Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told him
stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of
Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterward--stories to make
your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been there
four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much
health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten.
"That is well enough for men like you," he would say, "silpnas, puny
fellows--but my back is broad."

Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country. He was the sort of man
the bosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they
cannot get hold of. When he was told to go to a certain place, he would
go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would
stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was
in him. If he were working in a line of men, the line always moved
too slowly for him, and you could pick him out by his impatience and
restlessness. That was why he had been picked out on one important
occasion; for Jurgis had stood outside of Brown and Company's "Central
Time Station" not more than half an hour, the second day of his arrival
in Chicago, before he had been beckoned by one of the bosses. Of this he
was very proud, and it made him more disposed than ever to laugh at the
pessimists. In vain would they all tell him that there were men in that
crowd from which he had been chosen who had stood there a month--yes,
many months--and not been chosen yet. "Yes," he would say, "but what
sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings, fellows who have
spent all their money drinking, and want to get more for it. Do you want
me to believe that with these arms"--and he would clench his fists and
hold them up in the air, so that you might see the rolling muscles--"that
with these arms people will ever let me starve?"

"It is plain," they would answer to this, "that you have come from the
country, and from very far in the country." And this was the fact, for
Jurgis had never seen a city, and scarcely even a fair-sized town, until
he had set out to make his fortune in the world and earn his right
to Ona. His father, and his father's father before him, and as many
ancestors back as legend could go, had lived in that part of Lithuania
known as Brelovicz, the Imperial Forest. This is a great tract of a
hundred thousand acres, which from time immemorial has been a hunting
preserve of the nobility. There are a very few peasants settled in it,
holding title from ancient times; and one of these was Antanas Rudkus,
who had been reared himself, and had reared his children in turn, upon
half a dozen acres of cleared land in the midst of a wilderness. There
had been one son besides Jurgis, and one sister. The former had been
drafted into the army; that had been over ten years ago, but since that
day nothing had ever been heard of him. The sister was married, and her
husband had bought the place when old Antanas had decided to go with his
son.

It was nearly a year and a half ago that Jurgis had met Ona, at a
horse fair a hundred miles from home. Jurgis had never expected to get
married--he had laughed at it as a foolish trap for a man to walk into;
but here, without ever having spoken a word to her, with no more than
the exchange of half a dozen smiles, he found himself, purple in the
face with embarrassment and terror, asking her parents to sell her to
him for his wife--and offering his father's two horses he had been sent
to the fair to sell. But Ona's father proved as a rock--the girl was yet
a child, and he was a rich man, and his daughter was not to be had in
that way. So Jurgis went home with a heavy heart, and that spring and
summer toiled and tried hard to forget. In the fall, after the harvest
was over, he saw that it would not do, and tramped the full fortnight's
journey that lay between him and Ona.

He found an unexpected state of affairs--for the girl's father had died,
and his estate was tied up with creditors; Jurgis' heart leaped as he
realized that now the prize was within his reach. There was Elzbieta
Lukoszaite, Teta, or Aunt, as they called her, Ona's stepmother, and
there were her six children, of all ages. There was also her brother
Jonas, a dried-up little man who had worked upon the farm. They were
people of great consequence, as it seemed to Jurgis, fresh out of the
woods; Ona knew how to read, and knew many other things that he did
not know, and now the farm had been sold, and the whole family was
adrift--all they owned in the world being about seven hundred rubles
which is half as many dollars. They would have had three times that, but
it had gone to court, and the judge had decided against them, and it had
cost the balance to get him to change his decision.

Ona might have married and left them, but she would not, for she loved
Teta Elzbieta. It was Jonas who suggested that they all go to America,
where a friend of his had gotten rich. He would work, for his part, and
the women would work, and some of the children, doubtless--they would
live somehow. Jurgis, too, had heard of America. That was a country
where, they said, a man might earn three rubles a day; and Jurgis
figured what three rubles a day would mean, with prices as they were
where he lived, and decided forthwith that he would go to America and
marry, and be a rich man in the bargain. In that country, rich or poor,
a man was free, it was said; he did not have to go into the army, he did
not have to pay out his money to rascally officials--he might do as he
pleased, and count himself as good as any other man. So America was a
place of which lovers and young people dreamed. If one could only manage
to get the price of a passage, he could count his troubles at an end.

