The man had gone back to a seat upon the platform, and Jurgis realized
that his speech was over. The applause continued for several minutes;
and then some one started a song, and the crowd took it up, and the
place shook with it. Jurgis had never heard it, and he could not make
out the words, but the wild and wonderful spirit of it seized upon
him--it was the "Marseillaise!" As stanza after stanza of it thundered
forth, he sat with his hands clasped, trembling in every nerve. He
had never been so stirred in his life--it was a miracle that had been
wrought in him. He could not think at all, he was stunned; yet he knew
that in the mighty upheaval that had taken place in his soul, a new man
had been born. He had been torn out of the jaws of destruction, he had
been delivered from the thraldom of despair; the whole world had been
changed for him--he was free, he was free! Even if he were to suffer as
he had before, even if he were to beg and starve, nothing would be the
same to him; he would understand it, and bear it. He would no longer
be the sport of circumstances, he would be a man, with a will and a
purpose; he would have something to fight for, something to die for,
if need be! Here were men who would show him and help him; and he would
have friends and allies, he would dwell in the sight of justice, and
walk arm in arm with power.

The audience subsided again, and Jurgis sat back. The chairman of the
meeting came forward and began to speak. His voice sounded thin and
futile after the other's, and to Jurgis it seemed a profanation. Why
should any one else speak, after that miraculous man--why should they
not all sit in silence? The chairman was explaining that a collection
would now be taken up to defray the expenses of the meeting, and for the
benefit of the campaign fund of the party. Jurgis heard; but he had not
a penny to give, and so his thoughts went elsewhere again.

He kept his eyes fixed on the orator, who sat in an armchair, his head
leaning on his hand and his attitude indicating exhaustion. But suddenly
he stood up again, and Jurgis heard the chairman of the meeting saying
that the speaker would now answer any questions which the audience might
care to put to him. The man came forward, and some one--a woman--arose
and asked about some opinion the speaker had expressed concerning
Tolstoy. Jurgis had never heard of Tolstoy, and did not care anything
about him. Why should any one want to ask such questions, after an
address like that? The thing was not to talk, but to do; the thing was
to get bold of others and rouse them, to organize them and prepare for
the fight! But still the discussion went on, in ordinary conversational
tones, and it brought Jurgis back to the everyday world. A few minutes
ago he had felt like seizing the hand of the beautiful lady by his side,
and kissing it; he had felt like flinging his arms about the neck of the
man on the other side of him. And now he began to realize again that he
was a "hobo," that he was ragged and dirty, and smelled bad, and had no
place to sleep that night!

And so, at last, when the meeting broke up, and the audience started to
leave, poor Jurgis was in an agony of uncertainty. He had not thought of
leaving--he had thought that the vision must last forever, that he had
found comrades and brothers. But now he would go out, and the thing
would fade away, and he would never be able to find it again! He sat in
his seat, frightened and wondering; but others in the same row wanted to
get out, and so he had to stand up and move along. As he was swept down
the aisle he looked from one person to another, wistfully; they were all
excitedly discussing the address--but there was nobody who offered to
discuss it with him. He was near enough to the door to feel the night
air, when desperation seized him. He knew nothing at all about that
speech he had heard, not even the name of the orator; and he was to go
away--no, no, it was preposterous, he must speak to some one; he must
find that man himself and tell him. He would not despise him, tramp as
he was!

So he stepped into an empty row of seats and watched, and when the crowd
had thinned out, he started toward the platform. The speaker was gone;
but there was a stage door that stood open, with people passing in and
out, and no one on guard. Jurgis summoned up his courage and went in,
and down a hallway, and to the door of a room where many people were
crowded. No one paid any attention to him, and he pushed in, and in a
corner he saw the man he sought. The orator sat in a chair, with his
shoulders sunk together and his eyes half closed; his face was ghastly
pale, almost greenish in hue, and one arm lay limp at his side. A big
man with spectacles on stood near him, and kept pushing back the crowd,
saying, "Stand away a little, please; can't you see the comrade is worn
out?"

So Jurgis stood watching, while five or ten minutes passed. Now and then
the man would look up, and address a word or two to those who were
near him; and, at last, on one of these occasions, his glance rested
on Jurgis. There seemed to be a slight hint of inquiry about it, and a
sudden impulse seized the other. He stepped forward.

"I wanted to thank you, sir!" he began, in breathless haste. "I could
not go away without telling you how much--how glad I am I heard you.
I--I didn't know anything about it all--"

The big man with the spectacles, who had moved away, came back at this
moment. "The comrade is too tired to talk to any one--" he began; but
the other held up his hand.

"Wait," he said. "He has something to say to me." And then he looked
into Jurgis's face. "You want to know more about Socialism?" he asked.

Jurgis started. "I--I--" he stammered. "Is it Socialism? I didn't know.
I want to know about what you spoke of--I want to help. I have been
through all that."

"Where do you live?" asked the other.

"I have no home," said Jurgis, "I am out of work."

"You are a foreigner, are you not?"

"Lithuanian, sir."

The man thought for a moment, and then turned to his friend. "Who is
there, Walters?" he asked. "There is Ostrinski--but he is a Pole--"

"Ostrinski speaks Lithuanian," said the other. "All right, then; would
you mind seeing if he has gone yet?"

The other started away, and the speaker looked at Jurgis again. He had
deep, black eyes, and a face full of gentleness and pain. "You must
excuse me, comrade," he said. "I am just tired out--I have spoken every
day for the last month. I will introduce you to some one who will be
able to help you as well as I could--"

The messenger had had to go no further than the door, he came back,
followed by a man whom he introduced to Jurgis as "Comrade Ostrinski."
Comrade Ostrinski was a little man, scarcely up to Jurgis's shoulder,
wizened and wrinkled, very ugly, and slightly lame. He had on a
long-tailed black coat, worn green at the seams and the buttonholes; his
eyes must have been weak, for he wore green spectacles that gave him
a grotesque appearance. But his handclasp was hearty, and he spoke in
Lithuanian, which warmed Jurgis to him.

"You want to know about Socialism?" he said. "Surely. Let us go out and
take a stroll, where we can be quiet and talk some."

And so Jurgis bade farewell to the master wizard, and went out.
Ostrinski asked where he lived, offering to walk in that direction;
and so he had to explain once more that he was without a home. At the
other's request he told his story; how he had come to America, and
what had happened to him in the stockyards, and how his family had been
broken up, and how he had become a wanderer. So much the little man
heard, and then he pressed Jurgis's arm tightly. "You have been through
the mill, comrade!" he said. "We will make a fighter out of you!"

Then Ostrinski in turn explained his circumstances. He would have asked
Jurgis to his home--but he had only two rooms, and had no bed to offer.
He would have given up his own bed, but his wife was ill. Later on, when
he understood that otherwise Jurgis would have to sleep in a hallway,
he offered him his kitchen floor, a chance which the other was only too
glad to accept. "Perhaps tomorrow we can do better," said Ostrinski. "We
try not to let a comrade starve."

