The Jungle | #3
Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protest, 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.
In his capacity as delicatessen vendor, Jokubas Szadwilas had many acquaintances. Among these was one of the special policemen employed by Anderson, 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, in this he was not mistaken. He had gone to Smith's and stood there not more than half an hour before one of the bosses noticed his form towering above the rest, and signalled to him. The colloquy which followed was brief, and to the point:
"Speak English?"
"No: Lit-uanian." (Jurgis has 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. Szlouti!" (Imperiative motions.)
"Je."
"See door. Durys?" (Pointing.)
"Je."
"To-morrow, seven o'clock. Understand? Rytoj! Priespietys! 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 panei 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 around his estate; Jokubas 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 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 could reach there stretched before it a sea of pens. And they were all filled—so many cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the world. Red cattle, black, and 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 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 the 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 to men 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 business-like. The buyer would nod or drop his whip, and that would mean a bargain; and he would not 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 to-night 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 to-night," 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 the products away."
There were two hundred and fifty miles of track within the yards, their guide went on to inform 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, where 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 pigs went climbed high up—to the very top of the distant buildings; and Jokubas explained that with refinement of cynicism they made the pigs literally clean and dress themselves. They went up by the power of their own legs, and then their own 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 pig except the squeal." In front of Smith'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 pig 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 suddenly realized 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 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 Smith's Dressed Beef. Smith's Excelsior Sausages! Here was the headquarters of Anderson's Pure Leaf Lard, of Anderson's Breakfast Bacon, Andersons Canned Beef, Potted Ham, Devilled Chicken, Peerless Fertilizer. "But they might as well save the paint they waste around here," observed Jokbuas Szadwilas; "they can't fool anybody that has worked here."
This was a remark that caused Jurgis to look at the speaker in perplexity.
"How do you mean?" he asked. "Aren't the things all right?"
"Tai jukai!" Jokubas laughed. "Wait till you have been in here a while. I wouldn't put a piece of their canned beef into my mouth to save my grandmother's soul from purgatory!"
Entering one of the Anderson buildings, they found a number of other visitors waiting; and before long there came a guide, to escort them through the place. They made a great feature of showing strangers through the packing-plants, for it is a good advertisement. But panas Jokubas whispered maliciously that the visitors did not see any more than 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 pigs, all patiently toiling upwards; 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 pigs.
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 pigs 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 pig, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a pig was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft.
At the same instant the ear 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 pig 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 a frenzy—and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous to the ear-drums; 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 then 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 pigs nor tears of visitors made any difference to them; but one by one they hooked up the pigs, and one by one they slit their throats. There was a long line of pigs, with squeals and life-blood 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 business-like that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making reduced to mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the pigs; 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 pretence at 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 memory.
One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the pig-squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for pigs, where they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of those pigs was a separate creature. Some were white pigs, some were black; some were old, some were 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 protest, 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 pigs, to whom this pig personality was precious, to whom these pig-squeals and agonies had meaning? Who would take this pig into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice? For all the while there was a meaning—if only the poor pig could have known it. Perhaps if he has, he would not have squealed at all, but died happy! If only he had known that he was to figure in the bank account of some great captain of industry, and perhaps help to found a university, or endow a handful of libraries, when the captain of industry died! It is one of the crimes of commercialism that it thus cruelly leaves its victims to grope in darkness; that delicate women and little children, who toil and groan in factories and mines and sweatshops and die of starvation and loathsome diseases, are not taught and consoled by the reflection that they are adding to the wealth of society, and to the power of greatness of some eminent philanthropist. Perhaps some glimmering of this truth was in the thoughts of our humble-minded Jurgis, as her turned to go on with the rest of the party, and muttered: "Diewes—but I'm glad I'm not a pig!"
The carcass of the pig 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 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 breast-bone; 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 pigs 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 pig's progress every inch of the carcass had been gone over several times, and the pig was a work of art; then it was rolled into the chilling room, where it stayed for twenty-four hours, and where a stranger might lose himself in a boundless 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 man who was worked to death; he was apparently not haunted by a fear that the pig might get by him before he had finished the 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 tuberenlous pork; while he was talking with you you could hardly be so tactless as to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched. This inspector wore a blue uniform, with highly ornamental 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 Anderson's. For this reason the firm was very grateful to him; it appointed no bosses and no spies to see that he did his work thoroughly and it kept no record of his going and coming. It was the law that no employee might carry meat out of Anderson and Company houses under any circumstance whatever; even a boss might break this rule, not even one of the mighty superintendents and many a poor working-man had been caught taking home a link of sausage in his dinner-pail, and had been sent to the country jail for thirty days and never after been employed by any firm in Packingtown. The government inspectors alone were graciously excepted from this—they might carry away all the meat they chose, and they did carry it; any day you might see them going home with great roasts of beef wrapped in paper and tucked under their arms.
These were the things that Jurgis was to learn in time; at present he was as innocent as a child, and went down the line with the rest of the visitors, staring open-mouthed, lost in wonder. Jurgis had dressed pigs himself in the forest of Lithuania; but he had never expected to live to see one pig 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; as it was all done in open vats, 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 50 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 to 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 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 air-tight 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 meat in boxes and barrel, 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 move 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 the cattle were driven into by men with goads which gave them electric shocks. Once crowded into here the creatures were prisoned, each in a separate pen, by gates that shut, leaving them no room to turn around; while they stood bellowing and plunging, over the top of the pen there leaned one of the "knockers," armed with a sledgehammer, 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-floor." 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-floor had to get out of the way.
The way in which they did this was a sight 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; before you could realize it, the man had darted on to the next line, and a stream of bright red blood 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 "floorman," to make the first cut in the skin; and then another to finish ripping the skin down the center, and then a dozen more in swift succession, to finish the skinning. After they were through, the carcass was again swung up. While a man with a stick examined the skin, to make sure that it had not been cut, and another rolled it up and tumbled it through one of the inevitable holes in the door, the carcass 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 hoses 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 they 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, where choice meat was prepared for shipping in refrigerators, destined to be eaten in all the four corners of civilization. Afterwards they went out-side, wandering about among the mazes of buildings in which this was done the work auxiliary to this great industry. There was not a thing needed in the business that Anderson 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 hard 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 Anderson's, Out of the horns of the cattle they made combs, buttons, hairpins, and imitation ivory; out of the shin-bones and other big bones they cut knife and toothbrush handles, and mouth-pieces 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 phosphorous, 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 in buildings nearby, 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 old man Anderson, the self-made merchant a generation and more ago. If you counted with it the other big plants—and they were not 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 supported 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, open-mouthed—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 Smith's; and that Smith and Andersons were supposed by all the world to de deadly rivals by the law of the land, and compelled to cut each other's throats under penalty of fine and imprisonment!
(To be continued.)