It was arranged that they should leave the following spring, and
meantime Jurgis sold himself to a contractor for a certain time, and
tramped nearly four hundred miles from home with a gang of men to work
upon a railroad in Smolensk. This was a fearful experience, with filth
and bad food and cruelty and overwork; but Jurgis stood it and came out
in fine trim, and with eighty rubles sewed up in his coat. He did not
drink or fight, because he was thinking all the time of Ona; and for the
rest, he was a quiet, steady man, who did what he was told to, did not
lose his temper often, and when he did lose it made the offender anxious
that he should not lose it again. When they paid him off he dodged the
company gamblers and dramshops, and so they tried to kill him; but he
escaped, and tramped it home, working at odd jobs, and sleeping always
with one eye open.

So in the summer time they had all set out for America. At the last
moment there joined them Marija Berczynskas, who was a cousin of Ona's.
Marija was an orphan, and had worked since childhood for a rich farmer
of Vilna, who beat her regularly. It was only at the age of twenty that
it had occurred to Marija to try her strength, when she had risen up and
nearly murdered the man, and then come away.

There were twelve in all in the party, five adults and six children--and
Ona, who was a little of both. They had a hard time on the passage;
there was an agent who helped them, but he proved a scoundrel, and got
them into a trap with some officials, and cost them a good deal of
their precious money, which they clung to with such horrible fear. This
happened to them again in New York--for, of course, they knew nothing
about the country, and had no one to tell them, and it was easy for a
man in a blue uniform to lead them away, and to take them to a hotel and
keep them there, and make them pay enormous charges to get away. The law
says that the rate card shall be on the door of a hotel, but it does not
say that it shall be in Lithuanian.

It was in the stockyards that Jonas' friend had gotten rich, and so to
Chicago the party was bound. They knew that one word, Chicago and that
was all they needed to know, at least, until they reached the city.
Then, tumbled out of the cars without ceremony, they were no better off
than before; they stood staring down the vista of Dearborn Street, with
its big black buildings towering in the distance, unable to realize that
they had arrived, and why, when they said "Chicago," people no longer
pointed in some direction, but instead looked perplexed, or laughed,
or went on without paying any attention. They were pitiable in their
helplessness; above all things they stood in deadly terror of any sort
of person in official uniform, and so whenever they saw a policeman they
would cross the street and hurry by. For the whole of the first day they
wandered about in the midst of deafening confusion, utterly lost; and
it was only at night that, cowering in the doorway of a house, they
were finally discovered and taken by a policeman to the station. In the
morning an interpreter was found, and they were taken and put upon a
car, and taught a new word--"stockyards." Their delight at discovering
that they were to get out of this adventure without losing another share
of their possessions it would not be possible to describe.

They sat and stared out of the window. They were on a street which
seemed to run on forever, mile after mile--thirty-four of them, if they
had known it--and each side of it one uninterrupted row of wretched
little two-story frame buildings. Down every side street they could see,
it was the same--never a hill and never a hollow, but always the same
endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings. Here and there
would be a bridge crossing a filthy creek, with hard-baked mud shores
and dingy sheds and docks along it; here and there would be a railroad
crossing, with a tangle of switches, and locomotives puffing, and
rattling freight cars filing by; here and there would be a great
factory, a dingy building with innumerable windows in it, and immense
volumes of smoke pouring from the chimneys, darkening the air above and
making filthy the earth beneath. But after each of these interruptions,
the desolate procession would begin again--the procession of dreary
little buildings.

A full hour before the party reached the city they had begun to note the
perplexing changes in the atmosphere. It grew darker all the time, and
upon the earth the grass seemed to grow less green. Every minute, as
the train sped on, the colors of things became dingier; the fields were
grown parched and yellow, the landscape hideous and bare. And along
with the thickening smoke they began to notice another circumstance, a
strange, pungent odor. They were not sure that it was unpleasant, this
odor; some might have called it sickening, but their taste in odors was
not developed, and they were only sure that it was curious. Now, sitting
in the trolley car, they realized that they were on their way to the
home of it--that they had traveled all the way from Lithuania to it.
It was now no longer something far off and faint, that you caught in
whiffs; you could literally taste it, as well as smell it--you could
take hold of it, almost, and examine it at your leisure. They were
divided in their opinions about it. It was an elemental odor, raw and
crude; it was rich, almost rancid, sensual, and strong. There were some
who drank it in as if it were an intoxicant; there were others who put
their handkerchiefs to their faces. The new emigrants were still tasting
it, lost in wonder, when suddenly the car came to a halt, and the door
was flung open, and a voice shouted--"Stockyards!"

