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The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair carries an introduction in which he says, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by
accident I hit it in the stomach." Sinclair talks about how the working conditions of the people were so bad but instead
people thought of what they were eating and therefore he states how he hit the stomach.
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"A young man made a map of the district, and each block he put a black dot for every child who had died there in
the past year; [and] when he finished you would have said that his map had been made with a pepper cruet."
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Human body parts were used as "dollars and cents". "Jurgis talked with some who worked in the sausage-rooms,
and who told him how now and then some one would lose a finger in the dangerous cutting-machines; and how when that happened
they would stop the machine, but only for a minute or so; if they could not find the finger they would let it go and call
it sausage." In the book they call this "grinding up men" because even men were used as food as such in this
case when a man has a finger cut off and they cannot find it. This was called "speeding-up". It was to get the
highest production output possible of meat and therefore in return the company received more money. "They were slaughtering
men there, just as much as they were slaughtering cattle."
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"One of the women, an unmarried girl, who had been coming day after day when she ought not to have come, crept away
at last into a dark passage and gave birth to a baby boy; and not knowing of what to do with him, and in terror of losing
her place, she crept up to the floor above dropped him into one of the carts full of beef, that was all ready for the cooking-vats.
It was by the merest chance that some one heard the baby cry, just as the cart was in the act of being dumped." This
shows how everyone in Packingtown were so desperate for work that even a pregnant woman was in search.
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"The law says that all elevators in factories shall have gates; but probably the lawmakers did not realize what an
inconvenient law this would be." The problem was that there were not always gates because a man who ran an elevator
was paid a little more than a man who pushed a truck, he felt that he was a little boss, and had a right to swear at a poor
devil who did not make speed to suit him. He would slam over the lever of the elevator the instant the rear wheels of the
truck were on, and leave it for the man to follow as best he could...The first time it happened where Jonas worked, the man
was mashed right in half, and they got the body out of the way and started things up again, so that two or three minutes later,
when Jonas came along, there was only blood to show that anything had happened. But the second time he was right behind
the man, who was a friend of his and who missed his leaping into the moving car, and had one of his feet cut off. Jonas saw
the latter kneel down beside the frantic wretch, and heard him ask if he would not like to go to the hospital, if the company
would pay his expenses. The man approved this and so the lawyer had him sign a paper. What he did not know was that the
man had really signed was a statement that he accepted ten dollars as satisfaction of all his damage claims against Anderson
and Company. As for the hospital, Jonas's informant explained, that was all a damned lie."
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"The fertilizer plant was known as the place in Packingtown that awaits for the lowest man." Here it was the
most foul smell and polluted air. "He would go in like a man swimming under water; he would put his handkerchief over
his face, and begin to cough and choke; and then, if he were still obstinate, he would find his head beginning to ring, and
the veins in his forehead to throb, until finally he would be assailed by an overpowering blast of ammonia fumes, and would
turn and run for his life, and come out half-dazed." Jurgis being a built and a big man, even he could not take it.
"Working in his shirt sleeves, and with the thermometer at over a hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every pore
of Jurgis' skin, and in five minutes he had a headache, and in fifteen was almost dazed. The blood was pounding in his brain
like an engine's throbbing; there was a frightful pain in the top of his skull, and he could hardly control his hands. Still,
with the memory of his four months' siege behind him, he fought on, in a frenzy of determination; and half an hour later he
began to vomit;he vomited until it seemed as if his inwards must be torn into shreds. A man could get used to the fertilizer
mill, the boss had said, if he would make up his mind to it; but Jurgis now began to see that it was a question of making
up his stomach.In the month of November, 1900, there was one week when 126 men were employed and only six were able to continue."
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"One could never get in advance more than a guess as to this from a saloonkeeper - and then, when the time came he
always came to you scratching his head and saying that he had guessed too low, but that he had done his best - your guests
had gotten so very drunk. By him you were sure to be cheated unmercifully, and that even though you thought yourself the dearest
of the hundreds of friends he had. He would begin to serve your guests out of a keg that was half full, and finish with one
that was half empty, and then you would be charged for two kegs of beer. He would agree to serve a certain quality at a certain
price, and when the time came you and your friends would be drinking some horrible poison that could not be described. You
might complain, but you would get nothing for your pains but a ruined evening; while, as for going to law about it, you might
as well go to heaven at once. The saloonkeeper stood in with all the big politics men in the district; and when you had once
found out what it meant to get into trouble with such people, you would know enough to pay what you were told to pay and shut
up."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Perhaps it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that morning-which may have been made out of some of the tubercular
pork that was condemned as unfit for export. At any rate, an hour after eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and
in another hour he was rolling about on the floor in convulsions. Little Kotrina, who was all alone with him, ran out screaming
for help, and after a while a doctor came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl."
