The Jungle

by Upton Sinclair

He kept his eyes fixed on the orator, who sat in an arm-chair, his head leaning on his hand and his attitude indicating exhaustion. But suddenly he stood up again, and Jurgis heard the chairman of the meeting saying that the speaker would now answer any questions which the audience might care to put to him.

Why should anyone want to ask such questions, after an address like that? The thing was not to talk, but to do; the thing was to get hold of others and rouse them, to organize them and prepare for the fight!

and had no place to sleep that night!

“Stand away a little, please;” he would say. “Can’t you see the comrade is worn out?”

“Perhaps tomorrow we can do better,” said Ostrinski. “We try not to let a comrade starve.”

and no man could get more than the lowest man would consent to work for.

Every Socialist did his share, and lived upon the vision of the “good time” coming—when the working-class should go to the polls and seize the powers of government, and put an end to private property in the means of production. No matter how poor a man was, or how much he suffered, he could never be really unhappy while he knew of that future; even if he did not live to see it himself, his children would, and, to a Socialist, the victory of his class was his victory. Also he had always the progress to encourage him. Here in Chicago, for instance, the movement was growing by leaps and bounds—

expected to convert all the world the first week. After a while he would realize how hard a task it was;

So the Socialists never made any sort of an alliance with capitalist parties, never “fused,” or made a “deal,” and never voted for capitalist candidates. This principle was the very life of Socialism,

go out to the people and spread the truth by word of mouth.

So far the rule in America had been that one Socialist made another Socialist once every two years.

the same powers of darkness leagued

it was a sort of day-nightmare: the people burdened by poverty and ignorance, by race prejudice and religious bigotry, and crushed by a power such as this!

It would not do, Ostrinski explained. for the proletariat of one nation to achieve the victory; for that nation would be crushed by the military power of the others; and so the Socialist movement was a world movement, an organization of all mankind to establish liberty and fraternity, a party to which the rights of all men, white or black or red or yellow, were equally sacred.

it was literally the fact that in the methods of the packers a hundred human lives did not balance a penny of profit.

stole billions of gallons of city water openly,

the “Great Butcher” was at work—when it understood that he was dealing out, blindly and at random, a sudden and agonizing death to tens of thousands of human beings every year,

At first she thought he was out of his mind, and it was hours before she could really feel certain that he was himself. When, how-ever, she had satisfied herself that he was sane upon all subjects except politics she troubled herself no further

and in half an hour she had chosen her life-attitude to the Socialist movement.

describing the location of the hotel Ostrinski interrupted eagerly: “Not Hinds’s!” “Yes,” said Jurgis, “that’s the name.”

To which the other replied: “Then you’ve got the best boss in Chicago —he’s a state organizer of our party, and one of our best known speakers!” So the next morning Jurgis went to his employer and told him; and the man seized him by the hand and shook it. “By Jove!” he cried, “that lets me out—I didn’t sleep all last night because I had discharged a good Socialist!” So, after that, Jurgis was known to his “boss” as “Comrade Jurgis,” and in return he was expected to call him “Comrade Hinds.”

as he was known to his ...

compared with nothing save Niagara.

To a musket that broke in a crisis he always attributed the death of his only brother, and upon worthless blankets he blamed all the agonies of his own old age. Whenever it rained, the rheumatism would get into his joints, and then he would screw up his face and mutter: “Capitalism, my boy.

Capitalism!

one unfailing remedy for all the evils of this world,

“You know what to do about it—

or an Afro-American business-men’s banquet,

Hinds’s hotel was a very hot-bed of the propaganda; all the employees were party men, and if they were not when they came, they were quite certain to be before they went away.

In Massachusetts the percentage of white illiteracy is eight-tenths of one per cent, while in South Carolina it is thirteen and six-tenths per cent;

It is a favorite amusement of the authorities to go out hunting negroes—they will find a number of them playing craps in a hallway, or indulging in a poker-game on a Sunday night, and they will haul them up for “gambling,” and send them for three or six months to a convict-camp, where the hours of labor are from dawn till dark, and a man who ventures to murmur is knocked over the head. Harry Adams was sent up by a judge who was a cousin of the mill-owner with whose business he had interfered; the life had nearly killed him, but he had been wise enough not to murmur, and at the end of his term he and his family had left the state of South Carolina—hell’s backyard, as he called it.

there is the Oil Trust, that keeps you from reading at night—

And why is it so different with the Beef Trust.” Here the other would generally admit that he was “stuck;” and Billy Hinds would explain to him, and it was fun to see his eyes open. “If you were a Socialist,” the hotel-keeper would say, “you would understand that the power which really governs

that would he a great mistake.

These revolutionists were not angels; they were men, and men who had come up from the social pit, and with the mire of it smeared over them. Some of them drank, and some of them swore, and some of them ate pie with their knives; there was only one difference between them and the rest of the populace—that they were men with a hope, with a cause to fight for and suffer for.

but if the glass led to another glass and too many glasses, he had something to spur him to remorse and resolution on the

any one who refused to receive the new gospel was personally responsible for keeping Jurgis from his heart’s desire; and this, alas, made him somewhat impatient as a teacher, and somewhat uncomfortable as an acquaintance.

The whole balance of what the people produced went to heap up the fortunes of these capitalists, to heap, and heap again, and yet again—and that in spite of the fact that they, and every one about them, lived in unthinkable luxury! And was it not plain that if the people stopped this ceaseless drain of “profits” there would be much more for all who worked? That was as plain as two and two makes four; and it was all there was to Socialism—the whole of it, absolutely the whole of it;

Dr. Winslow seems to think that the first dollar is a male dollar, and the second a female dollar, and that when the man puts them into the bank together they reproduce nickels and dimes, which by and by grow up to be dollars as big as their daddy! He doesn’t understand that the thing he calls interest is wealth produced by another man and which the other man had taken from him!” And then the hotel-keeper went on to show how a person who could get ten thousand dollars, whether it was by saving it or stealing it, had an able-bodied man to work for him for the rest of his life. Day or night, that man would never stop; he would work in spite of sickness, of summer’s heat or winter’s cold, a blind and helpless slave of the owner of the ten thousand dollars! And there were tens upon tens of billions of such dollars—and those who were their slaves and worked for them were the wage-earners of the world!

Why does he simply stand there and tell us that Socialism is an untried experiment—of course it is an untried experiment! So is the first attempt of the baby to get upon its feet—but is that any reason for strapping the little wretch down?

When a woman had once come to this, she never got out.

and very much the worse for their life upon the streets.

but meantime in the realm of thought his life was a perpetual adventure. There was so much to know—so many wonders to be discovered!

from San Francisco to Texas, by way of Maine;

living like the apostles of old, upon hospitality, and preaching upon street-corners when there was no hall.

studied the composition of food-stuffs, and knew exactly how many proteins and carbohydrates his body needed;

by scientific chewing he said that he tripled the value of all he ate,

and it cost him eleven ce...

That was the nearest approach to independence a man could make under capitalism, he explained; he would never marry—no man should allow himself to fall in love until after the revolution.

Nicholas Schliemann was familiar with all the universe, and with man as a small part of it.