They were left standing upon the corner, staring; down a side street
there were two rows of brick houses, and between them a vista: half
a dozen chimneys, tall as the tallest of buildings, touching the very
sky--and leaping from them half a dozen columns of smoke, thick, oily,
and black as night. It might have come from the center of the world,
this smoke, where the fires of the ages still smolder. It came as if
self-impelled, driving all before it, a perpetual explosion. It was
inexhaustible; one stared, waiting to see it stop, but still the great
streams rolled out. They spread in vast clouds overhead, writhing,
curling; then, uniting in one giant river, they streamed away down the
sky, stretching a black pall as far as the eye could reach.

Then the party became aware of another strange thing. This, too, like
the color, was a thing elemental; it was a sound, a sound made up of ten
thousand little sounds. You scarcely noticed it at first--it sunk into
your consciousness, a vague disturbance, a trouble. It was like the
murmuring of the bees in the spring, the whisperings of the forest; it
suggested endless activity, the rumblings of a world in motion. It was
only by an effort that one could realize that it was made by animals,
that it was the distant lowing of ten thousand cattle, the distant
grunting of ten thousand swine.

They would have liked to follow it up, but, alas, they had no time for
adventures just then. The policeman on the corner was beginning to watch
them; and so, as usual, they started up the street. Scarcely had they
gone a block, however, before Jonas was heard to give a cry, and began
pointing excitedly across the street. Before they could gather the
meaning of his breathless ejaculations he had bounded away, and they saw
him enter a shop, over which was a sign: "J. Szedvilas, Delicatessen."
When he came out again it was in company with a very stout gentleman in
shirt sleeves and an apron, clasping Jonas by both hands and laughing
hilariously. Then Teta Elzbieta recollected suddenly that Szedvilas
had been the name of the mythical friend who had made his fortune in
America. To find that he had been making it in the delicatessen business
was an extraordinary piece of good fortune at this juncture; though it
was well on in the morning, they had not breakfasted, and the children
were beginning to whimper.

Thus was the happy ending to a woeful voyage. The two families literally
fell upon each other's necks--for it had been years since Jokubas
Szedvilas had met a man from his part of Lithuania. Before half the day
they were lifelong friends. Jokubas understood all the pitfalls of this
new world, and could explain all of its mysteries; he could tell them
the things they ought to have done in the different emergencies--and
what was still more to the point, he could tell them what to do now. He
would take them to poni Aniele, who kept a boardinghouse the other side
of the yards; old Mrs. Jukniene, he explained, had not what one would
call choice accommodations, but they might do for the moment. To this
Teta Elzbieta hastened to respond that nothing could be too cheap to
suit them just then; for they were quite terrified over the sums they
had had to expend. A very few days of practical experience in this land
of high wages had been sufficient to make clear to them the cruel fact
that it was also a land of high prices, and that in it the poor man
was almost as poor as in any other corner of the earth; and so there
vanished in a night all the wonderful dreams of wealth that had been
haunting Jurgis. What had made the discovery all the more painful was
that they were spending, at American prices, money which they had earned
at home rates of wages--and so were really being cheated by the world!
The last two days they had all but starved themselves--it made them
quite sick to pay the prices that the railroad people asked them for
food.

Yet, when they saw the home of the Widow Jukniene they could not but
recoil, even so, in all their journey they had seen nothing so bad as
this. Poni Aniele had a four-room flat in one of that wilderness of
two-story frame tenements that lie "back of the yards." There were four
such flats in each building, and each of the four was a "boardinghouse"
for the occupancy of foreigners--Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, or
Bohemians. Some of these places were kept by private persons, some were
cooperative. There would be an average of half a dozen boarders to each
room--sometimes there were thirteen or fourteen to one room, fifty
or sixty to a flat. Each one of the occupants furnished his own
accommodations--that is, a mattress and some bedding. The mattresses
would be spread upon the floor in rows--and there would be nothing else
in the place except a stove. It was by no means unusual for two men
to own the same mattress in common, one working by day and using it by
night, and the other working at night and using it in the daytime. Very
frequently a lodging house keeper would rent the same beds to double
shifts of men.

