Yet her friends would shake their heads and tell her to go slow; one
could not count upon such good fortune forever--there were accidents
that always happened. But Marija was not to be prevailed upon, and went
on planning and dreaming of all the treasures she was going to have for
her home; and so, when the crash did come, her grief was painful to see.

For her canning factory shut down! Marija would about as soon have
expected to see the sun shut down--the huge establishment had been to
her a thing akin to the planets and the seasons. But now it was shut!
And they had not given her any explanation, they had not even given her
a day's warning; they had simply posted a notice one Saturday that all
hands would be paid off that afternoon, and would not resume work for at
least a month! And that was all that there was to it--her job was gone!

It was the holiday rush that was over, the girls said in answer to
Marija's inquiries; after that there was always a slack. Sometimes the
factory would start up on half time after a while, but there was no
telling--it had been known to stay closed until way into the summer. The
prospects were bad at present, for truckmen who worked in the storerooms
said that these were piled up to the ceilings, so that the firm could
not have found room for another week's output of cans. And they had
turned off three-quarters of these men, which was a still worse sign,
since it meant that there were no orders to be filled. It was all a
swindle, can-painting, said the girls--you were crazy with delight
because you were making twelve or fourteen dollars a week, and saving
half of it; but you had to spend it all keeping alive while you were
out, and so your pay was really only half what you thought.


Marija came home, and because she was a person who could not rest
without danger of explosion, they first had a great house cleaning, and
then she set out to search Packingtown for a job to fill up the gap. As
nearly all the canning establishments were shut down, and all the girls
hunting work, it will be readily understood that Marija did not find
any. Then she took to trying the stores and saloons, and when this
failed she even traveled over into the far-distant regions near the lake
front, where lived the rich people in great palaces, and begged there
for some sort of work that could be done by a person who did not know
English.

The men upon the killing beds felt also the effects of the slump which
had turned Marija out; but they felt it in a different way, and a way
which made Jurgis understand at last all their bitterness. The big
packers did not turn their hands off and close down, like the canning
factories; but they began to run for shorter and shorter hours. They had
always required the men to be on the killing beds and ready for work at
seven o'clock, although there was almost never any work to be done till
the buyers out in the yards had gotten to work, and some cattle had come
over the chutes. That would often be ten or eleven o'clock, which was
bad enough, in all conscience; but now, in the slack season, they would
perhaps not have a thing for their men to do till late in the afternoon.
And so they would have to loaf around, in a place where the thermometer
might be twenty degrees below zero! At first one would see them running
about, or skylarking with each other, trying to keep warm; but before
the day was over they would become quite chilled through and exhausted,
and, when the cattle finally came, so near frozen that to move was an
agony. And then suddenly the place would spring into activity, and the
merciless "speeding-up" would begin!

There were weeks at a time when Jurgis went home after such a day as
this with not more than two hours' work to his credit--which meant about
thirty-five cents. There were many days when the total was less than
half an hour, and others when there was none at all. The general average
was six hours a day, which meant for Jurgis about six dollars a week;
and this six hours of work would be done after standing on the killing
bed till one o'clock, or perhaps even three or four o'clock, in the
afternoon. Like as not there would come a rush of cattle at the very
end of the day, which the men would have to dispose of before they went
home, often working by electric light till nine or ten, or even twelve
or one o'clock, and without a single instant for a bite of supper. The
men were at the mercy of the cattle. Perhaps the buyers would be holding
off for better prices--if they could scare the shippers into thinking
that they meant to buy nothing that day, they could get their own terms.
For some reason the cost of fodder for cattle in the yards was much
above the market price--and you were not allowed to bring your own
fodder! Then, too, a number of cars were apt to arrive late in the day,
now that the roads were blocked with snow, and the packers would buy
their cattle that night, to get them cheaper, and then would come into
play their ironclad rule, that all cattle must be killed the same day
they were bought. There was no use kicking about this--there had been
one delegation after another to see the packers about it, only to be
told that it was the rule, and that there was not the slightest chance
of its ever being altered. And so on Christmas Eve Jurgis worked till
nearly one o'clock in the morning, and on Christmas Day he was on the
killing bed at seven o'clock.

