The Jungle
members of the Packingtown locals would get armfuls and distribute them
on the streets and in the houses. The people of Packingtown had lost
their strike, if ever a people had, and so they read these papers
gladly, and twenty thousand were hardly enough to go round. Jurgis had
resolved not to go near his old home again, but when he heard of this
it was too much for him, and every night for a week he would get on the
car and ride out to the stockyards, and help to undo his work of the
previous year, when he had sent Mike Scully’s ten-pin setter to the
city Board of Aldermen.
It was quite marvelous to see what a difference twelve months had made
in Packingtown—the eyes of the people were getting opened! The
Socialists were literally sweeping everything before them that
election, and Scully and the Cook County machine were at their wits’
end for an “issue.” At the very close of the campaign they bethought
themselves of the fact that the strike had been broken by Negroes, and
so they sent for a South Carolina fire-eater, the “pitchfork senator,”
as he was called, a man who took off his coat when he talked to
workingmen, and damned and swore like a Hessian. This meeting they
advertised extensively, and the Socialists advertised it too—with the
result that about a thousand of them were on hand that evening. The
“pitchfork senator” stood their fusillade of questions for about an
hour, and then went home in disgust, and the balance of the meeting was
a strictly party affair. Jurgis, who had insisted upon coming, had the
time of his life that night; he danced about and waved his arms in his
excitement—and at the very climax he broke loose from his friends, and
got out into the aisle, and proceeded to make a speech himself! The
senator had been denying that the Democratic party was corrupt; it was
always the Republicans who bought the votes, he said—and here was
Jurgis shouting furiously, “It’s a lie! It’s a lie!” After which he
went on to tell them how he knew it—that he knew it because he had
bought them himself! And he would have told the “pitchfork senator” all
his experiences, had not Harry Adams and a friend grabbed him about the
neck and shoved him into a seat.
CHAPTER XXXI
One of the first things that Jurgis had done after he got a job was to
go and see Marija. She came down into the basement of the house to meet
him, and he stood by the door with his hat in his hand, saying, “I’ve
got work now, and so you can leave here.”
But Marija only shook her head. There was nothing else for her to do,
she said, and nobody to employ her. She could not keep her past a
secret—girls had tried it, and they were always found out. There were
thousands of men who came to this place, and sooner or later she would
meet one of them. “And besides,” Marija added, “I can’t do anything.
I’m no good—I take dope. What could you do with me?”
“Can’t you stop?” Jurgis cried.
“No,” she answered, “I’ll never stop. What’s the use of talking about
it—I’ll stay here till I die, I guess. It’s all I’m fit for.” And that
was all that he could get her to say—there was no use trying. When he
told her he would not let Elzbieta take her money, she answered
indifferently: “Then it’ll be wasted here—that’s all.” Her eyelids
looked heavy and her face was red and swollen; he saw that he was
annoying her, that she only wanted him to go away. So he went,
disappointed and sad.
Poor Jurgis was not very happy in his home-life. Elzbieta was sick a
good deal now, and the boys were wild and unruly, and very much the
worse for their life upon the streets. But he stuck by the family
nevertheless, for they reminded him of his old happiness; and when
things went wrong he could solace himself with a plunge into the
Socialist movement. Since his life had been caught up into the current
of this great stream, things which had before been the whole of life to
him came to seem of relatively slight importance; his interests were
elsewhere, in the world of ideas. His outward life was commonplace and
uninteresting; he was just a hotel-porter, and expected to remain one
while he lived; but meantime, in the realm of thought, his life was a
perpetual adventure. There was so much to know—so many wonders to be
discovered! Never in all his life did Jurgis forget the day before
election, when there came a telephone message from a friend of Harry
Adams, asking him to bring Jurgis to see him that night; and Jurgis
went, and met one of the minds of the movement.
The invitation was from a man named Fisher, a Chicago millionaire who
had given up his life to settlement work, and had a little home in the
heart of the city’s slums. He did not belong to the party, but he was
in sympathy with it; and he said that he was to have as his guest that
night the editor of a big Eastern magazine, who wrote against
Socialism, but really did not know what it was. The millionaire
suggested that Adams bring Jurgis along, and then start up the subject
of “pure food,” in which the editor was interested.
Young Fisher’s home was a little two-story brick house, dingy and
weather-beaten outside, but attractive within. The room that Jurgis saw
was half lined with books, and upon the walls were many pictures, dimly
visible in the soft, yellow light; it was a cold, rainy night, so a log
fire was crackling in the open hearth. Seven or eight people were
gathered about it when Adams and his friend arrived, and Jurgis saw to
his dismay that three of them were ladies. He had never talked to
people of this sort before, and he fell into an agony of embarrassment.
He stood in the doorway clutching his hat tightly in his hands, and
made a deep bow to each of the persons as he was introduced; then, when
he was asked to have a seat, he took a chair in a dark corner, and sat
down upon the edge of it, and wiped the perspiration off his forehead
with his sleeve. He was terrified lest they should expect him to talk.
