgis was
a manifesto addressed to striking workingmen, of which nearly a million
copies had been distributed in the industrial centers, wherever the
employers’ associations had been carrying out their “open shop”
program. “You have lost the strike!” it was headed. “And now what are
you going to do about it?” It was what is called an “incendiary”
appeal—it was written by a man into whose soul the iron had entered.
When this edition appeared, twenty thousand copies were sent to the
stockyards district; and they were taken out and stowed away in the
rear of a little cigar store, and every evening, and on Sundays, the