Mrs. Jukniene was a wizened-up little woman, with a wrinkled face. Her
home was unthinkably filthy; you could not enter by the front door at
all, owing to the mattresses, and when you tried to go up the backstairs
you found that she had walled up most of the porch with old boards
to make a place to keep her chickens. It was a standing jest of the
boarders that Aniele cleaned house by letting the chickens loose in
the rooms. Undoubtedly this did keep down the vermin, but it seemed
probable, in view of all the circumstances, that the old lady regarded
it rather as feeding the chickens than as cleaning the rooms. The truth
was that she had definitely given up the idea of cleaning anything,
under pressure of an attack of rheumatism, which had kept her doubled up
in one corner of her room for over a week; during which time eleven of
her boarders, heavily in her debt, had concluded to try their chances of
employment in Kansas City. This was July, and the fields were green. One
never saw the fields, nor any green thing whatever, in Packingtown; but
one could go out on the road and "hobo it," as the men phrased it, and
see the country, and have a long rest, and an easy time riding on the
freight cars.

Such was the home to which the new arrivals were welcomed. There was
nothing better to be had--they might not do so well by looking further,
for Mrs. Jukniene had at least kept one room for herself and her three
little children, and now offered to share this with the women and the
girls of the party. They could get bedding at a secondhand store,
she explained; and they would not need any, while the weather was so
hot--doubtless they would all sleep on the sidewalk such nights as this,
as did nearly all of her guests. "Tomorrow," Jurgis said, when they were
left alone, "tomorrow I will get a job, and perhaps Jonas will get one
also; and then we can get a place of our own."

Later that afternoon he and Ona went out to take a walk and look about
them, to see more of this district which was to be their home. In back
of the yards the dreary two-story frame houses were scattered farther
apart, and there were great spaces bare--that seemingly had been
overlooked by the great sore of a city as it spread itself over the
surface of the prairie. These bare places were grown up with dingy,
yellow weeds, hiding innumerable tomato cans; innumerable children
played upon them, chasing one another here and there, screaming and
fighting. The most uncanny thing about this neighborhood was the number
of the children; you thought there must be a school just out, and it was
only after long acquaintance that you were able to realize that
there was no school, but that these were the children of the
neighborhood--that there were so many children to the block in
Packingtown that nowhere on its streets could a horse and buggy move
faster than a walk!

It could not move faster anyhow, on account of the state of the streets.
Those through which Jurgis and Ona were walking resembled streets less
than they did a miniature topographical map. The roadway was commonly
several feet lower than the level of the houses, which were sometimes
joined by high board walks; there were no pavements--there were
mountains and valleys and rivers, gullies and ditches, and great hollows
full of stinking green water. In these pools the children played, and
rolled about in the mud of the streets; here and there one noticed them
digging in it, after trophies which they had stumbled on. One wondered
about this, as also about the swarms of flies which hung about the
scene, literally blackening the air, and the strange, fetid odor which
assailed one's nostrils, a ghastly odor, of all the dead things of the
universe. It impelled the visitor to questions and then the residents
would explain, quietly, that all this was "made" land, and that it had
been "made" by using it as a dumping ground for the city garbage. After
a few years the unpleasant effect of this would pass away, it was said;
but meantime, in hot weather--and especially when it rained--the flies
were apt to be annoying. Was it not unhealthful? the stranger would ask,
and the residents would answer, "Perhaps; but there is no telling."

A little way farther on, and Jurgis and Ona, staring open-eyed and
wondering, came to the place where this "made" ground was in process of
making. Here was a great hole, perhaps two city blocks square, and with
long files of garbage wagons creeping into it. The place had an odor
for which there are no polite words; and it was sprinkled over with
children, who raked in it from dawn till dark. Sometimes visitors from
the packing houses would wander out to see this "dump," and they would
stand by and debate as to whether the children were eating the food they
got, or merely collecting it for the chickens at home. Apparently none
of them ever went down to find out.