All this was bad; and yet it was not the worst. For after all the hard
work a man did, he was paid for only part of it. Jurgis had once been
among those who scoffed at the idea of these huge concerns cheating;
and so now he could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was
precisely their size which enabled them to do it with impunity. One of
the rules on the killing beds was that a man who was one minute late
was docked an hour; and this was economical, for he was made to work the
balance of the hour--he was not allowed to stand round and wait. And on
the other hand if he came ahead of time he got no pay for that--though
often the bosses would start up the gang ten or fifteen minutes before
the whistle. And this same custom they carried over to the end of the
day; they did not pay for any fraction of an hour--for "broken time." A
man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no work to fill out
the hour, there was no pay for him. Thus the end of every day was a
sort of lottery--a struggle, all but breaking into open war between
the bosses and the men, the former trying to rush a job through and
the latter trying to stretch it out. Jurgis blamed the bosses for this,
though the truth to be told it was not always their fault; for the
packers kept them frightened for their lives--and when one was in danger
of falling behind the standard, what was easier than to catch up
by making the gang work awhile "for the church"? This was a savage
witticism the men had, which Jurgis had to have explained to him. Old
man Jones was great on missions and such things, and so whenever they
were doing some particularly disreputable job, the men would wink at
each other and say, "Now we're working for the church!"

One of the consequences of all these things was that Jurgis was no
longer perplexed when he heard men talk of fighting for their rights.
He felt like fighting now himself; and when the Irish delegate of the
butcher-helpers' union came to him a second time, he received him in a
far different spirit. A wonderful idea it now seemed to Jurgis, this
of the men--that by combining they might be able to make a stand and
conquer the packers! Jurgis wondered who had first thought of it; and
when he was told that it was a common thing for men to do in America, he
got the first inkling of a meaning in the phrase "a free country." The
delegate explained to him how it depended upon their being able to get
every man to join and stand by the organization, and so Jurgis signified
that he was willing to do his share. Before another month was by, all
the working members of his family had union cards, and wore their union
buttons conspicuously and with pride. For fully a week they were quite
blissfully happy, thinking that belonging to a union meant an end to all
their troubles.

But only ten days after she had joined, Marija's canning factory closed
down, and that blow quite staggered them. They could not understand why
the union had not prevented it, and the very first time she attended
a meeting Marija got up and made a speech about it. It was a business
meeting, and was transacted in English, but that made no difference to
Marija; she said what was in her, and all the pounding of the chairman's
gavel and all the uproar and confusion in the room could not prevail.
Quite apart from her own troubles she was boiling over with a general
sense of the injustice of it, and she told what she thought of the
packers, and what she thought of a world where such things were allowed
to happen; and then, while the echoes of the hall rang with the shock
of her terrible voice, she sat down again and fanned herself, and the
meeting gathered itself together and proceeded to discuss the election
of a recording secretary.

Jurgis too had an adventure the first time he attended a union meeting,
but it was not of his own seeking. Jurgis had gone with the desire
to get into an inconspicuous corner and see what was done; but this
attitude of silent and open-eyed attention had marked him out for a
victim. Tommy Finnegan was a little Irishman, with big staring eyes and
a wild aspect, a "hoister" by trade, and badly cracked. Somewhere back
in the far-distant past Tommy Finnegan had had a strange experience,
and the burden of it rested upon him. All the balance of his life he had
done nothing but try to make it understood. When he talked he caught
his victim by the buttonhole, and his face kept coming closer and
closer--which was trying, because his teeth were so bad. Jurgis did not
mind that, only he was frightened. The method of operation of the higher
intelligences was Tom Finnegan's theme, and he desired to find out if
Jurgis had ever considered that the representation of things in their
present similarity might be altogether unintelligible upon a more
elevated plane. There were assuredly wonderful mysteries about the
developing of these things; and then, becoming confidential, Mr.
Finnegan proceeded to tell of some discoveries of his own. "If ye have
iver had onything to do wid shperrits," said he, and looked inquiringly
at Jurgis, who kept shaking his head. "Niver mind, niver mind,"
continued the other, "but their influences may be operatin' upon ye;
it's shure as I'm tellin' ye, it's them that has the reference to the
immejit surroundin's that has the most of power. It was vouchsafed to
me in me youthful days to be acquainted with shperrits" and so
Tommy Finnegan went on, expounding a system of philosophy, while the
perspiration came out on Jurgis' forehead, so great was his agitation
and embarrassment. In the end one of the men, seeing his plight, came
over and rescued him; but it was some time before he was able to find
any one to explain things to him, and meanwhile his fear lest the
strange little Irishman should get him cornered again was enough to keep
him dodging about the room the whole evening.