Ostrinski's home was in the Ghetto district, where he had two rooms in
the basement of a tenement. There was a baby crying as they entered,
and he closed the door leading into the bedroom. He had three young
children, he explained, and a baby had just come. He drew up two chairs
near the kitchen stove, adding that Jurgis must excuse the disorder of
the place, since at such a time one's domestic arrangements were upset.
Half of the kitchen was given up to a workbench, which was piled with
clothing, and Ostrinski explained that he was a "pants finisher." He
brought great bundles of clothing here to his home, where he and his
wife worked on them. He made a living at it, but it was getting harder
all the time, because his eyes were failing. What would come when they
gave out he could not tell; there had been no saving anything--a man
could barely keep alive by twelve or fourteen hours' work a day. The
finishing of pants did not take much skill, and anybody could learn it,
and so the pay was forever getting less. That was the competitive wage
system; and if Jurgis wanted to understand what Socialism was, it was
there he had best begin. The workers were dependent upon a job to exist
from day to day, and so they bid against each other, and no man could
get more than the lowest man would consent to work for. And thus
the mass of the people were always in a life-and-death struggle with
poverty. That was "competition," so far as it concerned the wage-earner,
the man who had only his labor to sell; to those on top, the exploiters,
it appeared very differently, of course--there were few of them, and
they could combine and dominate, and their power would be unbreakable.
And so all over the world two classes were forming, with an unbridged
chasm between them--the capitalist class, with its enormous fortunes,
and the proletariat, bound into slavery by unseen chains. The latter
were a thousand to one in numbers, but they were ignorant and helpless,
and they would remain at the mercy of their exploiters until they were
organized--until they had become "class-conscious." It was a slow
and weary process, but it would go on--it was like the movement of a
glacier, once it was started it could never be stopped. Every
Socialist did his share, and lived upon the vision of the "good time
coming,"--when the working class should go to the polls and seize the
powers of government, and put an end to private property in the means
of production. No matter how poor a man was, or how much he suffered, he
could never be really unhappy while he knew of that future; even if he
did not live to see it himself, his children would, and, to a Socialist,
the victory of his class was his victory. Also he had always the
progress to encourage him; here in Chicago, for instance, the movement
was growing by leaps and bounds. Chicago was the industrial center
of the country, and nowhere else were the unions so strong; but their
organizations did the workers little good, for the employers were
organized, also; and so the strikes generally failed, and as fast as the
unions were broken up the men were coming over to the Socialists.

Ostrinski explained the organization of the party, the machinery by
which the proletariat was educating itself. There were "locals" in every
big city and town, and they were being organized rapidly in the smaller
places; a local had anywhere from six to a thousand members, and there
were fourteen hundred of them in all, with a total of about twenty-five
thousand members, who paid dues to support the organization. "Local Cook
County," as the city organization was called, had eighty branch locals,
and it alone was spending several thousand dollars in the campaign. It
published a weekly in English, and one each in Bohemian and German; also
there was a monthly published in Chicago, and a cooperative publishing
house, that issued a million and a half of Socialist books and pamphlets
every year. All this was the growth of the last few years--there had
been almost nothing of it when Ostrinski first came to Chicago.

Ostrinski was a Pole, about fifty years of age. He had lived in Silesia,
a member of a despised and persecuted race, and had taken part in the
proletarian movement in the early seventies, when Bismarck, having
conquered France, had turned his policy of blood and iron upon the
"International." Ostrinski himself had twice been in jail, but he had
been young then, and had not cared. He had had more of his share of the
fight, though, for just when Socialism had broken all its barriers and
become the great political force of the empire, he had come to America,
and begun all over again. In America every one had laughed at the mere
idea of Socialism then--in America all men were free. As if political
liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable! said Ostrinski.

The little tailor sat tilted back in his stiff kitchen chair, with his
feet stretched out upon the empty stove, and speaking in low whispers,
so as not to waken those in the next room. To Jurgis he seemed a
scarcely less wonderful person than the speaker at the meeting; he was
poor, the lowest of the low, hunger-driven and miserable--and yet how
much he knew, how much he had dared and achieved, what a hero he had
been! There were others like him, too--thousands like him, and all of
them workingmen! That all this wonderful machinery of progress had been
created by his fellows--Jurgis could not believe it, it seemed too good
to be true.

That was always the way, said Ostrinski; when a man was first converted
to Socialism he was like a crazy person--he could not understand how
others could fail to see it, and he expected to convert all the world
the first week. After a while he would realize how hard a task it was;
and then it would be fortunate that other new hands kept coming, to save
him from settling down into a rut. Just now Jurgis would have plenty of
chance to vent his excitement, for a presidential campaign was on, and
everybody was talking politics. Ostrinski would take him to the next
meeting of the branch local, and introduce him, and he might join the
party. The dues were five cents a week, but any one who could not afford
this might be excused from paying. The Socialist party was a really
democratic political organization--it was controlled absolutely by
its own membership, and had no bosses. All of these things Ostrinski
explained, as also the principles of the party. You might say that there
was really but one Socialist principle--that of "no compromise," which
was the essence of the proletarian movement all over the world. When a
Socialist was elected to office he voted with old party legislators for
any measure that was likely to be of help to the working class, but
he never forgot that these concessions, whatever they might be, were
trifles compared with the great purpose--the organizing of the working
class for the revolution. So far, the rule in America had been that
one Socialist made another Socialist once every two years; and if
they should maintain the same rate they would carry the country in
1912--though not all of them expected to succeed as quickly as that.

The Socialists were organized in every civilized nation; it was an
international political party, said Ostrinski, the greatest the world
had ever known. It numbered thirty million of adherents, and it cast
eight million votes. It had started its first newspaper in Japan, and
elected its first deputy in Argentina; in France it named members of
cabinets, and in Italy and Australia it held the balance of power and
turned out ministries. In Germany, where its vote was more than a third
of the total vote of the empire, all other parties and powers had united
to fight it. It would not do, Ostrinski explained, for the proletariat
of one nation to achieve the victory, for that nation would be crushed
by the military power of the others; and so the Socialist movement was a
world movement, an organization of all mankind to establish liberty and
fraternity. It was the new religion of humanity--or you might say it was
the fulfillment of the old religion, since it implied but the literal
application of all the teachings of Christ.

Until long after midnight Jurgis sat lost in the conversation of his
new acquaintance. It was a most wonderful experience to him--an almost
supernatural experience. It was like encountering an inhabitant of
the fourth dimension of space, a being who was free from all one's
own limitations. For four years, now, Jurgis had been wondering and
blundering in the depths of a wilderness; and here, suddenly, a hand
reached down and seized him, and lifted him out of it, and set him upon
a mountain-top, from which he could survey it all--could see the paths
from which he had wandered, the morasses into which he had stumbled, the
hiding places of the beasts of prey that had fallen upon him. There
were his Packingtown experiences, for instance--what was there about
Packingtown that Ostrinski could not explain! To Jurgis the packers had
been equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef
Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed
all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying
upon the people. Jurgis recollected how, when he had first come to
Packingtown, he had stood and watched the hog-killing, and thought how
cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he
was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just
what he had been--one of the packers' hogs. What they wanted from a hog
was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they
wanted from the workingman, and also that was what they wanted from
the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were
not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the
purchaser of meat. That was true everywhere in the world, but it was
especially true in Packingtown; there seemed to be something about the
work of slaughtering that tended to ruthlessness and ferocity--it was
literally the fact that in the methods of the packers a hundred human
lives did not balance a penny of profit. When Jurgis had made himself
familiar with the Socialist literature, as he would very quickly, he
would get glimpses of the Beef Trust from all sorts of aspects, and he
would find it everywhere the same; it was the incarnation of blind and
insensate Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths,
trampling with a thousand hoofs; it was the Great Butcher--it was the
spirit of Capitalism made flesh. Upon the ocean of commerce it sailed
as a pirate ship; it had hoisted the black flag and declared war upon
civilization. Bribery and corruption were its everyday methods. In
Chicago the city government was simply one of its branch offices; it
stole billions of gallons of city water openly, it dictated to the
courts the sentences of disorderly strikers, it forbade the mayor to
enforce the building laws against it. In the national capital it had
power to prevent inspection of its product, and to falsify government
reports; it violated the rebate laws, and when an investigation was
threatened it burned its books and sent its criminal agents out of the
country. In the commercial world it was a Juggernaut car; it wiped out
thousands of businesses every year, it drove men to madness and suicide.
It had forced the price of cattle so low as to destroy the stock-raising
industry, an occupation upon which whole states existed; it had ruined
thousands of butchers who had refused to handle its products. It divided
the country into districts, and fixed the price of meat in all of them;
and it owned all the refrigerator cars, and levied an enormous tribute
upon all poultry and eggs and fruit and vegetables. With the millions
of dollars a week that poured in upon it, it was reaching out for
the control of other interests, railroads and trolley lines, gas and
electric light franchises--it already owned the leather and the grain
business of the country. The people were tremendously stirred up over
its encroachments, but nobody had any remedy to suggest; it was the task
of Socialists to teach and organize them, and prepare them for the time
when they were to seize the huge machine called the Beef Trust, and use
it to produce food for human beings and not to heap up fortunes for a
band of pirates. It was long after midnight when Jurgis lay down upon
the floor of Ostrinski's kitchen; and yet it was an hour before he
could get to sleep, for the glory of that joyful vision of the people of
Packingtown marching in and taking possession of the Union Stockyards!