There was the host himself, a tall, athletic young man, clad in evening
dress, as also was the editor, a dyspeptic-looking gentleman named
Maynard. There was the former’s frail young wife, and also an elderly
lady, who taught kindergarten in the settlement, and a young college
student, a beautiful girl with an intense and earnest face. She only
spoke once or twice while Jurgis was there—the rest of the time she sat
by the table in the center of the room, resting her chin in her hands
and drinking in the conversation. There were two other men, whom young
Fisher had introduced to Jurgis as Mr. Lucas and Mr. Schliemann; he
heard them address Adams as “Comrade,” and so he knew that they were
Socialists.
The one called Lucas was a mild and meek-looking little gentleman of
clerical aspect; he had been an itinerant evangelist, it transpired,
and had seen the light and become a prophet of the new dispensation. He
traveled all over the country, living like the apostles of old, upon
hospitality, and preaching upon street-corners when there was no hall.
The other man had been in the midst of a discussion with the editor
when Adams and Jurgis came in; and at the suggestion of the host they
resumed it after the interruption. Jurgis was soon sitting spellbound,
thinking that here was surely the strangest man that had ever lived in
the world.
Nicholas Schliemann was a Swede, a tall, gaunt person, with hairy hands
and bristling yellow beard; he was a university man, and had been a
professor of philosophy—until, as he said, he had found that he was
selling his character as well as his time. Instead he had come to
America, where he lived in a garret room in this slum district, and
made volcanic energy take the place of fire. He studied the composition
of food-stuffs, and knew exactly how many proteids and carbohydrates
his body needed; and by scientific chewing he said that he tripled the
value of all he ate, so that it cost him eleven cents a day. About the
first of July he would leave Chicago for his vacation, on foot; and
when he struck the harvest fields he would set to work for two dollars
and a half a day, and come home when he had another year’s supply—a
hundred and twenty-five dollars. That was the nearest approach to
independence a man could make “under capitalism,” he explained; he
would never marry, for no sane man would allow himself to fall in love
until after the revolution.
He sat in a big arm-chair, with his legs crossed, and his head so far
in the shadow that one saw only two glowing lights, reflected from the
fire on the hearth. He spoke simply, and utterly without emotion; with
the manner of a teacher setting forth to a group of scholars an axiom
in geometry, he would enunciate such propositions as made the hair of
an ordinary person rise on end. And when the auditor had asserted his
non-comprehension, he would proceed to elucidate by some new
proposition, yet more appalling. To Jurgis the Herr Dr. Schliemann
assumed the proportions of a thunderstorm or an earthquake. And yet,
strange as it might seem, there was a subtle bond between them, and he
could follow the argument nearly all the time. He was carried over the
difficult places in spite of himself; and he went plunging away in mad
career—a very Mazeppa-ride upon the wild horse Speculation.
Nicholas Schliemann was familiar with all the universe, and with man as
a small part of it. He understood human institutions, and blew them
about like soap bubbles. It was surprising that so much destructiveness
could be contained in one human mind. Was it government? The purpose of
government was the guarding of property-rights, the perpetuation of
ancient force and modern fraud. Or was it marriage? Marriage and
prostitution were two sides of one shield, the predatory man’s
exploitation of the sex-pleasure. The difference between them was a
difference of class. If a woman had money she might dictate her own
terms: equality, a life contract, and the legitimacy—that is, the
property-rights—of her children. If she had no money, she was a
proletarian, and sold herself for an existence. And then the subject
became Religion, which was the Archfiend’s deadliest weapon. Government
oppressed the body of the wage-slave, but Religion oppressed his mind,
and poisoned the stream of progress at its source. The working-man was
to fix his hopes upon a future life, while his pockets were picked in
this one; he was brought up to frugality, humility, obedience—in short
to all the pseudo-virtues of capitalism. The destiny of civilization
would be decided in one final death struggle between the Red
International and the Black, between Socialism and the Roman Catholic
Church; while here at home, “the stygian midnight of American
evangelicalism—”
And here the ex-preacher entered the field, and there was a lively
tussle. “Comrade” Lucas was not what is called an educated man; he knew
only the Bible, but it was the Bible interpreted by real experience.
And what was the use, he asked, of confusing Religion with men’s
perversions of it? That the church was in the hands of the merchants at
the moment was obvious enough; but already there were signs of
rebellion, and if Comrade Schliemann could come back a few years from
now—
“Ah, yes,” said the other, “of course, I have no doubt that in a
hundred years the Vatican will be denying that it ever opposed
Socialism, just as at present it denies that it ever tortured Galileo.”
“I am not defending the Vatican,” exclaimed Lucas, vehemently. “I am
defending the word of God—which is one long cry of the human spirit for
deliverance from the sway of oppression. Take the twenty-fourth chapter
of the Book of Job, which I am accustomed to quote in my addresses as
‘the Bible upon the Beef Trust’; or take the words of Isaiah—or of the
Master himself! Not the elegant prince of our debauched and vicious