He never missed a meeting, however. He had picked up a few words of
English by this time, and friends would help him to understand. They
were often very turbulent meetings, with half a dozen men declaiming
at once, in as many dialects of English; but the speakers were all
desperately in earnest, and Jurgis was in earnest too, for he understood
that a fight was on, and that it was his fight. Since the time of his
disillusionment, Jurgis had sworn to trust no man, except in his own
family; but here he discovered that he had brothers in affliction, and
allies. Their one chance for life was in union, and so the struggle
became a kind of crusade. Jurgis had always been a member of the church,
because it was the right thing to be, but the church had never
touched him, he left all that for the women. Here, however, was a new
religion--one that did touch him, that took hold of every fiber of him;
and with all the zeal and fury of a convert he went out as a missionary.
There were many nonunion men among the Lithuanians, and with these
he would labor and wrestle in prayer, trying to show them the right.
Sometimes they would be obstinate and refuse to see it, and Jurgis,
alas, was not always patient! He forgot how he himself had been blind,
a short time ago--after the fashion of all crusaders since the original
ones, who set out to spread the gospel of Brotherhood by force of arms.



Chapter 9


One of the first consequences of the discovery of the union was that
Jurgis became desirous of learning English. He wanted to know what was
going on at the meetings, and to be able to take part in them, and so he
began to look about him, and to try to pick up words. The children, who
were at school, and learning fast, would teach him a few; and a friend
loaned him a little book that had some in it, and Ona would read them to
him. Then Jurgis became sorry that he could not read himself; and later
on in the winter, when some one told him that there was a night school
that was free, he went and enrolled. After that, every evening that he
got home from the yards in time, he would go to the school; he would go
even if he were in time for only half an hour. They were teaching him
both to read and to speak English--and they would have taught him other
things, if only he had had a little time.

Also the union made another great difference with him--it made him begin
to pay attention to the country. It was the beginning of democracy with
him. It was a little state, the union, a miniature republic; its affairs
were every man's affairs, and every man had a real say about them. In
other words, in the union Jurgis learned to talk politics. In the place
where he had come from there had not been any politics--in Russia one
thought of the government as an affliction like the lightning and the
hail. "Duck, little brother, duck," the wise old peasants would whisper;
"everything passes away." And when Jurgis had first come to America he
had supposed that it was the same. He had heard people say that it was
a free country--but what did that mean? He found that here, precisely
as in Russia, there were rich men who owned everything; and if one could
not find any work, was not the hunger he began to feel the same sort of
hunger?

When Jurgis had been working about three weeks at Brown's, there had
come to him one noontime a man who was employed as a night watchman, and
who asked him if he would not like to take out naturalization papers
and become a citizen. Jurgis did not know what that meant, but the man
explained the advantages. In the first place, it would not cost him
anything, and it would get him half a day off, with his pay just the
same; and then when election time came he would be able to vote--and
there was something in that. Jurgis was naturally glad to accept, and so
the night watchman said a few words to the boss, and he was excused for
the rest of the day. When, later on, he wanted a holiday to get married
he could not get it; and as for a holiday with pay just the same--what
power had wrought that miracle heaven only knew! However, he went with
the man, who picked up several other newly landed immigrants, Poles,
Lithuanians, and Slovaks, and took them all outside, where stood a great
four-horse tallyho coach, with fifteen or twenty men already in it. It
was a fine chance to see the sights of the city, and the party had a
merry time, with plenty of beer handed up from inside. So they drove
downtown and stopped before an imposing granite building, in which they
interviewed an official, who had the papers all ready, with only the
names to be filled in. So each man in turn took an oath of which he did
not understand a word, and then was presented with a handsome ornamented
document with a big red seal and the shield of the United States upon
it, and was told that he had become a citizen of the Republic and the
equal of the President himself.

A month or two later Jurgis had another interview with this same man,
who told him where to go to "register." And then finally, when election
day came, the packing houses posted a notice that men who desired to
vote might remain away until nine that morning, and the same night
watchman took Jurgis and the rest of his flock into the back room of a
saloon, and showed each of them where and how to mark a ballot, and then
gave each two dollars, and took them to the polling place, where there
was a policeman on duty especially to see that they got through all
right. Jurgis felt quite proud of this good luck till he got home and
met Jonas, who had taken the leader aside and whispered to him, offering
to vote three times for four dollars, which offer had been accepted.