Beyond this dump there stood a great brickyard, with smoking chimneys.
First they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled it
up again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitous
arrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America. A
little way beyond was another great hole, which they had emptied and not
yet filled up. This held water, and all summer it stood there, with the
near-by soil draining into it, festering and stewing in the sun; and
then, when winter came, somebody cut the ice on it, and sold it to the
people of the city. This, too, seemed to the newcomers an economical
arrangement; for they did not read the newspapers, and their heads were
not full of troublesome thoughts about "germs."

They stood there while the sun went down upon this scene, and the sky in
the west turned blood-red, and the tops of the houses shone like fire.
Jurgis and Ona were not thinking of the sunset, however--their backs
were turned to it, and all their thoughts were of Packingtown, which
they could see so plainly in the distance. The line of the buildings
stood clear-cut and black against the sky; here and there out of the
mass rose the great chimneys, with the river of smoke streaming away to
the end of the world. It was a study in colors now, this smoke; in the
sunset light it was black and brown and gray and purple. All the sordid
suggestions of the place were gone--in the twilight it was a vision of
power. To the two who stood watching while the darkness swallowed it up,
it seemed a dream of wonder, with its talc of human energy, of things
being done, of employment for thousands upon thousands of men, of
opportunity and freedom, of life and love and joy. When they came away,
arm in arm, Jurgis was saying, "Tomorrow I shall go there and get a
job!"

Jurgis Rudkus is a big, strong man and a hard worker. He calls others who do not work as hard as he does weaklings or "broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings. He finds work easily because of his strength and work ethic. While others stand in line for work for many months, he is picked out of the unemployment line at Brown and Company after no more than half an hour on just his second day in Chicago. Jurgis is from the Lithuanian countryside where he had lived and worked on his ancestral estate in the Brelovicz ]. Jurgis's brother had been drafted into the military, and his sister had married. Although he never expected to get married himself, he met Ona, his future wife, at a horse fair and fell deeply in love. She is from a wealthy family, however, and her father did not approve of their marrying. Lovesick, Jurgis makes the one hundred mile trek from his home to her family's estate to convince her father to let her marry. When he arrives, he finds that Ona's father has died, leaving the family estate in disarray. Teta Elzbieta had managed to save seven hundred roubles of the family fortune, but all else had been lost. Because she loves Teta Elzbieta, Ona decides she could not marry, and Jurgis decides that they all should instead make a new life in America. Life in America, he has heard, is better than the old country; Jurgis imagines, "He might do as he please, and count himself as good as any other man. Five other adults, six other children, Marija Berczynskas, who had escaped work on a farm where she was beaten, and Jurgis board a boat headed for America. They have a hard passage. An agent takes advantage of them while on the boat, and then, when they arrive in New York, a man disguised as a police officer holds them captive in a hotel room where he makes them pay large sums to leave. The party loses much of their money during the journey. The group arrives in America, and because Ona's brother Jonas had known a man that made a fortune in Chicago, they decide to journey west. When they arrive, they do not understand where they are and ask people on the street for directions to Chicago, not realizing they have arrived. People laugh at them, and they sleep that night in the doorway of a house until a police officer picks them up and takes them to the police station. They are transported to the stockyards, a place with "never a hill and never a hollow, but always the same endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings. There are factories with "immense volumes of smoke" pouring from their chimneys and train yards with locomotives and freight cars. The party notices a change in the atmosphere as they enter the city: the dingy color of the landscape, the thickening smoke, and a "strange, pungent odor. The group cannot quite describe the odor. It is "an elemental odor, raw and crude. rich, almost rancid, sensual, and strong. When they exit their streetcar in the part of town known as the Stockyards, or, Packingtown, they hear the sound of ten thousand head of cattle lowing in the distance. They walk only a block when Jonas runs into a delicatessen owned by Jokubas Szedvilas, the rich man that Jonas knew from Lithuania. They are hungry and tired, and Jokubas offers to take them to old Mrs. Jukniene's flat where they can rest. Jokubas tells them that Old Mrs. Jukniene's house is not a nice place to stay, but Teta Elzbieta assures him, "Nothing could be too cheap to suit them. They have discovered that while America is a land of high wages, it is also a land of high prices. Old Mrs. Jukniene's flat, however, is even worse than they imagined. She lives in a two-story frame tenement house, and she does not clean. Each floor of the house has a four-room flat that houses an average of half a dozen boarders per room, or fifty or sixty people in each flat. Each room contains a row of mattresses and a stove. In some cases, the landlord rents out one of the mattresses to one man during the day and to another at night when the other man is at work. Mrs. Jukniene tells the women that they can share her room and, since the weather was hot, sleep on the sidewalk. Jurgis tells the group that tomorrow he and Jonas will get jobs, and they will be able to afford their own flat. Ona and Jurgis take a walk through their new neighborhood. There are children everywhere, playing in fetid puddles and streams of water. There are so many children in Packingtown "that nowhere on its streets could a horse and buggy move faster than a walk. Swarms of flies populate the air. The entire town is built upon the garbage dumps of the city and during the hot summer, the smell becomes overbearing. Beyond the dump is a brickyard. The brick company scoops out the dirt of the land and replaces it with garbage, a feat that seems "characteristic of an enterprising country like America. Beyond the brickyard is a hole that collects the water that drains from the polluted soil. In the winter, when the water freezes, it is cut and sold as ice to the people of the city. It seems economical to everyone, for "their heads were not full of troublesome thoughts about 'germs. As the sun sets, Jurgis and Ona look over Packingtown. It appears to them now as "a vision of power. of things being done, of employment for thousands upon thousands of men, of opportunity and freedom, of life and love and joy