Jurgis is overcome with emotion from the man's speech. The crowd begins to sing the Marseillaise, but when the rally turns to a question and answer period and a debate on Tolstoy breaks out, Jurgis comes back into the real world and realizes that he is a bum. In desperation, Jurgis fights his way to the platform when the meeting is over and tells the speaker how much he was affected by the speech. The speaker asks him if he wants to know more about socialism and he introduces him to a Polish man named Ostrinski. Ostrinski takes Jurgis back to his own home, a two-room tenement house in the Ghetto district. Ostrinski and his wife repair pants for a living, but they can barely make a living wage. Ostrinski begins to explain the tenets of Socialism. He tells Jurgis about how wage earners, the proletariat, are kept in slavery by those that exploit their work. These workers cannot change their circumstances until they became "class-conscious. Ostrinski tells Jurgis that the Socialist Party is the largest political organization in the world and that they are organizing to return the workingman to world power. They are a true democratic organization, meaning that they have no bosses or leaders. Chicago, he tells him, is at the mercy of the Beef Trust, and the Socialist Party wishes to help the workingman to rise up, take control, and reform the corrupt systems that the Trust controls. He tells Jurgis that this will be difficult work, but Jurgis is excited by the possibilities and has trouble falling asleep on Ostrinski's kitchen floor that night

The speaker concludes, and Jurgis feels stunned with the truth of what he has heard. Jurgis feels free. He will be able to bear any suffering now that he has heard this new message of labor uprising. Jurgis can take control of his own fate. After the meeting ends, Jurgis sits impatiently through the question and answer period. What's the point of talking when they should be getting out there and doing stuff? Jurgis feels that he has found a family again. Jurgis seeks out the speaker after the meeting has ended. Jurgis thanks him for the speech. The speaker asks Jurgis if he wants to know more about socialism. Jurgis answers that he didn't know that was socialism, but yes, that is what he wants. The speaker is exhausted and cannot explain personally to Jurgis. Still, he introduces Jurgis to someone who can: Comrade Ostrinski, a Polish man who speaks Lithuanian. Jurgis tells Ostrinski his whole life story, and Ostrinski promises that they will help him. Ostrinski invites Jurgis to sleep on his floor for the night, and the next day, they will find something better. Ostrinski lives in a tenement building. He works at a clothing factory, and is very poor. Ostrinski explains the problem: in a capitalist system, poor people have to compete with one another to make money. Whoever works the cheapest and the fastest will get the wages. This means that older workers or people who get sick are immediately left out in the cold. By keeping workers competing against each other, many workers don't think to organize or to look out for the interests of workers as a whole. This is why the only tool against this kind of enforced competition is "class consciousness" - being aware of the needs of laborers as a group, rather than as individuals. Meanwhile, the people who own these factories and don't have to compete; they just profit from cheap labor and mark up prices on the products their workers make. Chicago is the industrial center of the United States, which is why the unions are strong. The problem is that the employers - the meatpacking companies - are also organized. They work together to break strikes and to fix prices. Fortunately, the union workers who have suffered from strikes getting broken up are coming over to the socialists. The Socialist Party has chapters in every city and town, with over a million and a half books and pamphlets published every year. The growth in the party has really spiked over the last few years. Ostrinski was a socialist agitator back in Silesia in the 1870s. Once he came to the U.S., he had to start all over again. When he first arrived in America, most workers really believed that all Americans were free. Yet, over the past few years, conditions at the stockyards and in other factories have become so awful that many workers have realized the need for socialism. Jurgis feels a sense of almost religious inspiration to learn that there are workingmen like him throughout the world, struggling against the Man. Ostrinski assures Jurgis that the Socialist Party is not like other political parties. There are no back room shenanigans or party bosses. It is totally controlled by its membership. And the Socialist Party is the only really international party. Its goal is to establish real freedom and brotherhood for all mankind - much as Christ promised nineteen hundred years ago. Jurgis sees that the Beef Trust has about as much care for its laborers as it does for the hogs and cattle it slaughters. What's more, the Chicago government is just one more tool of these millionaire businessmen. The job of socialism is to teach the working people of the city how to take control of these factories for themselves.

After the speech is over, Jurgis makes his way backstage to meet the speaker. The speaker, recognizing Jurgis' desire to learn more, introduces Jurgis to Comrade Ostrinski. Ostrinski shares his own experiences and history as he takes Jurgis back to his own house. Ostrinski explains socialism to Jurgis from the point of view of a workingman. From both Ostrinski and party literature, Jurgis is able to make meaning out of his Packingtown experiences and sees socialism as the light -- as the only means of salvation for all people.

Jurgis' conversion is the key, as he acquires a new dignity, something he lost during his time in Packingtown. An unintended effect, though, is that readers are not inclined to believe or accept this transformation. Every time things start to look as though they may work out for Jurgis, something else happens, which only makes his situation worse. Readers can accept that socialism provides both hope and promise for Jurgis' future, but are not convinced that socialism is a positive and meaningful reality. Sinclair has spent too much time showing the harsh reality of Jurgis' world to expect readers to accept a chance for salvation. Jurgis' change is effective in propaganda but not effective in a novel. Ostrinski symbolizes the heroic, working proletariat; he is the embodiment of all workers. He exists solely to be the voice of socialism from the workingman's perspective. As he explains socialism to Jurgis, he simultaneously explains it to the readers. Glossary Marseillaise the national anthem of France, composed in 1792 during the French Revolution. Tolstoy Leo Tolstoy  Russian novelist whose most famous works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are examples of realistic fiction. proletarian a member of the proletariat, the working class, especially the industrial working class. incarnation any person or thing serving as the type or embodiment of a quality or concept.

To Jurgis the packers had been equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were. a gigantic combination of capital. After the meeting ends, Jurgis finds the speaker resting amid a crowd of people. He asks for more information about the party, and the speaker directs him to Ostrinski, a socialist who speaks Lithuanian. Ostrinski takes Jurgis to his home. They share their experiences in scraping out a miserable existence. Ostrinski explains that wage-earners have nothing but their labor to sell. None of them can obtain a price for it that is higher than what the most desperate worker will take. Ostrinski explains that there are two economic classes: the small, privileged capitalist class and the large, impoverished proletariat. Because the capitalists are few in number, they can easily work together in favor of their own interests. The proletariat, on the other hand, is large and generally ignorant. Ostrinski explains that workers need to gain "class consciousness" so that they can organize in favor of their interests. In this way, they can avoid the merciless wage competition. Ostrinski calls the current system "wage slavery. Although America claims to be the land of the free, Ostrinski explains that political freedom doesn't alleviate the grinding misery of wage slavery. He adds that socialism is necessarily a worldwide movement: any one nation that achieves success will be crushed by the others around it. Ostrinski calls socialism the "new religion" of humanity. He adds that it could also be interpreted as the fulfillment of Christian values on Earth