And now in the union Jurgis met men who explained all this mystery
to him; and he learned that America differed from Russia in that its
government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who
ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there
were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one
got the office which bought the most votes. Now and then, the election
was very close, and that was the time the poor man came in. In the
stockyards this was only in national and state elections, for in local
elections the Democratic Party always carried everything. The ruler of
the district was therefore the Democratic boss, a little Irishman named
Mike Scully. Scully held an important party office in the state, and
bossed even the mayor of the city, it was said; it was his boast that he
carried the stockyards in his pocket. He was an enormously rich man--he
had a hand in all the big graft in the neighborhood. It was Scully, for
instance, who owned that dump which Jurgis and Ona had seen the first
day of their arrival. Not only did he own the dump, but he owned the
brick factory as well, and first he took out the clay and made it into
bricks, and then he had the city bring garbage to fill up the hole, so
that he could build houses to sell to the people. Then, too, he sold the
bricks to the city, at his own price, and the city came and got them
in its own wagons. And also he owned the other hole near by, where the
stagnant water was; and it was he who cut the ice and sold it; and what
was more, if the men told truth, he had not had to pay any taxes for the
water, and he had built the icehouse out of city lumber, and had not had
to pay anything for that. The newspapers had got hold of that story, and
there had been a scandal; but Scully had hired somebody to confess and
take all the blame, and then skip the country. It was said, too, that he
had built his brick-kiln in the same way, and that the workmen were on
the city payroll while they did it; however, one had to press closely to
get these things out of the men, for it was not their business, and Mike
Scully was a good man to stand in with. A note signed by him was equal
to a job any time at the packing houses; and also he employed a good
many men himself, and worked them only eight hours a day, and paid them
the highest wages. This gave him many friends--all of whom he had gotten
together into the "War Whoop League," whose clubhouse you might see
just outside of the yards. It was the biggest clubhouse, and the biggest
club, in all Chicago; and they had prizefights every now and then,
and cockfights and even dogfights. The policemen in the district all
belonged to the league, and instead of suppressing the fights, they sold
tickets for them. The man that had taken Jurgis to be naturalized was
one of these "Indians," as they were called; and on election day there
would be hundreds of them out, and all with big wads of money in their
pockets and free drinks at every saloon in the district. That was
another thing, the men said--all the saloon-keepers had to be "Indians,"
and to put up on demand, otherwise they could not do business on
Sundays, nor have any gambling at all. In the same way Scully had all
the jobs in the fire department at his disposal, and all the rest of the
city graft in the stockyards district; he was building a block of flats
somewhere up on Ashland Avenue, and the man who was overseeing it for
him was drawing pay as a city inspector of sewers. The city inspector of
water pipes had been dead and buried for over a year, but somebody was
still drawing his pay. The city inspector of sidewalks was a barkeeper
at the War Whoop Cafe--and maybe he could make it uncomfortable for any
tradesman who did not stand in with Scully!

Even the packers were in awe of him, so the men said. It gave them
pleasure to believe this, for Scully stood as the people's man, and
boasted of it boldly when election day came. The packers had wanted a
bridge at Ashland Avenue, but they had not been able to get it till they
had seen Scully; and it was the same with "Bubbly Creek," which the city
had threatened to make the packers cover over, till Scully had come to
their aid. "Bubbly Creek" is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms the
southern boundary of the yards: all the drainage of the square mile of
packing houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open sewer
a hundred or two feet wide. One long arm of it is blind, and the filth
stays there forever and a day. The grease and chemicals that are poured
into it undergo all sorts of strange transformations, which are the
cause of its name; it is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were
feeding in it, or great leviathans disporting themselves in its depths.
Bubbles of carbonic acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and
make rings two or three feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth
have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk
about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to
stroll across, and vanished temporarily. The packers used to leave the
creek that way, till every now and then the surface would catch on fire
and burn furiously, and the fire department would have to come and put
it out. Once, however, an ingenious stranger came and started to gather
this filth in scows, to make lard out of; then the packers took the
cue, and got out an injunction to stop him, and afterward gathered it
themselves. The banks of "Bubbly Creek" are plastered thick with hairs,
and this also the packers gather and clean.

And there were things even stranger than this, according to the gossip
of the men. The packers had secret mains, through which they stole
billions of gallons of the city's water. The newspapers had been full of
this scandal--once there had even been an investigation, and an actual
uncovering of the pipes; but nobody had been punished, and the thing
went right on. And then there was the condemned meat industry, with its
endless horrors. The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors
in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected
from diseased meat; they did not understand that these hundred and
sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of the packers,
and that they were paid by the United States government to certify
that all the diseased meat was kept in the state. They had no authority
beyond that; for the inspection of meat to be sold in the city and state
the whole force in Packingtown consisted of three henchmen of the local
political machine!*

     (*Rules and Regulations for the Inspection of Livestock and
     Their Products. United States Department of Agriculture,
     Bureau of Animal Industries, Order No. 125:--

     Section 1. Proprietors of slaughterhouses, canning, salting,
     packing, or rendering establishments engaged in the
     slaughtering of cattle, sheep. or swine, or the packing of
     any of their products, the carcasses or products of which
     are to become subjects of interstate or foreign commerce,
     shall make application to the Secretary of Agriculture for
     inspection of said animals and their products....