Chapter Two begins the novel's narrative by describing Jurgis Rudkus. Sinclair describes Jurgis's character through physical traits. He is big and strong ,and the meat packing plant bosses quickly hire him. His physical characteristics influence his attitude towards other workers who are not as strong and not as enthusiastic about their work. Jurgis has a judgmental attitude towards these workers. In this early chapter, Sinclair strikes a balance between portraying the difficulties of the immigrants' move to America and the difficulties of life in Lithuania. Life in Lithuania is difficult, though it will not be as difficult as life in America, as the family will find out. Sinclair works here, however, not to idealize Eastern European life and to allow room for the validity of the American Dream. The American Dream, generally defined, is the belief in the ability of the individual to gain a sense of agency and economic or social advancement for themselves in American culture. Sinclair will use the contrast between dream and reality throughout the novel. In this early chapter, the dream is idealized. This power of this dream is evident in the family's trek to America. They immediately meet difficult circumstances. Their money is stolen, and they are extorted by being held captive. In addition, they find that while wages are higher in America, prices are also higher, which partly extinguishes a hope for riches, but the dream remains alive through the story of Jonas's friend in Chicago who has made a fortune. The dream is still alive when the family reaches Packingtown. Packingtown is a neighborhood in Chicago and the main setting for the novel. Packingtown contained the country's largest meat producing industries and was a destination for millions of immigrants looking for work in the early twentieth century. Packingtown remained a leading meat-producing neighborhood until the 1970's. While Packingtown was originally home to many German and Irish immigrant, many of them skilled butchers and meat producers, these groups were eventually replaced by cheaper labor, in the form of millions of unskilled Eastern European immigrants that flooded the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because of the influx of such large populations, Packingtown became a slum filled with trash, disease, and poor living conditions. Sinclair uses the metaphor of thousands of lowing cattle, all making the same droning noise that the family hears as they ride into the stockyards, as a symbol for the masses of people crowded into Packingtown. The lowing noise of the cows is a metaphor for the unheard agony of these immigrant populations who are forced into difficult living conditions. At the end of Chapter Two, Jurgis and Ona's American dream is symbolized in the way that they literally stand on top of the garbage of Packingtown. For the moment, Sinclair suggests, their industry and determination in coming to America has helped them rise above the poorer people and lower classes  surrounding them. Chapter Three is a realistic description of the packinghouses and the process of killing and butchering cattle and hogs for public consumption. The chapter is often graphic in its depiction of violence towards animals. Sinclair's original publisher would not publish his novel because of such scenes and Sinclair was forced to self-publish the novel before it was finally bought by a mainstream publishing house. The irony of the chapter is best summed up in Jurgis's line: "But I'm glad I'm not a hog!" In fact, the process of killing and breaking down animals is a similar process to the ways in which Jurgis himself will be broken down by the conditions of the city. This is not just a metaphorical breaking down, either, as a physical process of cutting and wounding is a primary cause of demise in the packing plants. Chapters Three and Four offer two visions of America's capitalist economy. Both visions show how unskilled, uneducated workers such as Jurgis's family have no hope of successfully navigating this economy towards any kind of economic or social success. The first vision of capitalism is offered through the packinghouse where Jurgis works. While Henry Ford is generally considered the creator of the modern assembly line process of manufacturing, it was the Chicago meat packing plants that first revolutionized the process of mass production and assembly line techniques. The mantra that these plants "use every part of the hog except for the squeal" exemplifies the way that capitalist industry seeks to eliminate waste, even if such elimination results in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. The second vision of capitalism is exemplified in the family's deal with the real estate agent. The agent attempts to sell the family a house that is not as advertised. In the quest for profit, Sinclair suggests that businessmen will use whatever means necessary to rip off or cheat others. A family such as Jurgis's will be the first victims of this capitalist greed because they have no education of the system. Sinclair suggests that capitalism is a rigged economic system that only benefits those with inside knowledge of how to manipulate others for personal gain.

