From
The Jungle.
In his capacity as delicatessen vender, Jokubas Szedvilas had many
acquaintances. Among these was one of the special policemen employed
by Durham, whose duty it frequently was to pick out men for employment.
Jokubas had never tried it, but he expressed a certainty that he could
get some of his friends a job through this man. It was agreed, after
consultation, that he should make the effort with old Antanas and
with Jonas. Jurgis was confident of his ability to get work for himself,
unassisted by any one. As we have said before, he was not mistaken
in this. He had gone to Brown's and stood there not more than half
an hour before one of the bosses noticed his form towering above
the rest, and signaled to him. The colloquy which followed was brief
and to the point:
"Speak English?"
"No; Lit-uanian." (Jurgis had studied this word carefully.)
"Job?"
"Je." (A nod.)
"Worked here before?"
"No 'stand."
(Signals and gesticulations on the part of the boss. Vigorous
shakes of the head by Jurgis.)
"Shovel guts?"
"No 'stand." (More shakes of the head.)
"Zarnos. Pagaiksztis. Szluofa!" (Imitative motions.)
"Je."
"See door. Durys?" (Pointing.)
"Je."
"To-morrow, seven o'clock. Understand? Rytoj! Prieszpietys! Septyni!"
"Dekui, tamistai!" (Thank you, sir.) And that was all. Jurgis turned
away, and then in a sudden rush the full realization of his triumph
swept over him, and he gave a yell and a jump, and started off on a run.
He had a job! He had a job! And he went all the way home as if upon
wings, and burst into the house like a cyclone, to the rage of the
numerous lodgers who had just turned in for their daily sleep.
Meantime Jokubas had been to see his friend the policeman, and received
encouragement, so it was a happy party. There being no more to be done
that day, the shop was left under the care of Lucija, and her husband
sallied forth to show his friends the sights of Packingtown. Jokubas did
this with the air of a country gentleman escorting a party of visitors
over his estate; he was an old-time resident, and all these wonders had
grown up under his eyes, and he had a personal pride in them. The packers
might own the land, but he claimed the landscape, and there was no one to
say nay to this.
They passed down the busy street that led to the yards. It was still
early morning, and everything was at its high tide of activity.
A steady stream of employees was pouring through the gate--employees
of the higher sort, at this hour, clerks and stenographers and such.
For the women there were waiting big two-horse wagons, which set off
at a gallop as fast as they were filled. In the distance there was heard
again the lowing of the cattle, a sound as of a far-off ocean calling.
They followed it, this time, as eager as children in sight of a circus
menagerie--which, indeed, the scene a good deal resembled. They crossed
the railroad tracks, and then on each side of the street were the pens
full of cattle; they would have stopped to look, but Jokubas hurried
them on, to where there was a stairway and a raised gallery, from which
everything could be seen. Here they stood, staring, breathless with wonder.
There is over a square mile of space in the yards, and more than half
of it is occupied by cattle pens; north and south as far as the eye can
reach there stretches a sea of pens. And they were all filled--so many
cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the world. Red cattle, black,
white, and yellow cattle; old cattle and young cattle; great bellowing
bulls and little calves not an hour born; meek-eyed milch cows and fierce,
long-horned Texas steers. The sound of them here was as of all the
barnyards of the universe; and as for counting them--it would have taken
all day simply to count the pens. Here and there ran long alleys, blocked
at intervals by gates; and Jokubas told them that the number of these gates
was twenty-five thousand. Jokubas had recently been reading a newspaper
article which was full of statistics such as that, and he was very proud
as he repeated them and made his guests cry out with wonder. Jurgis too
had a little of this sense of pride. Had he not just gotten a job, and
become a sharer in all this activity, a cog in this marvelous machine?
Here and there about the alleys galloped men upon horseback, booted,
and carrying long whips; they were very busy, calling to each other,
and to those who were driving the cattle. They were drovers and stock
raisers, who had come from far states, and brokers and commission
merchants, and buyers for all the big packing houses.
