Sinclair, Upton
1906
. . . And then there was the condemned meat industry, with its endless horrors. The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors in
Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected from diseased meat; they did not understand that these hundred and
sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of the packers, and that they were paid by the United States government to
certify that all the diseased meat was kept in the state. They had no authority beyond that; for the inspection of meat to be sold in
the city and state the whole force in Packingtown consisted of three henchmen of the local political machine! . . .
And then there was “potted game” and “potted grouse,” “potted ham,” and “deviled ham”–devyled, as the men called it. “De-vyled” ham
was made out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be sliced by the machines; and also tripe, dyed with chemicals so
that it would not show white, and trimmings of hams and corned beef, and potatoes, skins and all, and finally the hard cartilaginous
gullets of beef, after the tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make it taste
like something. Anybody who could invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said Jurgis’sinformant, but it was
hard to think of anything new in a place where so many sharp wits had been at work for so long; where men welcomed tuberculosis in the
cattle they were feeding, because it made them fatten more quickly; and where they bought up all the old rancid butter left over in the
grocery stores of a continent, and “oxidized” it by a forced-air process, to take away the odor, rechurned it with skim milk, and sold
it in bricks in the cities! . . .
There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some
spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that
would put him out of the world; all the joints of his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen,
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 criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have
no nails,–they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were
men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of
tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beefluggers, who carried two-hundred-pound
quarters into the refrigerator cars, 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. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time
limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool pluckers, whose hands went to pieces
even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for 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. There were those who made the tins
for the canned meat, and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at
the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget
himself, and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the “hoisters,” as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever
which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam, and as old
Durham’s architects had not built the killing room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop
under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on, which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be
walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could
not be shown to the visitor–for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare away any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the
other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their
peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth
exhibiting–sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf
Lard! . . .
There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that
had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white–it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made
over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had
tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky
roofs would drip over it, and thousands of 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 beshovelled 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. There was
no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that
was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of
the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which
the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the
waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water–and cart load after
cart load of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public’s breakfast. Some of it they
would make into “smoked” sausage–but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry
department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but
when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it “special,” and for this they would charge two cents more a pound. . . .
And then the editor wanted to know upon what ground Dr. Schliemann asserted that it might be possible for a society to exist upon an
hour’s toil by each of its members. “Just what,” answered the other, “would be the productive capacity of society if the present
resources of science were utilized, we have no means of ascertaining; but we may be sure it would exceed anything that would sound
reasonable to minds inured to the ferocious barbarities of Capitalism. After the triumph of the international proletariat, war would of
course be inconceivable; and who can figure the cost of war to humanity–not merely the value of the lives and the material that it
destroys, not merely the cost of keeping millions of men in idleness, of arming and equipping them for battle and parade, but the drain
upon the vital energies of society by the war-attitude and the war-terror, the brutality and ignorance, the drunkenness, prostitution,
and crime it entails, the industrial impotence and the moral deadness? Do you think that it would be too much to say that two hours of
the working time of every efficient member of a community goes to feed the red fiend of war?”
And then Schliemann went on to outline some of the wastes of competition: the losses of industrial warfare; the ceaseless worry and
friction; the vices–such as drink, for instance, the use of which had nearly doubled in twenty years, as a consequence of the
intensification of the economic struggle; the idle and unproductive members of the community, the frivolous rich and the pauperized
poor; the law and the whole machinery of repression; the wastes of social ostentation, the milliners and tailors, the hairdressers,
dancing masters, chefs and lackeys. “You understand,” he said, “that in a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition,
money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power. So we have, at the present moment, a society
with, say, thirty per cent of the population occupied in producing useless articles, and one per cent occupied in destroying them. . .
.
And then there were official returns from the various precincts and wards of the city itself! Whether it was a factory district or one
of the “silk-stocking” wards seemed to make no particular difference in the increase; but one of the things which surprised the
[Socialist] party leaders most was the tremendous vote that came rolling in from the stockyards. Packingtown comprised three wards of
the city, and the vote in the spring of 1903 had been five hundred, and in the fall of the same year, sixteen hundred. Now, only a year
later, it was over sixty-three hundred–and the Democratic vote only eighty-eight hundred! There were other wards in which the
Democratic vote had been actually surpassed, and in two districts, members of the state legislature had been elected. Thus Chicago now
led the country; it had set a new standard for the party, it had shown the workingmen the way!
–So spoke an orator upon the platform; and two thousand pairs of eyes were fixed upon him, and two thousand voices were cheering his
every sentence. The orator had been the head of the city’s relief bureau in the stockyards, until the sight of misery and corruption
had made him sick. He was young, hungry-looking, full of fire; and as he swung his long arms and beat up the crowd, to Jurgis he seemed
the very spirit of the revolution. “Organize! Organize! Organize!”–that was his cry. He was afraid of this tremendous vote, which his
party had not expected, and which it had not earned. “These men are not Socialists!” he cried. “This election will pass, and the
excitement will die, and people will forget about it; and if you forget about it, too, if you sink back and rest upon your oars, we
shall lose this vote that we have polled today, and our enemies will laugh us to scorn! It rests with you to take your resolution–now,
in the flush of victory, to find these men who have voted for us, and bring them to our meetings, and organize them and bind them to
us! We shall not find all our campaigns as easy as this one. Everywhere in the country tonight the old party politicians are studying
this vote, and setting their sails by it; and nowhere will they be quicker or more cunning than here in our own city. Fifty thousand
Socialist votes in Chicago means a municipal-ownership Democracy in the spring! And then they will fool the voters once more, and all
the powers of plunder and corruption will be swept into office again! But whatever they may do when they get in, there is one thing
they will not do, and that will be the thing for which they were elected! They will not give the people of our city municipal
ownership–they will not mean to do it, they will not try to do it; all that they will do is give our party in Chicago the greatest
opportunity that has ever come to Socialism in America! We shall have the sham reformers self-stultified and self-convicted; we shall
have the radical Democracy left without a lie with which to cover its nakedness! And then will begin the rush that will never be
checked, the tide that will never turn till it has reached its flood–that will be irresistible, overwhelming–the rallying of the
outraged workingmen of Chicago to our standard! And we shall organize them, we shall drill them, we shall marshal them for the victory!
We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us–and Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!”
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Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906 (New York: New American Library, rep. 1960), pp. 98, 101-102, 136-137, 332, 340-341.
Questions:
1. Define progressivism; what kind of impact did pieces of literature like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle have on society?
2. What do you find most surprising in Upton Sinclair’s account of the meatpacking industry around the turn of the century? Why?
3. What connection do you see between the public’s reading The Jungle and subsequent progressive legislation, like the Meat
Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which were passed within six months of its publication?
4. Do you think this legislation would have passed without the public attention these issues received after the publication of
articles and books like this one? Why or why not?
5. What was Sinclair’s purpose for writing this piece? Were his goals achieved after publication of this?
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