     Section 15. Such rejected or condemned animals shall at once
     be removed by the owners from the pens containing animals
     which have been inspected and found to be free from disease
     and fit for human food, and shall be disposed of in
     accordance with the laws, ordinances, and regulations of the
     state and municipality in which said rejected or condemned
     animals are located....

     Section 25. A microscopic examination for trichinae shall be
     made of all swine products exported to countries requiring
     such examination. No microscopic examination will be made of
     hogs slaughtered for interstate trade, but this examination
     shall be confined to those intended for the export trade.)

And shortly afterward one of these, a physician, made the discovery that
the carcasses of steers which had been condemned as tubercular by the
government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomaines, which
are deadly poisons, were left upon an open platform and carted away to
be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be treated
with an injection of kerosene--and was ordered to resign the same week!
So indignant were the packers that they went farther, and compelled
the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection; so that since then
there has not been even a pretense of any interference with the graft.
There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush money from the
tubercular steers alone; and as much again from the hogs which had died
of cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded
into boxcars and hauled away to a place called Globe, in Indiana, where
they made a fancy grade of lard.

Jurgis heard of these things little by little, in the gossip of those
who were obliged to perpetrate them. It seemed as if every time you
met a person from a new department, you heard of new swindles and new
crimes. There was, for instance, a Lithuanian who was a cattle butcher
for the plant where Marija had worked, which killed meat for canning
only; and to hear this man describe the animals which came to his place
would have been worthwhile for a Dante or a Zola. It seemed that they
must have agencies all over the country, to hunt out old and crippled
and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed
on "whisky-malt," the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the
men called "steerly"--which means covered with boils. It was a nasty
job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would
burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man's
sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he
ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could see? It was
stuff such as this that made the "embalmed beef" that had killed
several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the
Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was old
stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars.

Then one Sunday evening, Jurgis sat puffing his pipe by the kitchen
stove, and talking with an old fellow whom Jonas had introduced, and
who worked in the canning rooms at Durham's; and so Jurgis learned a few
things about the great and only Durham canned goods, which had become
a national institution. They were regular alchemists at Durham's; they
advertised a mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it did not know what
a mushroom looked like. They advertised "potted chicken,"--and it was
like the boardinghouse soup of the comic papers, through which a chicken
had walked with rubbers on. Perhaps they had a secret process for making
chickens chemically--who knows? said Jurgis' friend; the things that
went into the mixture were tripe, and the fat of pork, and beef suet,
and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal, when they had
any. They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several
prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper.
And then there was "potted game" and "potted grouse," "potted ham," and
"deviled ham"--de-vyled, as the men called it. "De-vyled" ham was made
out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be sliced by
the machines; and also tripe, dyed with chemicals so that it would not
show white; and trimmings of hams and corned beef; and potatoes, skins
and all; and finally the hard cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the
tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and
flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Anybody who could
invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said
Jurgis' informant; but it was hard to think of anything new in a
place where so many sharp wits had been at work for so long; where men
welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because it made
them fatten more quickly; and where they bought up all the old rancid
butter left over in the grocery stores of a continent, and "oxidized" it
by a forced-air process, to take away the odor, rechurned it with skim
milk, and sold it in bricks in the cities! Up to a year or two ago
it had been the custom to kill horses in the yards--ostensibly for
fertilizer; but after long agitation the newspapers had been able to
make the public realize that the horses were being canned. Now it was
against the law to kill horses in Packingtown, and the law was really
complied with--for the present, at any rate. Any day, however, one might
see sharp-horned and shaggy-haired creatures running with the sheep and
yet what a job you would have to get the public to believe that a good
part of what it buys for lamb and mutton is really goat's flesh!

There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might
have gathered in Packingtown--those of the various afflictions of
the workers. When Jurgis had first inspected the packing plants with
Szedvilas, he had marveled while he listened to the tale of all the
things that were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the
lesser industries that were maintained there; now he found that each one
of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as
horrible as the killing beds, the source and fountain of them all.
The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases. And the
wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he
could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence
of them about on his own person--generally he had only to hold out his
hand.

There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas
had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of
horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a
truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him
out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the
acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and
trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a
person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it
had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the
man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be
criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count
them or to trace them. They would have no nails,--they had worn them off
pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread
out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the
midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms
the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply
was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried
two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of
work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the
most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the
chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit
that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years.
There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner
than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be
painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to
pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their
fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and
their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance
for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was
very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and
not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off.
There were the "hoisters," as they were called, whose task it was to
press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran
along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and
as old Durham's architects had not built the killing room for the
convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop
under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them
into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking
like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and
those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown
to the visitor,--for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any
ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who
worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open
vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they
fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never
enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be
overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the
world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!



