The Jungle

by Upton Sinclair

was permitted to take himself out upon the broad, snow-covered prairies of this land of liberty, and lie down and die there, as a witness to the fact that he was no man’s slave.

delegate of the butcher-helpers’ union

one that did touch him, that took hold of every fiber of him,

when that happened they would stop the machine, but only for a minute or so; if they could not find the finger they would let it go and call it sausage. And that was grinding up men, as anyone will admit;

while outside the starving thousands struggled and fought for a chance to take their places, when at last they could hold out no longer, but fell in their tracks and dragged themselves home to die.

only in Russia the policemen were friendly, and would call one Brother while they pushed him along—whereas the policemen here in America were Cossacks.

They would curse at him and kick him; they would search him on the street, or break into his own house, if they felt like it, and if he protested, like as not they would crack his head open. And if that did not shut him up, they would drag him to the station-house and lock him in and he might stay there two or three days without any one’s knowing where he was. Often they did not even enter his name on the station-house

From the room where they kill the hogs, in each of the plants, go daily a certain number of carcasses marked with red tags: “U. S. Condemned.” These hogs have been found to be tuberculous, which means that the flesh had ptomaines in it. These ptomaines are deadly poisons—and not germs which cooking can kill, but poisons, which will remain and be fatal, no matter what may be done to the meat. The government requires that these carcasses be “tanked,” that is, destroyed and turned into fertilizer;

grew interested, and found that the knowledge of it was an every day, matter-of-fact thing among the

all the cows that developed lumpy jaw, or fell sick, or dried up of old age—they kept them till they had a carload, which was twenty, and then shipped them to this place to be canned.

had become what the men called “steerly”—which means covered with boils that were full of matter. 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?

No doubt 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; and Jurgis’s informant added that the old scoundrel who had been Secretary of War and gotten that graft was now an honorable senator in Washington.

They advertised “potted chicken,”—and it was like the boarding-house soup of the comic papers, through which a chicken had walked with rubbers on.

tripe, dyed with chemicals so that it would not show white;

Of the butchers and floormen, 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 cris-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them.

the beef-luggers, who carried two hundred pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; this was 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.

the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle-men; 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.

the odor of the fertilizer men 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 which there were open vats upon a level with the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out there was never enough

but when she had nothing, certainly they could not turn her out into the street. 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.

single instant’s respite from worry, a single instant in which they were not haunted by the thoughts of money.

was in truth not living; it was scarcely even existing,

When people did their best they ought to be able to keep alive.

the spring there were cold rains, that turned the streets into canals and bogs;

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 down; all the old smells of a generation would be drawn out by this heat—for there was never any washing-up at Anderson’s,

the most careful man gave it up in the end,

it was because of her activity in the union.

as they thought they needed;

laughed at her and made her cry.

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;

could do the work of an able-bodied man, when she was cheerful, but discouragement wore her out

you hang on to it, come what will; you hang on even if they kick and beat you, you hang on as long as you can drag yourself there.

did not tell half of her story at home, because she saw it was a torment

because there was no difference in color between master and slave.

One of the women, an unmarried girl, who had been coming day after day when she ought not to have come, crept away at last into a dark passage and gave birth to a baby boy; and not knowing what to do with him, and in terror of losing her place, she crept up to the floor above and dropped him into one of the carts full of beef, that was all ready for the cooking-vats. It was by the merest chance that some one heard the baby cry, just as the cart was in the act of being dumped. They took this woman to the hospital—what became of her after that no one ever knew.

sitting still sewing hams all day;

All this is so familiar and common-place that one has to apologize for telling of it;

Sooner or later, by this plan, they would have all the floating labor of Chicago trained to do their work. And how very cunning a trick was that! The men were to teach new hands, who would some day come and break their strike; and meantime they were kept so poor that they could not prepare for the trial!

organized in the street outside.

God help the people who are caught in a crowd that the police at the stock-yards are sent out to disperse.

To make matters worse, a drizzling rain came up, and soaked them to the skin;

enough by this time to realize that it was not supposed to be right to sell your vote.

knew what it was to be really opposed.

of Jurgis was a song, for he had met the enemy and conquered, and he felt himself the master of his fate.—So it might be with some monarch of the forest, that had vanquished his foes in fair fight, and then fell into some cowardly trap in the night-time. There are so many traps in the jungle—the creature that would escape them all must never sleep.

In the slaughter-houses of Europe, where there are laws, they fit over the head of the animal a leather cap having a nail in it; then, provided the knocker has only skill enough to hit the nail with a big mallet, he cannot fail to kill the animal. But they never stopped for things like that in the yards— the knockers would lean over the pens and slap away at the creatures with a pointed hammer, and if they did not kill at the first blow, they had only to try again. So now and then you might see one banging away for a full minute, with the steer plunging and bellowing in agony and terror.

trap. That is the very word to describe it—it was so cruel, and so utterly not to be foreseen.

was such a slight accident—simply that in leaping out of the way he turned his ankle.

here, in this ghastly home of all horror, he and all those who were dear to him might lie and perish of starvation and cold, and there would be no ear to hear their cry, no hand to help them! It was true, it was true—and yet did it not seem a monstrous thing that could happen, here in this huge city, with its stores of heaped-up wealth—that tens and hundreds of thousands of human creatures should be hunted and destroyed

They did without everything that human beings could do without;

there was no one to tell them that the nutriment they got in meat cost them several times as much as if they had gotten it in oatmeal and beans