The Jungle
“No; Lit-uanian.” (Jurgis had studied this word carefully.)
“Job?”
“Je.” (A nod.)
“Worked here before?”
“No ’stand.”
(Signals and gesticulations on the part of the boss. Vigorous shakes of
the head by Jurgis.)
“Shovel guts?”
“No ’stand.” (More shakes of the head.)
“Zarnos. Pagaiksztis. Szluofa!” (Imitative motions.)
“Je.”
“See door. Durys?” (Pointing.)
“Je.”
“To-morrow, seven o’clock. Understand? Rytoj! Prieszpietys! Septyni!”
“Dekui, tamistai!” (Thank you, sir.) And that was all. Jurgis turned
away, and then in a sudden rush the full realization of his triumph
swept over him, and he gave a yell and a jump, and started off on a
run. He had a job! He had a job! And he went all the way home as if
upon wings, and burst into the house like a cyclone, to the rage of the
numerous lodgers who had just turned in for their daily sleep.
Meantime Jokubas had been to see his friend the policeman, and received
encouragement, so it was a happy party. There being no more to be done
that day, the shop was left under the care of Lucija, and her husband
sallied forth to show his friends the sights of Packingtown. Jokubas
did this with the air of a country gentleman escorting a party of
visitors over his estate; he was an old-time resident, and all these
wonders had grown up under his eyes, and he had a personal pride in
them. The packers might own the land, but he claimed the landscape, and
there was no one to say nay to this.
They passed down the busy street that led to the yards. It was still
early morning, and everything was at its high tide of activity. A
steady stream of employees was pouring through the gate—employees of
the higher sort, at this hour, clerks and stenographers and such. For
the women there were waiting big two-horse wagons, which set off at a
gallop as fast as they were filled. In the distance there was heard
again the lowing of the cattle, a sound as of a far-off ocean calling.
They followed it, this time, as eager as children in sight of a circus
menagerie—which, indeed, the scene a good deal resembled. They crossed
the railroad tracks, and then on each side of the street were the pens
full of cattle; they would have stopped to look, but Jokubas hurried
them on, to where there was a stairway and a raised gallery, from which
everything could be seen. Here they stood, staring, breathless with
wonder.
There is over a square mile of space in the yards, and more than half
of it is occupied by cattle pens; north and south as far as the eye can
reach there stretches a sea of pens. And they were all filled—so many
cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the world. Red cattle, black,
white, and yellow cattle; old cattle and young cattle; great bellowing
bulls and little calves not an hour born; meek-eyed milch cows and
fierce, long-horned Texas steers. The sound of them here was as of all
the barnyards of the universe; and as for counting them—it would have
taken all day simply to count the pens. Here and there ran long alleys,
blocked at intervals by gates; and Jokubas told them that the number of
these gates was twenty-five thousand. Jokubas had recently been reading
a newspaper article which was full of statistics such as that, and he
was very proud as he repeated them and made his guests cry out with
wonder. Jurgis too had a little of this sense of pride. Had he not just
gotten a job, and become a sharer in all this activity, a cog in this
marvelous machine? Here and there about the alleys galloped men upon
horseback, booted, and carrying long whips; they were very busy,
calling to each other, and to those who were driving the cattle. They
were drovers and stock raisers, who had come from far states, and
brokers and commission merchants, and buyers for all the big packing
houses.
Here and there they would stop to inspect a bunch of cattle, and there
would be a parley, brief and businesslike. The buyer would nod or drop
his whip, and that would mean a bargain; and he would note it in his
little book, along with hundreds of others he had made that morning.
Then Jokubas pointed out the place where the cattle were driven to be
weighed, upon a great scale that would weigh a hundred thousand pounds
at once and record it automatically. It was near to the east entrance
that they stood, and all along this east side of the yards ran the
railroad tracks, into which the cars were run, loaded with cattle. All
night long this had been going on, and now the pens were full; by
tonight they would all be empty, and the same thing would be done
again.
“And what will become of all these creatures?” cried Teta Elzbieta.
“By tonight,” Jokubas answered, “they will all be killed and cut up;
and over there on the other side of the packing houses are more
railroad tracks, where the cars come to take them away.”