The final chapters of The Jungle largely abandon the narrative, functioning as an explanation and an argument for socialism. Insofar as they tell a story, it is the story of Jurgis's process of conversion to socialism. The newly introduced Ostrinski and Schliemann are less dramatic characters than mouthpieces for socialism. The ending of The Jungle is, to a great extent, meant to be simplistic. Sinclair's aim, after all, is not to present the complicated nuances of actual political and economic practices but to persuade the reader to adopt his opinions. The lack of literary sophistication in the ending is obvious, but it is also questionable whether the simplistic ending and the one-dimensional story in general make for the most persuasive political argument. One can argue that the credibility of the novel as reportage becomes doubtful as it begins to resemble propaganda. Sinclair closes his sharp eye for detail when he examines socialism, and the effect stunts the humanity of the people whom he wants to liberate. Ironically, the peoples' movement seems devoid of real human beings. If Sinclair wants the reader to identify with his socialists, he fails because there is no real human being with whom to identify. Jurgis, a constricted character to begin with, almost disappears, and the new characters are flatter than any that Sinclair has offered so far. The shift to pure propaganda in the final chapters occasions several awkward ruptures in the narrative perspective. Throughout The Jungle, Sinclair narrates events as seen through the eyes of Jurgis, though he sometimes employs a more omniscient perspective to describe business dealings and social problems that Jurgis doesn't witness. In an attempt to weave these passages into the narrative fabric, Sinclair has Jurgis learn of them at some unspecified future point in time. As the volume of political argument increases in the final chapters, the interweaving of political commentary and narrative structure becomes more forced. Sinclair recounts that "after Jurgis had made himself more familiar with the Socialist literature, as he would very quickly, he would get glimpses of the Beef Trust from all sorts of aspects . . ."; a lengthy polemic against the Beef Trust then follows, as if it comprises the knowledge that Sinclair claims that Jurgis gains. The meetings that Jurgis attends provide another forum for Sinclair to air his politics, as does the literature that Jurgis reads. These framing devices are sites of tension between Sinclair's politics and the demands of literary composition. Sinclair wants to make his argument in as blunt a language as possible, but the work of fiction has its own laws of internal consistency. The journalistic style that Sinclair employs requires realism. Moreover, a narrative perspective that filters events and ideas through the experience of the protagonist must do so consistently or risk breaking apart. The framing devices show that Sinclair feels these demands. He knows that information about the Beef Trust cannot simply be inserted into the text; rather, its presence has to be justified in the narrative structure. Thus, Jurgis learns about the Beef Trust at some future, unspecified point, and Sinclair is free to rail against it. One can argue again, however, that these framing devices are too cheap to be effective. They are usually a single sentence, an afterthought. Perhaps their real failure, though, lies in the fact that they do not control the information that follows. They claim that what follows is witnessed or learned by Jurgis, but Jurgis's perspective disappears in the subsequent argument. The reader doesn't learn how Jurgis, in particular, receives what he learns from socialist literature. Jurgis doesn't filter events and information through his subjectivity; he is simply a conduit: "Such was the home in which Jurgis lived and worked. . . ." His character, one might argue, becomes not only flat but hollow.


Jurgis had breakfast with Ostrinski and his family, and then he went
home to Elzbieta. He was no longer shy about it--when he went in,
instead of saying all the things he had been planning to say, he started
to tell Elzbieta about the revolution! At first she thought he was out
of his mind, and it was hours before she could really feel certain that
he was himself. When, however, she had satisfied herself that he was
sane upon all subjects except politics, she troubled herself no
further about it. Jurgis was destined to find that Elzbieta's armor was
absolutely impervious to Socialism. Her soul had been baked hard in the
fire of adversity, and there was no altering it now; life to her was the
hunt for daily bread, and ideas existed for her only as they bore upon
that. All that interested her in regard to this new frenzy which had
seized hold of her son-in-law was whether or not it had a tendency to
make him sober and industrious; and when she found he intended to look
for work and to contribute his share to the family fund, she gave him
full rein to convince her of anything. A wonderfully wise little woman
was Elzbieta; she could think as quickly as a hunted rabbit, and in half
an hour she had chosen her life-attitude to the Socialist movement.
She agreed in everything with Jurgis, except the need of his paying his
dues; and she would even go to a meeting with him now and then, and sit
and plan her next day's dinner amid the storm.

For a week after he became a convert Jurgis continued to wander about
all day, looking for work; until at last he met with a strange fortune.
He was passing one of Chicago's innumerable small hotels, and after some
hesitation he concluded to go in. A man he took for the proprietor was
standing in the lobby, and he went up to him and tackled him for a job.

"What can you do?" the man asked.

"Anything, sir," said Jurgis, and added quickly: "I've been out of work
for a long time, sir. I'm an honest man, and I'm strong and willing--"

The other was eying him narrowly. "Do you drink?" he asked.

"No, sir," said Jurgis.

"Well, I've been employing a man as a porter, and he drinks. I've
discharged him seven times now, and I've about made up my mind that's
enough. Would you be a porter?"

"Yes, sir."

"It's hard work. You'll have to clean floors and wash spittoons and fill
lamps and handle trunks--"

"I'm willing, sir."

"All right. I'll pay you thirty a month and board, and you can begin
now, if you feel like it. You can put on the other fellow's rig."

And so Jurgis fell to work, and toiled like a Trojan till night. Then
he went and told Elzbieta, and also, late as it was, he paid a visit to
Ostrinski to let him know of his good fortune. Here he received a great
surprise, for when he was describing the location of the hotel Ostrinski
interrupted suddenly, "Not Hinds's!"

"Yes," said Jurgis, "that's the name."

To which the other replied, "Then you've got the best boss in
Chicago--he's a state organizer of our party, and one of our best-known
speakers!"

So the next morning Jurgis went to his employer and told him; and the
man seized him by the hand and shook it. "By Jove!" he cried, "that lets
me out. I didn't sleep all last night because I had discharged a good
Socialist!"

So, after that, Jurgis was known to his "boss" as "Comrade Jurgis," and
in return he was expected to call him "Comrade Hinds." "Tommy" Hinds,
as he was known to his intimates, was a squat little man, with broad
shoulders and a florid face, decorated with gray side whiskers.
He was the kindest-hearted man that ever lived, and the
liveliest--inexhaustible in his enthusiasm, and talking Socialism all
day and all night. He was a great fellow to jolly along a crowd, and
would keep a meeting in an uproar; when once he got really waked up, the
torrent of his eloquence could be compared with nothing save Niagara.

Tommy Hinds had begun life as a blacksmith's helper, and had run away
to join the Union army, where he had made his first acquaintance with
"graft," in the shape of rotten muskets and shoddy blankets. To a
musket that broke in a crisis he always attributed the death of his only
brother, and upon worthless blankets he blamed all the agonies of his
own old age. Whenever it rained, the rheumatism would get into his
joints, and then he would screw up his face and mutter: "Capitalism, my
boy, capitalism! 'Ecrasez l'infame!'" He had one unfailing remedy for
all the evils of this world, and he preached it to every one; no matter
whether the person's trouble was failure in business, or dyspepsia, or
a quarrelsome mother-in-law, a twinkle would come into his eyes and he
would say, "You know what to do about it--vote the Socialist ticket!"