Here and there they would stop to inspect a bunch of cattle, and there
would be a parley, brief and businesslike. The buyer would nod or drop
his whip, and that would mean a bargain; and he would note it in his
little book, along with hundreds of others he had made that morning.
Then Jokubas pointed out the place where the cattle were driven to be
weighed, upon a great scale that would weigh a hundred thousand pounds at
once and record it automatically. It was near to the east entrance that
they stood, and all along this east side of the yards ran the railroad
tracks, into which the cars were run, loaded with cattle. All night long
this had been going on, and now the pens were full; by tonight they would
all be empty, and the same thing would be done again.
"And what will become of all these creatures?" cried Teta Elzbieta.
"By tonight," Jokubas answered, "they will all be killed and cut up;
and over there on the other side of the packing houses are more
railroad tracks, where the cars come to take them away."
There were two hundred and fifty miles of track within the yards, their
guide went on to tell them. They brought about ten thousand head of
cattle every day, and as many hogs, and half as many sheep--which meant
some eight or ten million live creatures turned into food every year.
One stood and watched, and little by little caught the drift of the tide,
as it set in the direction of the packing houses. There were groups of
cattle being driven to the chutes, which were roadways about fifteen feet
wide, raised high above the pens. In these chutes the stream of animals
was continuous; it was quite uncanny to watch them, pressing on to their
fate, all unsuspicious a very river of death. Our friends were not
poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors of human destiny;
they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it all. The chutes into
which the hogs went climbed high up--to the very top of the distant
buildings; and Jokubas explained that the hogs went up by the power of
their own legs, and then their weight carried them back through all the
processes necessary to make them into pork.
"They don't waste anything here," said the guide, and then he laughed
and added a witticism, which he was pleased that his unsophisticated
friends should take to be his own: "They use everything about the hog
except the squeal." In front of Brown's General Office building there
grows a tiny plot of grass, and this, you may learn, is the only bit
of green thing in Packingtown; likewise this jest about the hog and his
squeal, the stock in trade of all the guides, is the one gleam of humor
that you will find there.
After they had seen enough of the pens, the party went up the street,
to the mass of buildings which occupy the center of the yards. These
buildings, made of brick and stained with innumerable layers of
Packingtown smoke, were painted all over with advertising signs, from
which the visitor realized suddenly that he had come to the home of many
of the torments of his life. It was here that they made those products
with the wonders of which they pestered him so--by placards that defaced
the landscape when he traveled, and by staring advertisements in the
newspapers and magazines--by silly little jingles that he could not get
out of his mind, and gaudy pictures that lurked for him around every
street corner. Here was where they made Brown's Imperial Hams and Bacon,
Brown's Dressed Beef, Brown's Excelsior Sausages! Here was the
headquarters of Durham's Pure Leaf Lard, of Durham's Breakfast Bacon,
Durham's Canned Beef, Potted Ham, Deviled Chicken, Peerless Fertilizer!
Entering one of the Durham buildings, they found a number of other visitors
waiting; and before long there came a guide, to escort them through the
place. They make a great feature of showing strangers through the packing
plants, for it is a good advertisement. But Ponas Jokubas whispered
maliciously that the visitors did not see any more than the packers
wanted them to. They climbed a long series of stairways outside of the
building, to the top of its five or six stories. Here was the chute,
with its river of hogs, all patiently toiling upward; there was a place
for them to rest to cool off, and then through another passageway they
went into a room from which there is no returning for hogs.
It was a long, narrow room, with a gallery along it for visitors. At the
head there was a great iron wheel, about twenty feet in circumference,
with rings here and there along its edge. Upon both sides of this wheel
there was a narrow space, into which came the hogs at the end of their
journey; in the midst of them stood a great burly Negro, bare-armed and
bare-chested. He was resting for the moment, for the wheel had stopped
while men were cleaning up. In a minute or two, however, it began slowly
to revolve, and then the men upon each side of it sprang to work. They had
chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the other
end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So, as
the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft.
At the same instant the car was assailed by a most terrifying shriek;
the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back.