Chapter 10


During the early part of the winter the family had had money enough to
live and a little over to pay their debts with; but when the earnings of
Jurgis fell from nine or ten dollars a week to five or six, there was
no longer anything to spare. The winter went, and the spring came, and
found them still living thus from hand to mouth, hanging on day by day,
with literally not a month's wages between them and starvation. Marija
was in despair, for there was still no word about the reopening of the
canning factory, and her savings were almost entirely gone. She had had
to give up all idea of marrying then; the family could not get along
without her--though for that matter she was likely soon to become a
burden even upon them, for when her money was all gone, they would have
to pay back what they owed her in board. So Jurgis and Ona and Teta
Elzbieta would hold anxious conferences until late at night, trying to
figure how they could manage this too without starving.

Such were the cruel terms upon which their life was possible, that they
might never have nor expect a single instant's respite from worry, a
single instant in which they were not haunted by the thought of money.
They would no sooner escape, as by a miracle, from one difficulty,
than a new one would come into view. In addition to all their physical
hardships, there was thus a constant strain upon their minds; they were
harried all day and nearly all night by worry and fear. This was in
truth not living; it was scarcely even existing, and they felt that it
was too little for the price they paid. They were willing to work all
the time; and when people did their best, ought they not to be able to
keep alive?

There seemed never to be an end to the things they had to buy and to the
unforeseen contingencies. Once their water pipes froze and burst; and
when, in their ignorance, they thawed them out, they had a terrifying
flood in their house. It happened while the men were away, and poor
Elzbieta rushed out into the street screaming for help, for she did
not even know whether the flood could be stopped, or whether they were
ruined for life. It was nearly as bad as the latter, they found in
the end, for the plumber charged them seventy-five cents an hour, and
seventy-five cents for another man who had stood and watched him, and
included all the time the two had been going and coming, and also a
charge for all sorts of material and extras. And then again, when
they went to pay their January's installment on the house, the agent
terrified them by asking them if they had had the insurance attended
to yet. In answer to their inquiry he showed them a clause in the deed
which provided that they were to keep the house insured for one thousand
dollars, as soon as the present policy ran out, which would happen in
a few days. Poor Elzbieta, upon whom again fell the blow, demanded how
much it would cost them. Seven dollars, the man said; and that night
came Jurgis, grim and determined, requesting that the agent would be
good enough to inform him, once for all, as to all the expenses they
were liable for. The deed was signed now, he said, with sarcasm proper
to the new way of life he had learned--the deed was signed, and so the
agent had no longer anything to gain by keeping quiet. And Jurgis looked
the fellow squarely in the eye, and so the fellow wasted no time in
conventional protests, but read him the deed. They would have to renew
the insurance every year; they would have to pay the taxes, about ten
dollars a year; they would have to pay the water tax, about six dollars
a year--(Jurgis silently resolved to shut off the hydrant). This,
besides the interest and the monthly installments, would be all--unless
by chance the city should happen to decide to put in a sewer or to lay
a sidewalk. Yes, said the agent, they would have to have these, whether
they wanted them or not, if the city said so. The sewer would cost them
about twenty-two dollars, and the sidewalk fifteen if it were wood,
twenty-five if it were cement.

So Jurgis went home again; it was a relief to know the worst, at any
rate, so that he could no more be surprised by fresh demands. He saw
now how they had been plundered; but they were in for it, there was
no turning back. They could only go on and make the fight and win--for
defeat was a thing that could not even be thought of.

When the springtime came, they were delivered from the dreadful cold,
and that was a great deal; but in addition they had counted on the money
they would not have to pay for coal--and it was just at this time that
Marija's board began to fail. Then, too, the warm weather brought trials
of its own; each season had its trials, as they found. In the spring
there were cold rains, that turned the streets into canals and bogs; the
mud would be so deep that wagons would sink up to the hubs, so that half
a dozen horses could not move them. Then, of course, it was impossible
for any one to get to work with dry feet; and this was bad for men that
were poorly clad and shod, and still worse for women and children. Later
came midsummer, with the stifling heat, when the dingy killing beds of
Durham's became a very purgatory; one time, in a single day, three men
fell dead from sunstroke. All day long the rivers of hot blood poured
forth, until, with the sun beating down, and the air motionless,
the stench was enough to knock a man over; all the old smells of a
generation would be drawn out by this heat--for there was never any
washing of the walls and rafters and pillars, and they were caked with
the filth of a lifetime. The men who worked on the killing beds would
come to reek with foulness, so that you could smell one of them fifty
feet away; there was simply no such thing as keeping decent, the most
careful man gave it up in the end, and wallowed in uncleanness. There
was not even a place where a man could wash his hands, and the men ate
as much raw blood as food at dinnertime. When they were at work they
could not even wipe off their faces--they were as helpless as newly born
babes in that respect; and it may seem like a small matter, but when the
sweat began to run down their necks and tickle them, or a fly to bother
them, it was a torture like being burned alive. Whether it was the
slaughterhouses or the dumps that were responsible, one could not say,
but with the hot weather there descended upon Packingtown a veritable
Egyptian plague of flies; there could be no describing this--the houses
would be black with them. There was no escaping; you might provide all
your doors and windows with screens, but their buzzing outside would be
like the swarming of bees, and whenever you opened the door they would
rush in as if a storm of wind were driving them.