Tommy Hinds had set out upon the trail of the Octopus as soon as the war
was over. He had gone into business, and found himself in competition
with the fortunes of those who had been stealing while he had been
fighting. The city government was in their hands and the railroads were
in league with them, and honest business was driven to the wall; and
so Hinds had put all his savings into Chicago real estate, and set out
singlehanded to dam the river of graft. He had been a reform member
of the city council, he had been a Greenbacker, a Labor Unionist, a
Populist, a Bryanite--and after thirty years of fighting, the year 1896
had served to convince him that the power of concentrated wealth could
never be controlled, but could only be destroyed. He had published a
pamphlet about it, and set out to organize a party of his own, when a
stray Socialist leaflet had revealed to him that others had been
ahead of him. Now for eight years he had been fighting for the
party, anywhere, everywhere--whether it was a G.A.R. reunion, or a
hotel-keepers' convention, or an Afro-American business-men's banquet, or
a Bible society picnic, Tommy Hinds would manage to get himself invited
to explain the relations of Socialism to the subject in hand. After that
he would start off upon a tour of his own, ending at some place between
New York and Oregon; and when he came back from there, he would go out
to organize new locals for the state committee; and finally he would
come home to rest--and talk Socialism in Chicago. Hinds's hotel was a
very hot-bed of the propaganda; all the employees were party men, and if
they were not when they came, they were quite certain to be before they
went away. The proprietor would get into a discussion with some one in
the lobby, and as the conversation grew animated, others would gather
about to listen, until finally every one in the place would be crowded
into a group, and a regular debate would be under way. This went on
every night--when Tommy Hinds was not there to do it, his clerk did it;
and when his clerk was away campaigning, the assistant attended to it,
while Mrs. Hinds sat behind the desk and did the work. The clerk was an
old crony of the proprietor's, an awkward, rawboned giant of a man, with
a lean, sallow face, a broad mouth, and whiskers under his chin,
the very type and body of a prairie farmer. He had been that all his
life--he had fought the railroads in Kansas for fifty years, a Granger,
a Farmers' Alliance man, a "middle-of-the-road" Populist. Finally, Tommy
Hinds had revealed to him the wonderful idea of using the trusts instead
of destroying them, and he had sold his farm and come to Chicago.

That was Amos Struver; and then there was Harry Adams, the assistant
clerk, a pale, scholarly-looking man, who came from Massachusetts, of
Pilgrim stock. Adams had been a cotton operative in Fall River, and the
continued depression in the industry had worn him and his family out,
and he had emigrated to South Carolina. In Massachusetts the percentage
of white illiteracy is eight-tenths of one per cent, while in South
Carolina it is thirteen and six-tenths per cent; also in South Carolina
there is a property qualification for voters--and for these and other
reasons child labor is the rule, and so the cotton mills were driving
those of Massachusetts out of the business. Adams did not know this, he
only knew that the Southern mills were running; but when he got there
he found that if he was to live, all his family would have to work, and
from six o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. So he had set
to work to organize the mill hands, after the fashion in Massachusetts,
and had been discharged; but he had gotten other work, and stuck at it,
and at last there had been a strike for shorter hours, and Harry Adams
had attempted to address a street meeting, which was the end of him.
In the states of the far South the labor of convicts is leased to
contractors, and when there are not convicts enough they have to be
supplied. Harry Adams was sent up by a judge who was a cousin of the
mill owner with whose business he had interfered; and though the life
had nearly killed him, he had been wise enough not to murmur, and at
the end of his term he and his family had left the state of South
Carolina--hell's back yard, as he called it. He had no money for
carfare, but it was harvest-time, and they walked one day and worked
the next; and so Adams got at last to Chicago, and joined the Socialist
party. He was a studious man, reserved, and nothing of an orator; but
he always had a pile of books under his desk in the hotel, and articles
from his pen were beginning to attract attention in the party press.

Contrary to what one would have expected, all this radicalism did not
hurt the hotel business; the radicals flocked to it, and the commercial
travelers all found it diverting. Of late, also, the hotel had become a
favorite stopping place for Western cattlemen. Now that the Beef Trust
had adopted the trick of raising prices to induce enormous shipments of
cattle, and then dropping them again and scooping in all they needed,
a stock raiser was very apt to find himself in Chicago without money
enough to pay his freight bill; and so he had to go to a cheap hotel,
and it was no drawback to him if there was an agitator talking in the
lobby. These Western fellows were just "meat" for Tommy Hinds--he
would get a dozen of them around him and paint little pictures of "the
System." Of course, it was not a week before he had heard Jurgis's
story, and after that he would not have let his new porter go for the
world. "See here," he would say, in the middle of an argument, "I've got
a fellow right here in my place who's worked there and seen every bit of
it!" And then Jurgis would drop his work, whatever it was, and come, and
the other would say, "Comrade Jurgis, just tell these gentlemen what you
saw on the killing-beds." At first this request caused poor Jurgis the
most acute agony, and it was like pulling teeth to get him to talk; but
gradually he found out what was wanted, and in the end he learned to
stand up and speak his piece with enthusiasm. His employer would sit by
and encourage him with exclamations and shakes of the head; when Jurgis
would give the formula for "potted ham," or tell about the condemned
hogs that were dropped into the "destructors" at the top and immediately
taken out again at the bottom, to be shipped into another state and made
into lard, Tommy Hinds would bang his knee and cry, "Do you think a man
could make up a thing like that out of his head?"

And then the hotel-keeper would go on to show how the Socialists had the
only real remedy for such evils, how they alone "meant business" with
the Beef Trust. And when, in answer to this, the victim would say that
the whole country was getting stirred up, that the newspapers were full
of denunciations of it, and the government taking action against it,
Tommy Hinds had a knock-out blow all ready. "Yes," he would say, "all
that is true--but what do you suppose is the reason for it? Are you
foolish enough to believe that it's done for the public? There are
other trusts in the country just as illegal and extortionate as the Beef
Trust: there is the Coal Trust, that freezes the poor in winter--there
is the Steel Trust, that doubles the price of every nail in your
shoes--there is the Oil Trust, that keeps you from reading at night--and
why do you suppose it is that all the fury of the press and the
government is directed against the Beef Trust?" And when to this the
victim would reply that there was clamor enough over the Oil Trust, the
other would continue: "Ten years ago Henry D. Lloyd told all the truth
about the Standard Oil Company in his Wealth versus Commonwealth; and
the book was allowed to die, and you hardly ever hear of it. And now, at
last, two magazines have the courage to tackle 'Standard Oil' again, and
what happens? The newspapers ridicule the authors, the churches defend
the criminals, and the government--does nothing. And now, why is it all
so different with the Beef Trust?"

Here the other would generally admit that he was "stuck"; and Tommy
Hinds would explain to him, and it was fun to see his eyes open. "If you
were a Socialist," the hotel-keeper would say, "you would understand that
the power which really governs the United States today is the Railroad
Trust. It is the Railroad Trust that runs your state government,
wherever you live, and that runs the United States Senate. And all of
the trusts that I have named are railroad trusts--save only the Beef
Trust! The Beef Trust has defied the railroads--it is plundering them
day by day through the Private Car; and so the public is roused to
fury, and the papers clamor for action, and the government goes on the
war-path! And you poor common people watch and applaud the job, and
think it's all done for you, and never dream that it is really the grand
climax of the century-long battle of commercial competition--the final
death grapple between the chiefs of the Beef Trust and 'Standard Oil,'
for the prize of the mastery and ownership of the United States of
America!"

