The Jungle

by Upton Sinclair

and for two miles the street was filled with a jeering crowd.

They pleaded with the men to work at home, to go fishing on the lake-front, to do anything but loaf on the corners.

driving the panic-stricken people before them like sheep.

It was violence

Adrienne rich frame in silence i was there

but the vast majority were “green” negroes from the cotton-districts of the far South, and they were herded into the packing-plants like sheep.

There was a law forbidding the use of buildings as lodging-houses unless they were licensed for the purpose, and provided with proper windows, stairways and fire-escapes; now, in a “paint-room,” reached only by an inclosed “chute,” a room without a single window and only one door, one hundred men were crowded upon mattresses placed in a solid row upon the floor. Upon the third-story of the “hog-house” of Morton’s was a store-room, without a window, into which they crowded seven hundred men, sleeping upon the bare springs of cots, and with a second shift to use them by day. When the clamor of the public

and now the corners of every room where meat was being prepared were reeking with the stench of human filth.

one might see brawny negroes stripped to the waist, and pounding each other for money, under the eyes of

young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with big buck negroes with daggers in their boots,

while rows of woolly heads peered down from every window of the surrounding factories. The ancestors of these black p...

or held down by a community ruled by the tradit...

Now for the first time they were free—free to gratify every passion—fre...

the packers had blank permits, which enabled them to ship dead bodies from the city without troubling the authorities.

men were for the most part ignorant country negroes,

Certainly, at any rate, Jurgis did not mention it, for during the drive the policeman slipped into his hand two “cart-wheels” that had come out of the till.

before he had been content if he could sleep in a doorway or under a truck out of the rain,

had to starve the balance of the day in consequence.

Every-where Jurgis went he kept meeting them, and he was in an agony of fear lest any one

There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.

after two or three days more, he even became sparing of the bread, and would stop and peer into the ash-barrels as he walked along the streets, and now and then rake out a bit of something, shake it free from dust, and count himself just so many minutes further from the end.

Then suddenly, at the corner, he came upon a green-grocery, with a tray full of cabbages in front of it. Jurgis gave one swift glance about him, and stooped and seized the biggest of them, and darted around the corner with it. There was a hue and cry, and a score of men and boys started in chase of him; but he came to an alley, and then to an other branching off from it and leading him into another street, where he fell into a walk, and slipped his cabbage under his coat and went off unsuspected in the crowd. When he had gotten a safe distance away he sat down and devoured half the cabbage raw, stowing the balance away in his pockets till the next day.

She took him to a cheap restaurant, and paid the proprietor a quarter, and told him to see that Jurgis had a dinner. And so he ate soup and bread, and boiled beef, and potatoes and beans. Then—the old lady having of course left—the proprietor told Jurgis to “git;” but he, having been sharp enough to look at the bill-of-fare, announced that he had corned beef and cabbage and pie and coffee still coming to him; and when the proprietor tried to bluster it out, he backed up against the wall and declared that he would wreck the place before he would leave without his rights. As several people in the restaurant had seen the quarter paid, the other had to give in, and so when Jurgis left it was with a skin stuffed as tight as a foot-ball.

Spareshanks,

when he had had a little bung in the campaign-barrel for his own! It was almost like a dream, he could scarcely believe that it was true. Sitting here, a forlorn and homeless

the gem of the ocean; and all her future triumphs, her power and good repute among the nations, depended upon the zeal and fidelity with which

patriarchal poetry gertrude stein

until suddenly the band struck up “Hail Columbia,” and he sat erect. But it was only to begin

fortunate son hail to the chief

got into the shelter of a doorway and took stock of himself.

no money, and no place to sleep; he must try begging again.

there was no one among them save Jurgis who showed any signs of poverty.

and never in his life would he have suffered this way again, save that they had caught him unawares, and overwhelmed him before he could protect himself. He heard the old voices of his soul, he saw its old ghosts beckoning to him, stretching out their arms to him; but they were far-off

mists of the past and their voices would die, and never would he see or hear them—the last faint spark of manhood in his soul would flicker out.”

for that keeps them quiet—when they have had enough, they don’t care what is done to them.

“How long are you going to stay?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “Always, I guess. What else

And she called him “Comrade!”

or witnessing a struggle. There was a faint quivering of her nostrils;

lorde question of climate

And, therefore, I cannot rest, I cannot be silent; therefore I cast aside comfort and happiness, health and good repute, and go out into the world and cry out the pain of my spirit; therefore, I am not to be silenced by poverty and sickness, not by hatred and obloquy, by threats and ridicule—not by prison and persecution, if they should come—not by any power that is upon the earth or above the earth, that was, or is, or ever can be created. If I fail tonight, I can only try tomorrow; knowing that the fault must be mine, knowing that if once the vision of my soul were spoken upon earth, if once the anguish of its defeat were uttered in human speech, it would break the stoutest barriers of prejudice,

would abash the most cynical, it would terrify the most selfish; and the voice of mockery would be silenced, and fraud and falsehood would slink back into their dens, and the truth would stand forth alone! For I speak with the voice of the millions who are voiceless; of them that are oppressed and have no comforter; of the disinherited of life, for whom there is no respite and no deliverance, to whom the world is a prison, a dungeon of torture, a tomb! With the voice of the little child who toils tonight in a Southern cotton-mill, staggering with exhaustion, numb with agony, and knowing no hope but the grave! Of the mother who sews by candle-light in her tenement-garret, weary and weeping, smitten with the mortal hunger of her babes! Of the man who lies upon a bed of rags, wrestling in his last sickness and leaving his loved ones to perish! Of the young girl who, somewhere, at this moment, is walking the streets of this horrible city, beaten and starving,

and that they do not tempt me to despair is simply because I know also the forces that drive behind—

with a cry of thankfulness, and stride forth a free man at last!

just as all the springs pour into streamlets, and the streamlets into rivers, and the rivers into the ocean—so, automatically and inevitably, all the wealth of society comes to them.

somehow, somewhen, the labor of humanity will not belong to

everything in the world that is worth while to you! The voice of the

voice of the oppressed, pronouncing the doom of oppression!

The sentences of this man had been to Jurgis like the crashing of thunder in his soul. A flood of emotion surged up in him—all his old hopes and longings, his old griefs and rages and despairs;

whose soul had been murdered, who had ceased to hope and to struggle—

had made terms with

degradation and ...

There was a falling in of all the pillars of his soul, the sky seeme...

yet he knew that in the mighty upheaval that had taken place in his soul, a new man had been born.

The chairman of the meeting came forward and began to speak. His voice sounded thin and futile after the other’s, and to Jurgis it seemed a profanation. Why should any one else speak, after that miraculous man—why should they not all sit in silence?