Perhaps the summertime suggests to you thoughts of the country, visions
of green fields and mountains and sparkling lakes. It had no such
suggestion for the people in the yards. The great packing machine ground
on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men and
women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not
even a flower. Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue
waters of Lake Michigan; but for all the good it did them it might have
been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and
then they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the great packing
machine, and tied to it for life. The managers and superintendents and
clerks of Packingtown were all recruited from another class, and never
from the workers; they scorned the workers, the very meanest of them. A
poor devil of a bookkeeper who had been working in Durham's for twenty
years at a salary of six dollars a week, and might work there for twenty
more and do no better, would yet consider himself a gentleman, as far
removed as the poles from the most skilled worker on the killing beds;
he would dress differently, and live in another part of the town, and
come to work at a different hour of the day, and in every way make sure
that he never rubbed elbows with a laboring man. Perhaps this was due to
the repulsiveness of the work; at any rate, the people who worked with
their hands were a class apart, and were made to feel it.

In the late spring the canning factory started up again, and so once
more Marija was heard to sing, and the love-music of Tamoszius took on
a less melancholy tone. It was not for long, however; for a month or two
later a dreadful calamity fell upon Marija. Just one year and three days
after she had begun work as a can-painter, she lost her job.

It was a long story. Marija insisted that it was because of her activity
in the union. The packers, of course, had spies in all the unions, and
in addition they made a practice of buying up a certain number of the
union officials, as many as they thought they needed. So every week they
received reports as to what was going on, and often they knew things
before the members of the union knew them. Any one who was considered
to be dangerous by them would find that he was not a favorite with
his boss; and Marija had been a great hand for going after the foreign
people and preaching to them. However that might be, the known facts
were that a few weeks before the factory closed, Marija had been cheated
out of her pay for three hundred cans. The girls worked at a long table,
and behind them walked a woman with pencil and notebook, keeping count
of the number they finished. This woman was, of course, only human, and
sometimes made mistakes; when this happened, there was no redress--if
on Saturday you got less money than you had earned, you had to make the
best of it. But Marija did not understand this, and made a disturbance.
Marija's disturbances did not mean anything, and while she had known
only Lithuanian and Polish, they had done no harm, for people only
laughed at her and made her cry. But now Marija was able to call names
in English, and so she got the woman who made the mistake to disliking
her. Probably, as Marija claimed, she made mistakes on purpose after
that; at any rate, she made them, and the third time it happened Marija
went on the warpath and took the matter first to the forelady, and
when she got no satisfaction there, to the superintendent. This was
unheard-of presumption, but the superintendent said he would see about
it, which Marija took to mean that she was going to get her money; after
waiting three days, she went to see the superintendent again. This time
the man frowned, and said that he had not had time to attend to it; and
when Marija, against the advice and warning of every one, tried it once
more, he ordered her back to her work in a passion. Just how things
happened after that Marija was not sure, but that afternoon the forelady
told her that her services would not be any longer required. Poor Marija
could not have been more dumfounded had the woman knocked her over the
head; at first she could not believe what she heard, and then she grew
furious and swore that she would come anyway, that her place belonged
to her. In the end she sat down in the middle of the floor and wept and
wailed.

It was a cruel lesson; but then Marija was headstrong--she should have
listened to those who had had experience. The next time she would know
her place, as the forelady expressed it; and so Marija went out, and the
family faced the problem of an existence again.

It was especially hard this time, for Ona was to be confined before
long, and Jurgis was trying hard to save up money for this. He had
heard dreadful stories of the midwives, who grow as thick as fleas
in Packingtown; and he had made up his mind that Ona must have a
man-doctor. Jurgis could be very obstinate when he wanted to, and he
was in this case, much to the dismay of the women, who felt that a
man-doctor was an impropriety, and that the matter really belonged to
them. The cheapest doctor they could find would charge them fifteen
dollars, and perhaps more when the bill came in; and here was Jurgis,
declaring that he would pay it, even if he had to stop eating in the
meantime!