Such was the new home in which Jurgis lived and worked, and in which his
education was completed. Perhaps you would imagine that he did not do
much work there, but that would be a great mistake. He would have cut
off one hand for Tommy Hinds; and to keep Hinds's hotel a thing of
beauty was his joy in life. That he had a score of Socialist arguments
chasing through his brain in the meantime did not interfere with
this; on the contrary, Jurgis scrubbed the spittoons and polished
the banisters all the more vehemently because at the same time he was
wrestling inwardly with an imaginary recalcitrant. It would be pleasant
to record that he swore off drinking immediately, and all the rest
of his bad habits with it; but that would hardly be exact. These
revolutionists were not angels; they were men, and men who had come up
from the social pit, and with the mire of it smeared over them. Some of
them drank, and some of them swore, and some of them ate pie with their
knives; there was only one difference between them and all the rest of
the populace--that they were men with a hope, with a cause to fight
for and suffer for. There came times to Jurgis when the vision seemed
far-off and pale, and a glass of beer loomed large in comparison; but
if the glass led to another glass, and to too many glasses, he had
something to spur him to remorse and resolution on the morrow. It was
so evidently a wicked thing to spend one's pennies for drink, when the
working class was wandering in darkness, and waiting to be delivered;
the price of a glass of beer would buy fifty copies of a leaflet, and
one could hand these out to the unregenerate, and then get drunk upon
the thought of the good that was being accomplished. That was the way
the movement had been made, and it was the only way it would progress;
it availed nothing to know of it, without fighting for it--it was a
thing for all, not for a few! A corollary of this proposition of course
was, that any one who refused to receive the new gospel was personally
responsible for keeping Jurgis from his heart's desire; and this, alas,
made him uncomfortable as an acquaintance. He met some neighbors with
whom Elzbieta had made friends in her neighborhood, and he set out to
make Socialists of them by wholesale, and several times he all but got
into a fight.

It was all so painfully obvious to Jurgis! It was so incomprehensible
how a man could fail to see it! Here were all the opportunities of the
country, the land, and the buildings upon the land, the railroads, the
mines, the factories, and the stores, all in the hands of a few private
individuals, called capitalists, for whom the people were obliged to
work for wages. The whole balance of what the people produced went to
heap up the fortunes of these capitalists, to heap, and heap again, and
yet again--and that in spite of the fact that they, and every one about
them, lived in unthinkable luxury! And was it not plain that if the
people cut off the share of those who merely "owned," the share of those
who worked would be much greater? That was as plain as two and two makes
four; and it was the whole of it, absolutely the whole of it; and yet
there were people who could not see it, who would argue about everything
else in the world. They would tell you that governments could not manage
things as economically as private individuals; they would repeat and
repeat that, and think they were saying something! They could not see
that "economical" management by masters meant simply that they, the
people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid less! They were
wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters whose one thought
was to get as much out of them as possible; and they were taking
an interest in the process, were anxious lest it should not be done
thoroughly enough! Was it not honestly a trial to listen to an argument
such as that?

And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to some
poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and
had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six
o'clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to
take his clothes off; who had never had a week's vacation in his life,
had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything,
never hoped anything--and when you started to tell him about
Socialism he would sniff and say, "I'm not interested in that--I'm an
individualist!" And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was
"paternalism," and that if it ever had its way the world would stop
progressing. It was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like
that; and yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out--for how many
millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been
so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what freedom was! And
they really thought that it was "individualism" for tens of thousands
of them to herd together and obey the orders of a steel magnate, and
produce hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for him, and then let
him give them libraries; while for them to take the industry, and run it
to suit themselves, and build their own libraries--that would have been
"Paternalism"!

Sometimes the agony of such things as this was almost more than Jurgis
could bear; yet there was no way of escape from it, there was nothing
to do but to dig away at the base of this mountain of ignorance and
prejudice. You must keep at the poor fellow; you must hold your temper,
and argue with him, and watch for your chance to stick an idea or
two into his head. And the rest of the time you must sharpen up your
weapons--you must think out new replies to his objections, and provide
yourself with new facts to prove to him the folly of his ways.

So Jurgis acquired the reading habit. He would carry in his pocket a
tract or a pamphlet which some one had loaned him, and whenever he had
an idle moment during the day he would plod through a paragraph, and
then think about it while he worked. Also he read the newspapers, and
asked questions about them. One of the other porters at Hinds's was a
sharp little Irishman, who knew everything that Jurgis wanted to know;
and while they were busy he would explain to him the geography of
America, and its history, its constitution and its laws; also he gave
him an idea of the business system of the country, the great railroads
and corporations, and who owned them, and the labor unions, and the big
strikes, and the men who had led them. Then at night, when he could get
off, Jurgis would attend the Socialist meetings. During the campaign one
was not dependent upon the street corner affairs, where the weather
and the quality of the orator were equally uncertain; there were
hall meetings every night, and one could hear speakers of national
prominence. These discussed the political situation from every point of
view, and all that troubled Jurgis was the impossibility of carrying off
but a small part of the treasures they offered him.

There was a man who was known in the party as the "Little Giant." The
Lord had used up so much material in the making of his head that there
had not been enough to complete his legs; but he got about on the
platform, and when he shook his raven whiskers the pillars of capitalism
rocked. He had written a veritable encyclopedia upon the subject, a book
that was nearly as big as himself--And then there was a young
author, who came from California, and had been a salmon fisher, an
oyster-pirate, a longshoreman, a sailor; who had tramped the country and
been sent to jail, had lived in the Whitechapel slums, and been to the
Klondike in search of gold. All these things he pictured in his books,
and because he was a man of genius he forced the world to hear him. Now
he was famous, but wherever he went he still preached the gospel of
the poor. And then there was one who was known at the "millionaire
Socialist." He had made a fortune in business, and spent nearly all of
it in building up a magazine, which the post office department had tried
to suppress, and had driven to Canada. He was a quiet-mannered man, whom
you would have taken for anything in the world but a Socialist agitator.
His speech was simple and informal--he could not understand why any
one should get excited about these things. It was a process of economic
evolution, he said, and he exhibited its laws and methods. Life was a
struggle for existence, and the strong overcame the weak, and in turn
were overcome by the strongest. Those who lost in the struggle were
generally exterminated; but now and then they had been known to save
themselves by combination--which was a new and higher kind of strength.
It was so that the gregarious animals had overcome the predaceous; it
was so, in human history, that the people had mastered the kings. The
workers were simply the citizens of industry, and the Socialist movement
was the expression of their will to survive. The inevitability of the
revolution depended upon this fact, that they had no choice but to unite
or be exterminated; this fact, grim and inexorable, depended upon no
human will, it was the law of the economic process, of which the editor
showed the details with the most marvelous precision.

And later on came the evening of the great meeting of the campaign, when
Jurgis heard the two standard-bearers of his party. Ten years before
there had been in Chicago a strike of a hundred and fifty thousand
railroad employees, and thugs had been hired by the railroads to commit
violence, and the President of the United States had sent in troops
to break the strike, by flinging the officers of the union into jail
without trial. The president of the union came out of his cell a ruined
man; but also he came out a Socialist; and now for just ten years he had
been traveling up and down the country, standing face to face with the
people, and pleading with them for justice. He was a man of electric
presence, tall and gaunt, with a face worn thin by struggle and
suffering. The fury of outraged manhood gleamed in it--and the tears of
suffering little children pleaded in his voice. When he spoke he paced
the stage, lithe and eager, like a panther. He leaned over, reaching out
for his audience; he pointed into their souls with an insistent finger.
His voice was husky from much speaking, but the great auditorium was as
still as death, and every one heard him.

And then, as Jurgis came out from this meeting, some one handed him
a paper which he carried home with him and read; and so he became
acquainted with the "Appeal to Reason." About twelve years previously a
Colorado real-estate speculator had made up his mind that it was wrong
to gamble in the necessities of life of human beings: and so he had
retired and begun the publication of a Socialist weekly. There had come
a time when he had to set his own type, but he had held on and won out,
and now his publication was an institution. It used a carload of paper
every week, and the mail trains would be hours loading up at the depot
of the little Kansas town. It was a four-page weekly, which sold for
less than half a cent a copy; its regular subscription list was a
quarter of a million, and it went to every crossroads post office in
America.