The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing--
for once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the
top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing
down the room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another,
and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by
a foot and kicking in frenzy--and squealing. The uproar was appalling,
perilous to the eardrums; one feared there was too much sound for the room
to hold--that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were
high squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony; there would
come a momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever,
surging up to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the
visitors--the men would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the
women would stand with hands clenched, and the blood rushing to their
faces, and the tears starting in their eyes.
Meantime, heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were going
about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors made any
difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs, and one by one
with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long line of hogs,
with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away together; until at last each started
again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water.
It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was
porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics. And yet
somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the
hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were
so very human in their protests--and so perfectly within their rights!
They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury,
as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded,
impersonal way, without a pretense of apology, without the homage of
a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering
machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime
committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and
of memory.
One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical,
without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog
squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was
nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where
they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a
separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown,
some were spotted; some were old, some young; some were long and lean,
some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own,
a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full of self-
confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and
strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow
hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway. Now suddenly
it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless,
remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it--
it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply
no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life.
And now was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom
this hog personality was precious, to whom these hog squeals and agonies
had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him,
reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his
sacrifice? Perhaps some glimpse of all this was in the thoughts of our
humble-minded Jurgis, as he turned to go on with the rest of the party,
and muttered: "Dieve--but I'm glad I'm not a hog!"
The carcass hog was scooped out of the vat by machinery, and then it
fell to the second floor, passing on the way through a wonderful machine
with numerous scrapers, which adjusted themselves to the size and shape
of the animal, and sent it out at the other end with nearly all of its
bristles removed. It was then again strung up by machinery, and sent
upon another trolley ride; this time passing between two lines of men,
who sat upon a raised platform, each doing a certain single thing to
the carcass as it came to him. One scraped the outside of a leg;
another scraped the inside of the same leg. One with a swift stroke cut
the throat; another with two swift strokes severed the head, which fell
to the floor and vanished through a hole. Another made a slit down
the body; a second opened the body wider; a third with a saw cut the
breastbone; a fourth loosened the entrails; a fifth pulled them out--
and they also slid through a hole in the floor. There were men to scrape
each side and men to scrape the back; there were men to clean the carcass
inside, to trim it and wash it. Looking down this room, one saw, creeping
slowly, a line of dangling hogs a hundred yards in length; and for every
yard there was a man, working as if a demon were after him. At the end of
this hog's progress every inch of the carcass had been gone over several
times; and then it was rolled into the chilling room, where it stayed for
twenty-four hours, and where a stranger might lose himself in a forest of
freezing hogs.
Before the carcass was admitted here, however, it had to pass a government
inspector, who sat in the doorway and felt of the glands in the neck for
tuberculosis. This government inspector did not have the manner of a man
who was worked to death; he was apparently not haunted by a fear that the
hog might get by him before he had finished his testing. If you were a
sociable person, he was quite willing to enter into conversation with you,
and to explain to you the deadly nature of the ptomaines which are found in
tubercular pork; and while he was talking with you you could hardly be so
ungrateful as to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched.
This inspector wore a blue uniform, with brass buttons, and he gave an
atmosphere of authority to the scene, and, as it were, put the stamp of
official approval upon the things which were done in Durham's.
Jurgis went down the line with the rest of the visitors, staring
openmouthed, lost in wonder. He had dressed hogs himself in the forest
of Lithuania; but he had never expected to live to see one hog dressed
by several hundred men. It was like a wonderful poem to him, and he took
it all in guilelessly--even to the conspicuous signs demanding immaculate
cleanliness of the employees. Jurgis was vexed when the cynical Jokubas
translated these signs with sarcastic comments, offering to take them to
the secret rooms where the spoiled meats went to be doctored.