Marija had only about twenty-five dollars left. Day after day she
wandered about the yards begging a job, but this time without hope of
finding it. Marija could do the work of an able-bodied man, when she
was cheerful, but discouragement wore her out easily, and she would come
home at night a pitiable object. She learned her lesson this time, poor
creature; she learned it ten times over. All the family learned it along
with her--that when you have once got a job in Packingtown, you hang on
to it, come what will.

Four weeks Marija hunted, and half of a fifth week. Of course she
stopped paying her dues to the union. She lost all interest in the
union, and cursed herself for a fool that she had ever been dragged
into one. She had about made up her mind that she was a lost soul,
when somebody told her of an opening, and she went and got a place as
a "beef-trimmer." She got this because the boss saw that she had the
muscles of a man, and so he discharged a man and put Marija to do his
work, paying her a little more than half what he had been paying before.

When she first came to Packingtown, Marija would have scorned such work
as this. She was in another canning factory, and her work was to trim
the meat of those diseased cattle that Jurgis had been told about not
long before. She was shut up in one of the rooms where the people seldom
saw the daylight; beneath her were the chilling rooms, where the meat
was frozen, and above her were the cooking rooms; and so she stood on an
ice-cold floor, while her head was often so hot that she could scarcely
breathe. Trimming beef off the bones by the hundred-weight, while
standing up from early morning till late at night, with heavy boots on
and the floor always damp and full of puddles, liable to be thrown out
of work indefinitely because of a slackening in the trade, liable again
to be kept overtime in rush seasons, and be worked till she trembled
in every nerve and lost her grip on her slimy knife, and gave herself
a poisoned wound--that was the new life that unfolded itself before
Marija. But because Marija was a human horse she merely laughed and went
at it; it would enable her to pay her board again, and keep the family
going. And as for Tamoszius--well, they had waited a long time, and they
could wait a little longer. They could not possibly get along upon his
wages alone, and the family could not live without hers. He could come
and visit her, and sit in the kitchen and hold her hand, and he must
manage to be content with that. But day by day the music of Tamoszius'
violin became more passionate and heartbreaking; and Marija would sit
with her hands clasped and her cheeks wet and all her body atremble,
hearing in the wailing melodies the voices of the unborn generations
which cried out in her for life.


Marija's lesson came just in time to save Ona from a similar fate.
Ona, too, was dissatisfied with her place, and had far more reason than
Marija. She did not tell half of her story at home, because she saw it
was a torment to Jurgis, and she was afraid of what he might do. For
a long time Ona had seen that Miss Henderson, the forelady in her
department, did not like her. At first she thought it was the old-time
mistake she had made in asking for a holiday to get married. Then she
concluded it must be because she did not give the forelady a present
occasionally--she was the kind that took presents from the girls, Ona
learned, and made all sorts of discriminations in favor of those who
gave them. In the end, however, Ona discovered that it was even worse
than that. Miss Henderson was a newcomer, and it was some time before
rumor made her out; but finally it transpired that she was a kept woman,
the former mistress of the superintendent of a department in the same
building. He had put her there to keep her quiet, it seemed--and that
not altogether with success, for once or twice they had been heard
quarreling. She had the temper of a hyena, and soon the place she ran
was a witch's caldron. There were some of the girls who were of her own
sort, who were willing to toady to her and flatter her; and these would
carry tales about the rest, and so the furies were unchained in the
place. Worse than this, the woman lived in a bawdyhouse downtown, with
a coarse, red-faced Irishman named Connor, who was the boss of the
loading-gang outside, and would make free with the girls as they went
to and from their work. In the slack seasons some of them would go with
Miss Henderson to this house downtown--in fact, it would not be too much
to say that she managed her department at Brown's in conjunction with
it. Sometimes women from the house would be given places alongside of
decent girls, and after other decent girls had been turned off to make
room for them. When you worked in this woman's department the house
downtown was never out of your thoughts all day--there were always
whiffs of it to be caught, like the odor of the Packingtown rendering
plants at night, when the wind shifted suddenly. There would be stories
about it going the rounds; the girls opposite you would be telling them
and winking at you. In such a place Ona would not have stayed a day, but
for starvation; and, as it was, she was never sure that she could
stay the next day. She understood now that the real reason that Miss
Henderson hated her was that she was a decent married girl; and she knew
that the talebearers and the toadies hated her for the same reason, and
were doing their best to make her life miserable.