The Jungle

by Upton Sinclair

Now and then he would break into cursing, regardless of everything; and now and then his impatience would get the better of him,

These were dreadful times, for Jurgis would get as cross as any bear; he was scarcely to be blamed, for he had enough to worry him, and it was hard when he was trying to take a nap to be kept awake by noisy and peevish children.

and because such a world could not but be of good at the heart of it.

planning all day and all night to soothe the prisoned giant who was entrusted to her care.

There is no pet quite so fascinating as a baby;

flew into a passion of nervous rage and swore like a madman, declaring that he would kill him if he did not stop.

it did not tend to add to the sweetness of his temper.

the best dog will turn cross if he be kept chained all the time, and it was the same with our friend;

The poor fellow looked like a homeless ghost, with his cheeks sunken in

read enough to understand that there was only three dollars left to them in the world.

they would say that when a man had been killed; it was the easiest way out of it for all concerned—when, for instance, a man had fallen into one of the rendering tanks and had been made into pure leaf lard and peerless fertilizer, what was the use of letting the fact out, and making his family unhappy, and perhaps getting the story into the papers, and stirring up those pests who call themselves reformers?

had gone on the road, seeking happiness.

The men all knew about this; there were few of them who had not “hoboed it” a few times in their lives, and had not dreamed the wild dream of freedom. Out of the yards every single day there went hundreds of freight cars, and all a man had to do was to hide in one of these, or underneath on the trucks, and the next day he would be in the country.

But the winter was a long way off—and if Jonas had stayed, likely as not he might lose his place by that time, or be killed in one of the elevators.

the names of the different papers that are sold there, and how many of each to get and where to get them, and what sort of people to offer them to, and where to go and where to stay away from. After this leaving home at four o’clock in the morning, and running about the streets, first with morning papers and then with evening, they might come home late at night with twenty or thirty cents apiece—possibly as much as forty cents —in their pockets. From this they had to deduct

took this much to heart, for to her it meant one more victory of America over Lithuania.

Little Kotrina was like most children of the poor, prematurely made old; she had to take care of her little brother and sister,

She had to cook all the meals, and wash the dishes and clean house, and then have supper ready when the workers came home in the evening. She w...

had gotten the best out of them all.

There were some, of course, who had wandered in from other places, who had been ground up in other mills; there were others, who were out from their own fault—some, for instance, who had not been able to stand the awful grind without drink.

and the people who might be starving to death next door.

and either were living upon others, or dying of starvation and exposure, and the diseases to which these made them liable. Or else they had wandered off to beg

vagrants—all of them certain to perish in the end, of the same cold, the same hunger, and the same diseases, as if they had stayed at home.

that is taken out at the bottom of the tank. At any rate, an hour after eating it the child had begun to cry with pain and in another hour he was rolling about on the floor in convulsions.

howled his last howl. No

There are all stages of being out of work,

would talk about it in awe-stricken whispers. Not more than one in ten had ever really tried it; the other nine had contented themselves with hearsay evidence and a peep through the door. There were some things worse than even starving to death. They would ask

went there every day, like a prisoner to an execution;

Few visitors ever saw them, and the few who did would come out looking like Dante, of whom the peasants would say that he had been into hell. To this part of the yards came all the “tankage,” and the waste products of all sorts.

breathing their lungs full of the fine dust, and doomed to die, every one of them, within a certain definite time.

In the corridors and caverns where it was done you might lose yourself as in the great caves of Kentucky. In the dust and the steam, the electric lights would shine like far-off twinkling stars—red and blue, green and purple stars, according to the color of the mist and the brew from which it came. For the odors in these ghastly charnel-houses there may be words in Lithuanian, but there are none in English. The person entering would have to summon his courage as for a cold-water plunge. He would go on like a man swimming under water; he would put his handkerchief over his face, and begin to cough and choke; and then if he were still obstinate, he would find his head beginning to ring, and the veins in his forehead to throb, until finally he would be assailed by an overpowering blast of ammonia fumes, and would turn and run for his life, and come out half dazed.

On top of this were the suffocating rooms where they dried the “tankage,” as it was called, the mass of brown stringy stuff that was left after the waste portions of the carcasses have had the lard and tallow dried out of them. This dried tankage they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had adulterated it with railroad cinders and an innocuous brown rock which they brought in and ground up by the hundreds

farmer in Maine or California or Texas would buy this, at say twenty-five dollars a ton, and plant it with his corn; and for several days after the operation the fields would have a strong odor,

spread out on several acres under the open sky, there were hundreds and thousands of tons of it in one building, heaped here and there in hay-stack piles, covering the floor several inches deep, and filling the air with a choking dust that became a blinding sandstorm when the wind stirred.

choking smoke to celebrate murder

they gave him a sponge to tie over his mouth, so that he could breathe, but the sponge did not prevent his lips and eyelids from caking up with it, and his ears from filling solid.

month of November, 1900, there was one week when one hundred and twenty-six men were employed and only six were able to continue.

It was possible for Jurgis to conquer his revulsion from the odor of the fertilizer, but he could not prevent his body from rebelling.

was almost dazed. The blood was pounding in his brain like an engine’s throbbing; there was a frightful pain in the top of his skull, and he could hardly control his hands. Still, with the memory of his four months’ siege behind him, he fought on, in a frenzy of determination; and half an hour later he began to vomit—he vomited until it seemed as if his insides must be torn to shreds. A man could get used to the fertilizer-mill, the boss had said, if he would only make up his mind to it; but Jurgis now began to see that it was a question of making up his stomach.

how the people in the car began to gasp and sputter, to put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and transfix him with furious glances.

but were not his mouth and throat filled with the poison?

Every man who worked in the fertilizer plant was dying slowly of deadly diseases; but so long as the process was slow enough, it did not trouble them much—the men outside were dying more rapidly still.

they were learning to pick up cigar stumps and smoke them,

on the “Levee,”

What was the use, they would ask, of wasting time and energy and a possible car-fare riding out to the stock-yards every night, when the weather was pleasant, and they could crawl under a truck or into an empty doorway and sleep exactly as well?

she caught at her breath two or three times, and then managed to gasp out an inquiry as to what she had done. She had done nothing in particular, the forelady answered coldly; she was no longer needed. She would be paid for the time she had worked. And so Ona got her things together and went out and sat down on the steps and wept to break her heart.

deadly— there was always a thin layer of water on the floor and a sickening odor of moist flesh in the room. The people who worked here followed the ancient custom of nature, whereby the ptarmigan is the color of dead leaves in the fall and of snow in the winter, and the chameleon, who is black when he lies upon a stump, turns green when he moves to a leaf. The men and women who work in this department were precisely the color of the “fresh country sausage” they made.

had arranged it that she could only do this by working just as she did, with all her soul upon her work, and with never an instant for thought, nor a glance at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as at some wild beast in a menagerie.

Packingtown jest—that they use everything of the pig except the squeal. Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters.

what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected and that was moldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption.

rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy-story, and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.