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"Then one Sunday evening, Jurgis sat puffing his pipe by the kitchen stove, and talking with an old fellow whom Jonas
had introduced, and who worked in the canning rooms at Anderson's; and so Jurgis learned a few things about the great and
only Anderson canned goods, which had become a national institution. They were regular alchemists at Anderson's; they advertised
a mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it did not know what a mushroom looked like. They advertised "potted chicken,"-and
it was like the boardinghouse soup of the comic papers, through which a chicken had walked with rubbers on. Perhaps they had
a secret process for making chickens chemically-who knows? said Jurgis' friend; the things that went into the mixture were
tripe, and the fat of pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal, when they had any. They
put these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper.
And then there was "potted game" and "potted grouse," "potted ham," and "deviled ham"-de-vyled,
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 Anderson, said Jurgis' informant; 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! Up to a year or two ago it had been the custom to kill horses in the yards-ostensibly for fertilizer;
but after long agitation the newspapers had been able to make the public realize that the horses were being canned. Now it
was against the law to kill horses in Packingtown, and the law was really complied with-for the present, at any rate. Any
day, however, one might see sharp-horned and creatures running with the sheep and yet what a job you would have to get the
public to believe that a good part of what it buys for lamb and mutton is really goat's flesh!"
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"The packers had secret mains, through which they stole billions of gallons of the city's water. The newspapers had
been full of this scandal-once there had even been an investigation, and an actual uncovering of the pipes; but nobody had
been punished, and the thing went right on. 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!"
There were men with whom Jurgis talked at the union meetings who had been working in the shipping-room for years, and
had never seen that law complied with once in all the time. There was never any inspection of meat at all after it left the
killing-floor, save by the packers themselves, and with meat intended for export-all the best meat was sent abroad-it was
impossible to get it in this country, not even the richest hotels and clubs could get it. The good went to France and England,
and the very best to Germany, which was apparently the one country there was no deceiving."
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"A time of peril on the killing beds was when a steer broke loose. Sometimes, in the haste of speeding-up, they would
dump one of the animals out on the floor before it was fully stunned, and it would get upon its feet and run amuck. Then there
would be a yell of warning-the men would drop everything and dash for the nearest pillar, slipping here and there on the floor,
and tumbling over each other. This was bad enough in the summer, when a man could see; in wintertime it was enough to make
your hair stand up, for the room would be so full of steam that you could not make anything out five feet in front of you.
To be sure, the steer was generally blind and frantic, and not especially bent on hurting any one; but think of the chances
of running upon a knife, while nearly every man had one in his hand! And then, to cap the climax, the floor boss would come
rushing up with a rifle and begin blazing away!
It was in one of these melees that Jurgis fell into his trap. That is the only word to describe it; it was so cruel, and
so utterly not to be foreseen. At first he hardly noticed it, it was such a slight accident-simply that in leaping out of
the way he turned his ankle. There was a twinge of pain, but Jurgis was used to pain, and did not coddle himself. When he
came to walk home, however, he realized that it was hurting him a great deal; and in the morning his ankle was swollen out
nearly double its size, and he could not get his foot into his shoe. Still, even then, he did nothing more than swear a little,
and wrapped his foot in old rags, and hobbled out to take the car. It chanced to be a rush day at Anderson's, and all the
long morning he limped about with his aching foot; by noontime the pain was so great that it made him faint, and after a couple
of hours in the afternoon he was fairly beaten, and had to tell the boss. They sent for the company doctor, and he examined
the foot and told Jurgis to go home to bed, adding that he had probably laid himself up for months by his folly. The injury
was not one that Anderson and Company could be held responsible for, and so that was all there was to it, so far as the doctor
was concerned."
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"Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub
it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry
which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor
they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of
the plant-a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with
his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled,
some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers
had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor-a process known to the workers as "giving them thirty
per cent." Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had
been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would
extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there
was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade-there was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes-they
had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and "California
hams," which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy "skinned hams,"
which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them-that is, until they had
been cooked and chopped fine and labeled "head cheese!"
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"It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Ona. Cut up by the two-thousand-minute
flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. 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 moldy 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 be shoveled 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 cartload after cartload
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.
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"Yes, said the other; she was bending over, lacing her shoes as she spoke. "He was working in an oil factory-at
least he was hired by the men to get their beer. He used to carry cans on a long pole; and he'd drink a little out of each
can, and one day he drank too much, and fell asleep in a corner, and got locked up in the place all night. When they found
him the rats had killed him and eaten him nearly all up."
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