There were two hundred and fifty miles of track within the yards, their
guide went on to tell them. They brought about ten thousand head of
cattle every day, and as many hogs, and half as many sheep—which meant
some eight or ten million live creatures turned into food every year.
One stood and watched, and little by little caught the drift of the
tide, as it set in the direction of the packing houses. There were
groups of cattle being driven to the chutes, which were roadways about
fifteen feet wide, raised high above the pens. In these chutes the
stream of animals was continuous; it was quite uncanny to watch them,
pressing on to their fate, all unsuspicious a very river of death. Our
friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors
of human destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it
all. The chutes into which the hogs went climbed high up—to the very
top of the distant buildings; and Jokubas explained that the hogs went
up by the power of their own legs, and then their weight carried them
back through all the processes necessary to make them into pork.
“They don’t waste anything here,” said the guide, and then he laughed
and added a witticism, which he was pleased that his unsophisticated
friends should take to be his own: “They use everything about the hog
except the squeal.” In front of Brown’s General Office building there
grows a tiny plot of grass, and this, you may learn, is the only bit of
green thing in Packingtown; likewise this jest about the hog and his
squeal, the stock in trade of all the guides, is the one gleam of humor
that you will find there.
After they had seen enough of the pens, the party went up the street,
to the mass of buildings which occupy the center of the yards. These
buildings, made of brick and stained with innumerable layers of
Packingtown smoke, were painted all over with advertising signs, from
which the visitor realized suddenly that he had come to the home of
many of the torments of his life. It was here that they made those
products with the wonders of which they pestered him so—by placards
that defaced the landscape when he traveled, and by staring
advertisements in the newspapers and magazines—by silly little jingles
that he could not get out of his mind, and gaudy pictures that lurked
for him around every street corner. Here was where they made Brown’s
Imperial Hams and Bacon, Brown’s Dressed Beef, Brown’s Excelsior
Sausages! Here was the headquarters of Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard, of
Durham’s Breakfast Bacon, Durham’s Canned Beef, Potted Ham, Deviled
Chicken, Peerless Fertilizer!
Entering one of the Durham buildings, they found a number of other
visitors waiting; and before long there came a guide, to escort them
through the place. They make a great feature of showing strangers
through the packing plants, for it is a good advertisement. But Ponas
Jokubas whispered maliciously that the visitors did not see any more
than the packers wanted them to. They climbed a long series of
stairways outside of the building, to the top of its five or six
stories. Here was the chute, with its river of hogs, all patiently
toiling upward; there was a place for them to rest to cool off, and
then through another passageway they went into a room from which there
is no returning for hogs.
It was a long, narrow room, with a gallery along it for visitors. At
the head there was a great iron wheel, about twenty feet in
circumference, with rings here and there along its edge. Upon both
sides of this wheel there was a narrow space, into which came the hogs
at the end of their journey; in the midst of them stood a great burly
Negro, bare-armed and bare-chested. He was resting for the moment, for
the wheel had stopped while men were cleaning up. In a minute or two,
however, it began slowly to revolve, and then the men upon each side of
it sprang to work. They had chains which they fastened about the leg of
the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of
the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly
jerked off his feet and borne aloft.
At the same instant the car was assailed by a most terrifying shriek;
the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back.
The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing—for
once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of
the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing down the
room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another,
until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and
kicking in frenzy—and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous to
the eardrums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to
hold—that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high
squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony; there would come a
momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever, surging up
to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the visitors—the men
would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand
with hands clenched, and the blood rushing to their faces, and the
tears starting in their eyes.
Meantime, heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were
going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors
made any difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs, and
one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a
long line of hogs, with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away together;
until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a
huge vat of boiling water.
It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was
porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics. And yet
somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the
hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they
were so very human in their protests—and so perfectly within their
rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult
to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this
cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense of apology, without
the homage of a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this
slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some
horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried
out of sight and of memory.
One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical,
without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog
squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was
nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where
they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a
separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were
brown, some were spotted; some were old, some young; some were long and
lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his