The party descended to the next floor, where the various waste materials
were treated. Here came the entrails, to be scraped and washed clean for
sausage casings; men and women worked here in the midst of a sickening
stench, which caused the visitors to hasten by, gasping. To another room
came all the scraps to be "tanked," which meant boiling and pumping off
the grease to make soap and lard; below they took out the refuse, and this,
too, was a region in which the visitors did not linger. In still other
places men were engaged in cutting up the carcasses that had been through
the chilling rooms. First there were the "splitters," the most expert
workmen in the plant, who earned as high as fifty cents an hour, and did
not a thing all day except chop hogs down the middle. Then there were
"cleaver men," great giants with muscles of iron; each had two men to
attend him--to slide the half carcass in front of him on the table,
and hold it while he chopped it, and then turn each piece so that he might
chop it once more. His cleaver had a blade about two feet long, and he
never made but one cut; he made it so neatly, too, that his implement
did not smite through and dull itself--there was just enough force for a
perfect cut, and no more. So through various yawning holes there slipped
to the floor below--to one room hams, to another forequarters, to another
sides of pork. One might go down to this floor and see the pickling rooms,
where the hams were put into vats, and the great smoke rooms, with their
airtight iron doors. In other rooms they prepared salt pork--there were
whole cellars full of it, built up in great towers to the ceiling. In yet
other rooms they were putting up meats in boxes and barrels, and wrapping
hams and bacon in oiled paper, sealing and labeling and sewing them.
From the doors of these rooms went men with loaded trucks, to the platform
where freight cars were waiting to be filled; and one went out there and
realized with a start that he had come at last to the ground floor of this
enormous building.
Then the party went across the street to where they did the killing of
beef--where every hour they turned four or five hundred cattle into meat.
Unlike the place they had left, all this work was done on one floor;
and instead of there being one line of carcasses which moved to the
workmen, there were fifteen or twenty lines, and the men moved from one
to another of these. This made a scene of intense activity, a picture of
human power wonderful to watch. It was all in one great room, like a
circus amphitheater, with a gallery for visitors running over the center.
Along one side of the room ran a narrow gallery, a few feet from
the floor; into which gallery the cattle were driven by men with goads
which gave them electric shocks. Once crowded in here, the creatures
were prisoned, each in a separate pen, by gates that shut, leaving them
no room to turn around; and while they stood bellowing and plunging,
over the top of the pen there leaned one of the "knockers," armed with
a sledge hammer, and watching for a chance to deal a blow. The room
echoed with the thuds in quick succession, and the stamping and kicking
of the steers. The instant the animal had fallen, the "knocker" passed
on to another; while a second man raised a lever, and the side of the
pen was raised, and the animal, still kicking and struggling, slid out
to the "killing bed." Here a man put shackles about one leg, and pressed
another lever, and the body was jerked up into the air. There were
fifteen or twenty such pens, and it was a matter of only a couple of
minutes to knock fifteen or twenty cattle and roll them out. Then once
more the gates were opened, and another lot rushed in; and so out of
each pen there rolled a steady stream of carcasses, which the men upon
the killing beds had to get out of the way.
The manner in which they did this was something to be seen and never
forgotten. They worked with furious intensity, literally upon the run--
at a pace with which there is nothing to be compared except a football
game. It was all highly specialized labor, each man having his task
to do; generally this would consist of only two or three specific cuts,
and he would pass down the line of fifteen or twenty carcasses, making
these cuts upon each. First there came the "butcher," to bleed them;
this meant one swift stroke, so swift that you could not see it--only the
flash of the knife; and before you could realize it, the man had darted
on to the next line, and a stream of bright red was pouring out upon the
floor. This floor was half an inch deep with blood, in spite of the best
efforts of men who kept shoveling it through holes; it must have made
the floor slippery, but no one could have guessed this by watching the
men at work.
The carcass hung for a few minutes to bleed; there was no time lost,
however, for there were several hanging in each line, and one was always
ready. It was let down to the ground, and there came the "headsman,"
whose task it was to sever the head, with two or three swift strokes.