The "Appeal" was a "propaganda" paper. It had a manner all its own--it
was full of ginger and spice, of Western slang and hustle: It collected
news of the doings of the "plutes," and served it up for the benefit
of the "American working-mule." It would have columns of the deadly
parallel--the million dollars' worth of diamonds, or the fancy
pet-poodle establishment of a society dame, beside the fate of Mrs.
Murphy of San Francisco, who had starved to death on the streets, or of
John Robinson, just out of the hospital, who had hanged himself in New
York because he could not find work. It collected the stories of graft
and misery from the daily press, and made a little pungent paragraphs
out of them. "Three banks of Bungtown, South Dakota, failed, and
more savings of the workers swallowed up!" "The mayor of Sandy Creek,
Oklahoma, has skipped with a hundred thousand dollars. That's the kind
of rulers the old partyites give you!" "The president of the Florida
Flying Machine Company is in jail for bigamy. He was a prominent
opponent of Socialism, which he said would break up the home!" The
"Appeal" had what it called its "Army," about thirty thousand of the
faithful, who did things for it; and it was always exhorting the "Army"
to keep its dander up, and occasionally encouraging it with a prize
competition, for anything from a gold watch to a private yacht or an
eighty-acre farm. Its office helpers were all known to the "Army" by
quaint titles--"Inky Ike," "the Bald-headed Man," "the Redheaded Girl,"
"the Bulldog," "the Office Goat," and "the One Hoss."

But sometimes, again, the "Appeal" would be desperately serious. It sent
a correspondent to Colorado, and printed pages describing the overthrow
of American institutions in that state. In a certain city of the country
it had over forty of its "Army" in the headquarters of the Telegraph
Trust, and no message of importance to Socialists ever went through that
a copy of it did not go to the "Appeal." It would print great broadsides
during the campaign; one copy that came to Jurgis was a manifesto
addressed to striking workingmen, of which nearly a million copies had
been distributed in the industrial centers, wherever the employers'
associations had been carrying out their "open shop" program. "You have
lost the strike!" it was headed. "And now what are you going to do about
it?" It was what is called an "incendiary" appeal--it was written by a
man into whose soul the iron had entered. When this edition appeared,
twenty thousand copies were sent to the stockyards district; and they
were taken out and stowed away in the rear of a little cigar store, and
every evening, and on Sundays, the members of the Packingtown locals
would get armfuls and distribute them on the streets and in the houses.
The people of Packingtown had lost their strike, if ever a people had,
and so they read these papers gladly, and twenty thousand were hardly
enough to go round. Jurgis had resolved not to go near his old home
again, but when he heard of this it was too much for him, and every
night for a week he would get on the car and ride out to the stockyards,
and help to undo his work of the previous year, when he had sent Mike
Scully's ten-pin setter to the city Board of Aldermen.

It was quite marvelous to see what a difference twelve months had
made in Packingtown--the eyes of the people were getting opened! The
Socialists were literally sweeping everything before them that election,
and Scully and the Cook County machine were at their wits' end for an
"issue." At the very close of the campaign they bethought themselves of
the fact that the strike had been broken by Negroes, and so they sent
for a South Carolina fire-eater, the "pitchfork senator," as he was
called, a man who took off his coat when he talked to workingmen,
and damned and swore like a Hessian. This meeting they advertised
extensively, and the Socialists advertised it too--with the result
that about a thousand of them were on hand that evening. The "pitchfork
senator" stood their fusillade of questions for about an hour, and then
went home in disgust, and the balance of the meeting was a strictly
party affair. Jurgis, who had insisted upon coming, had the time of
his life that night; he danced about and waved his arms in his
excitement--and at the very climax he broke loose from his friends,
and got out into the aisle, and proceeded to make a speech himself! The
senator had been denying that the Democratic party was corrupt; it
was always the Republicans who bought the votes, he said--and here was
Jurgis shouting furiously, "It's a lie! It's a lie!" After which he went
on to tell them how he knew it--that he knew it because he had bought
them himself! And he would have told the "pitchfork senator" all his
experiences, had not Harry Adams and a friend grabbed him about the neck
and shoved him into a seat.

Jurgis, now awakened by Socialism, returns to Elzbieta's house where he attempts to convince her of the system's merits. She is skeptical, but decides that anything that keeps Jurgis away from drink and makes him industrious is worth it. Jurgis begins looking for a job and fortunately comes to find one in a hotel as a porter. When Ostrinski learns of Jurgis's job, he tells him that the hotel owner is one of the most passionate Socialist Party members in the city. The hotel, owned by a man name Hinds, is a hotbed of Socialist activity. Hinds tells Jurgis of his own life and struggles and anytime he is faced with adversity he mutters: "'Capitalism, my boy, Capitalism. Ecrasez l'Infame. The hotel employs a number of Socialist Party members and every night the employees get into intense arguments and debates with guests who defend systems of capitalism and individualism. Hinds explains how the Oil Trust, the Beef Trust, and the Railroad Trust actually own the country and the politicians. Some guests change their minds and attitudes towards socialism, and some do not. Jurgis begins to spend all his time and much of his money on spreading the Socialist cause, though he does occasionally fall into old habits of drink. At those times, he remembers, however, that it is a "wicked thing to spend one's pennies for a drink, when the working-class was wandering in darkness, and waiting to be delivered. Jurgis attempts to convert his neighbors to socialism, though he makes many enemies and almost gets into a few fights during the process. The people tell Jurgis that socialism is "paternalism," but Jurgis argues that by letting the capitalists rule the country and build the libraries and social structures, they are not allowing the workers to build their own country. Capitalism is true paternalism. Jurgis meets and hears a number of famous socialist speakers and writers. He meets the "Little Giant," a little person who "had written a veritable encyclopedia" of Socialism. He hears a young author from California that had made a fortune selling books but that had never ceased to fight for the poor. He begins to read the "Appeal to Reason," a tabloid newspaper that spreads the word of socialism through fantastical stories. Jurgis and the Socialist Party members distribute flyers and pamphlets telling the people of Packingtown what they can do to fight the Beef Trust when their strike fails. Feeling pressure, Mike Scully brings in the South Carolina "pitchfork Senator" to speak to the workers and to fight for the Republican Party. Jurgis stands up, however, and gives his own speech in the meeting, telling the crowd how he himself had been a part of the political machine that had bought votes and oppressed the voice of the people

As Jurgis leaves Marija's brothel, he is in danger of falling back into the same cycle of poverty and unemployment as before. By chance, he enters the Socialist Party rally and undergoes his most significant awakening. Some scholars have likened this awakening to a conversion experience for Jurgis. The conversion narrative is a fixture of much of modern Western literature. Based upon narratives that began appearing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which found their greatest popularity in Puritan and Evangelical literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these narratives generally focus around a specific time in which a character undergoes some kind of intense personal or intellectual change. Jurgis's conversion fits this pattern. Through no effort of his own, Jurgis transforms from a character that is at the whim of the horrors of the natural world around him to a person with agency and the ability to influence his life and the lives of others. This conversion is seen in the reappearance of the voices and noises inside of Jurgis's head. In the novel's previous chapter, these voices and noises, symbolic of the spark of life, were extinguished. This represented the mental and interior death of Jurgis, even if his physical self still exists. The return of these voices represents a resurrection. This shows how Jurgis can be considered a Christ-figure in the novel's narrative. The Socialist Party movement is a typical description of revolutionary movements in America during this time. As shown by the singing of the Marseillaise, the French national anthem written during the Revolution of 1789. Sinclair had used the scene of Jurgis at the meat packing plant owner's house to propose that the reader understand the developing class conflict in Chicago in terms of previous revolutionary activity. By singing this anthem, Sinclair firmly establishes the Socialist Party in America as in the lineage of the French Revolution. These final chapters of The Jungle shows a shift in Sinclair's narrative technique. From Chapter Two until Chapter Twenty-Eight, Sinclair uses a narrative arc, mostly of the demise of Jurgis and his family. This arc ends in Chapter Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine with Jurgis's conversion to Socialism. The remaining chapters of the novel move from a narrative to an explanatory style of writing. Sinclair uses the final chapters to explain the tenets and the merits of socialism to his reading audience. Scholars and critics have not always approved of this technique since it abandons the Naturalist mode of writing Sinclair established in the rest of the novel. The discussion between Lucas and Schliemann allows Sinclair to elaborate on the breadth of the socialist movement. Lucas's argument that Christianity can be fully reconciled with the political aspirations of socialism demonstrates the thinking of the Social Gospel movement. This movement, unofficially led by pastors and writers who often ministered in the country's working class slums, seeks to portray the Christian church as originally a socialist movement. Their goal is to reclaim the social message of the gospel and to support socialist political goals. Schliemann's arguments for socialism follow the more traditional intellectual explanation of the movement. Schliemann relies heavily on the arguments framed by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto and Capital. The novel's ending has been another point of criticism from scholars and critics. The novel resolves with a victory, if not in actual votes than in momentum,  for the Socialist Party. Jurgis's narrative is never resolved beyond experiencing his spiritual and intellectual awakening, and the reader is unsure as to whether his life truly improved or if he remained subject to the forces of the natural world that caused his previous demise. The novel's closing chapters, critics have charged, resemble propagandist material more than literary achievement, a fault that some feel keeps The Jungle from achieving the literary ambitions that Sinclair proposed for the novel.