Then came the "floorsman," to make the first cut in the skin; and then
another to finish ripping the skin down the center; and then half a dozen
more in swift succession, to finish the skinning. After they were through,
the carcass was again swung up; and while a man with a stick examined the
skin, to make sure that it had not been cut, and another rolled it tip
and tumbled it through one of the inevitable holes in the floor, the beef
proceeded on its journey. There were men to cut it, and men to split it,
and men to gut it and scrape it clean inside. There were some with hose
which threw jets of boiling water upon it, and others who removed the feet
and added the final touches. In the end, as with the hogs, the finished
beef was run into the chilling room, to hang its appointed time.
The visitors were taken there and shown them, all neatly hung in rows,
labeled conspicuously with the tags of the government inspectors--and
some, which had been killed by a special process, marked with the sign
of the kosher rabbi, certifying that it was fit for sale to the orthodox.
And then the visitors were taken to the other parts of the building,
to see what became of each particle of the waste material that had
vanished through the floor; and to the pickling rooms, and the salting
rooms, the canning rooms, and the packing rooms, where choice meat was
prepared for shipping in refrigerator cars, destined to be eaten in all
the four corners of civilization. Afterward they went outside, wandering
about among the mazes of buildings in which was done the work auxiliary
to this great industry. There was scarcely a thing needed in the business
that Durham and Company did not make for themselves. There was a great
steam power plant and an electricity plant. There was a barrel factory,
and a boiler-repair shop. There was a building to which the grease was
piped, and made into soap and lard; and then there was a factory for
making lard cans, and another for making soap boxes. There was a building
in which the bristles were cleaned and dried, for the making of hair
cushions and such things; there was a building where the skins were dried
and tanned, there was another where heads and feet were made into glue,
and another where bones were made into fertilizer. No tiniest particle
of organic matter was wasted in Durham's. Out of the horns of the
cattle they made combs, buttons, hairpins, and imitation ivory; out of
the shinbones and other big bones they cut knife and toothbrush handles,
and mouthpieces for pipes; out of the hoofs they cut hairpins and
buttons, before they made the rest into glue. From such things as feet,
knuckles, hide clippings, and sinews came such strange and unlikely
products as gelatin, isinglass, and phosphorus, bone black, shoe blacking,
and bone oil. They had curled-hair works for the cattle tails, and a
"wool pullery" for the sheepskins; they made pepsin from the stomachs
of the pigs, and albumen from the blood, and violin strings from the
ill-smelling entrails. When there was nothing else to be done with
a thing, they first put it into a tank and got out of it all the tallow
and grease, and then they made it into fertilizer. All these industries
were gathered into buildings near by, connected by galleries and
railroads with the main establishment; and it was estimated that they
had handled nearly a quarter of a billion of animals since the founding
of the plant by the elder Durham a generation and more ago. If you
counted with it the other big plants--and they were now really all
one--it was, so Jokubas informed them, the greatest aggregation of labor
and capital ever gathered in one place. It employed thirty thousand men;
it suppported directly two hundred and fifty thousand people in its
neighborhood, and indirectly it supported half a million. It sent its
products to every country in the civilized world, and it furnished the
food for no less than thirty million people!
To all of these things our friends would listen openmouthed--it seemed
to them impossible of belief that anything so stupendous could have been
devised by mortal man. That was why to Jurgis it seemed almost profanity
to speak about the place as did Jokubas, skeptically; it was a thing as
tremendous as the universe--the laws and ways of its working no more than
the universe to be questioned or understood. All that a mere man could do,
it seemed to Jurgis, was to take a thing like this as he found it, and do
as he was told; to be given a place in it and a share in its wonderful
activities was a blessing to be grateful for, as one was grateful for the
sunshine and the rain. Jurgis was even glad that he had not seen the
place before meeting with his triumph, for he felt that the size of it
would have overwhelmed him. But now he had been admitted--he was a part
of it all! He had the feeling that this whole huge establishment had
taken him under its protection, and had become responsible for his welfare.
So guileless was he, and ignorant of the nature of business, that he did
not even realize that he had become an employee of Brown's, and that Brown
and Durham were supposed by all the world to be deadly rivals--were even
required to be deadly rivals by the law of the land, and ordered to try
to ruin each other under penalty of fine and imprisonment!
The Jungle Chapter 4