The next morning, Jurgis goes to find Teta Elzbieta. He starts talking to her about socialism. Teta Elzbieta couldn't care less about whether or not socialism is right for the world. All she cares about is that Jurgis's new convictions mean that he plans to stay sober and look for a job. Once she figures that out, she encourages Jurgis's socialism as much as he wants. Jurgis starts looking for jobs at the various hotels in the neighborhood. A week later, Jurgis goes into the lobby of a hotel and approaches the owner. The owner asks Jurgis if he drinks. Jurgis says no, and the owner asks Jurgis if he is afraid of hard work. There's a job available for a night porter, but he'll have to do a lot of cleaning and hauling. Jurgis says that's fine. Jurgis tells Ostrinski he's gotten a job at a nearby hotel. Ostrinski is thrilled to hear that Jurgis has been hired at Hind's Hotel. Apparently, Tommy Hinds, the owner of this place, is a state organizer of the Socialist Party in Illinois. The next day, Jurgis informs his employer that he is also a socialist. Tommy Hinds shakes his hand. Tommy Hinds calls Jurgis "Comrade Jurgis," and Jurgis calls his boss "Comrade Hinds." Tommy Hinds frequently goes out to convince people to vote the socialist ticket to solve their troubles. He has a history as a union organizer and populist. After the 1896 election, in which Populist and Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan lost his campaign for president, Tommy Hinds gave up on the idea of wealth in private hands. Ever since then, he has been getting himself invited to every business meeting and church service in Chicago so that he can preach the value of socialism far and wide. Tommy Hinds's hotel is also a big source of pro-socialist political activity. His staff members are all socialists, and his chief clerk has been fighting the big railroad companies his whole life. His assistant clerk is Harry Adams, a smart guy from Massachusetts who moved down south to South Carolina and was horrified by the widespread illiteracy and poverty he found there. So he moved to Chicago and became a socialist. Oddly, the fact that this hotel is a socialist business doesn't mean it's not profitable. The hotel is inexpensive and gets plenty of out-of-towners looking for work in the stockyards who are too poor to afford lodging elsewhere. Tommy Hinds works to convert all of these new guys to the cause. He frequently asks Jurgis to tell them about his experiences in the stockyards. Jurgis is reluctant at first, but eventually he realizes that Tommy Hinds doesn't need him to get personal - he just wants Jurgis to explain the bad business and hygiene practices at these meatpacking plants. Tommy Hinds explains that it's not just the Beef Trust ; all business in the US is dominated by just a few super-powerful companies. The Standard Oil Company controls the price of oil and the Steel Trust overcharges on nails, and so on. Jurgis learns everything he needs to know about socialism working for Tommy Hinds. Because he has such faith in Tommy Hinds's views, Jurgis works harder and with more loyalty than he ever would have for the meatpackers. Jurgis does his best to convert his acquaintances to socialism. Still, he often finds himself almost getting into fights. Even though the benefits of socialism seem obvious to Jurgis, a lot of working people resist. They claim to prefer individualism, and resist the kind of control on their money that socialism would mean. Jurgis feels that these people are forgetting that the people who really benefit from individualism and capitalism are the steel, oil, and meat magnates. It's never the working guy who profits from free enterprise. Jurgis starts to read newspapers and to learn about America's history so that he can convince people to join the socialist cause. At socialist meetings, Jurgis meets a range of extraordinary organizers and great people who have sacrificed so much to join the cause of the working man. Jurgis becomes a regular reader of Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper with lots of tidbits about how the American working man suffers. They begin to distribute this newspaper in Packingtown after the union lost the strike there, so that workers can take hope. Jurgis also hands out Appeal to Reason in the stockyards in an effort to undo the damage he did when he was part of Mike Scully's political machine. The socialists are gaining a real political foothold in Packingtown, and Mike Scully and his political machine are on the run.

With his newfound faith and fire, Jurgis goes to see Elzbieta. She is not interested in his politics but notices the spark of industry in his eyes and tolerates his rhetoric. Soon Jurgis finds a job as a porter at a hotel, a hotel that, coincidentally, is a political hotbed of socialism. The proprietor of the hotel, Tommy Hinds, and his staff educate Jurgis and others in the ways and means of socialism. Gradually, socialism becomes the root of Jurgis' existence.

Jurgis is like any new convert: He is fanatical about his new belief. socialism becomes the answer to all of life's problems. From a literary perspective, this chapter is too contrived: Jurgis just happens to find employment at a hotel whose proprietor is one of the leaders of the socialist movement. Throughout The Jungle chance has played a major part in the events of Jurgis' life, but only after Jurgis embraces socialism does a chance encounter end up benefiting him. Sinclair also refers to the newspaper Appeal to Reason, rightfully acknowledging it as a propaganda paper. Later, Sinclair claims that the Appeal could be serious, but he does not afford a way for readers to distinguish between the two. This mirrors a problem with The Jungle itself. The fictional accounts gloss over the seriousness of the novel, resulting in a piece of propaganda rather than an enduring literary accomplishment. Glossary Trojan here alluding to the Greek legend of the Trojan horse, a huge, hollow wooden horse Greek soldiers hid in then left at the gates of Troy; the Trojans brought the horse into the city, and the soldiers crept out and opened the gates to the rest of the Greek army, which destroyed the city of Troy. dyspepsia indigestion. Octopus reference to the novel The Octopus, written by Frank Norris, in which farmers fought against the railroad monopoly. recalcitrant hard to handle or deal with. unregenerate not converted to a particular belief or viewpoint. paternalism the principle or system of governing or controlling a country or group of employees in a manner suggesting a father's relationship with his children.

Jurgis visits Teta Elzbieta to tell her about socialism. She is happy to hear that he wishes to work and help support the family. She even agrees to attend socialist political meetings with him from time to time. Jurgis finds a job as a porter in a small hotel that pays thirty dollars a month plus board. Ostrinski informs Jurgis that his new boss, Tommy Hinds, is actually a state organizer for the socialist party and a well-known socialist speaker. Hinds is overjoyed to find that Jurgis is a comrade. Hinds never tires of preaching socialism in his hotel and elsewhere. Socialists flock to the hotel, so the radical philosophy of the proprietor does not hurt the business he owns. Hinds often urges Jurgis to detail the horrendous filth of the meat-packing plants along with the real recipes for tinned meats and sausages. Jurgis takes up the socialist cause with a passion. He endeavors to read newspapers, including The Appeal to Reason, and learn all about the political and economic systems of power in America. He becomes angry and frustrated when he cannot sway people to socialism