Jurgis feels that work will come easily to him because he's young, strong, and optimistic. He hears horror stories about what laboring at the stockyards does to you, but he doesn't believe it can happen to him. Chicago is the first city Jurgis has ever seen: he was raised in a forest in Lithuania. This forest has long been a game preserve for the Lithuanian nobility. Jurgis's family is one of the few peasant families with the right to live in this forest. Jurgis met Ona a year and a half ago, at a horse fair. Even though he's not particularly romantic, he still finds himself falling in love with her at first sight. So Jurgis goes to meet Ona's father to ask if he can buy her in marriage. Ona's father refuses: Ona is still a child , and he has plenty of money to support her. Jurgis goes home defeated. But he keeps thinking about her, so he tries again after the harvest is in. Apparently, Ona's father has died in the meantime, and his estate is going to his creditors. Ona's family is in big financial trouble. There are nine of them, counting Ona: her stepmother, Teta Elzbieta, Teta Elzbieta's six children, Teta Elzbieta's brother, Jonas, and Ona herself. Ona is a well-educated girl , but she has literally no experience of the world. Jonas suggests that they all go to America to get rich, and Jurgis agrees. Jurgis's father also decides to join them. Jurgis spends a year working as a contract laborer in Russia to earn the money they need for travel expenses. At the last minute, Ona's cousin, Marija Berczynskas, joins them. She is escaping an abusive work situation, and needs to get out of Lithuania. So there are twelve people setting off for the States in this party: Jurgis, Ona, Marija, Jonas, Teta Elzbieta, Antanas , and Teta Elzbieta's six children. Jonas has heard that the place to get rich is the Chicago stockyards, so they all go to Chicago. They arrive there after being cheated by officials twice, once in trying to get out of Lithuania, and once in New York when they arrive. When they finally get to Chicago, they don't know where to go. They wander around the city, utterly lost and unable to ask for directions. Finally, a policeman sees them wandering aimlessly, picks them up, and finds an interpreter. So they learn a new word: stockyards. They start going to their new home. As they reach the Chicago meatpacking district, they notice that the air is changing: not only is it filled with smoke and strange noises, but it also has a weird, unknown odor. They have no idea what this odor might be. Jonas suddenly starts pointing and shouting: he sees a sign, "J. Szedvilas. Delicatessen" . This same Jokubas Szedvilas was Jonas's friend who had come to America and gotten rich. Jokubas Szedvilas is really excited to see people from his old part of Lithuania, and agrees to help them get situated. Jokubas Szedvilas sends them to an apartment run by Mrs. Aniele Jukniene, a widow. She rents a four room apartment in a tenement house kept for Eastern European immigrants. These four room apartments often house thirteen or fourteen people to a room, fifty or sixty people to an apartment. Even though Jurgis and his new family have seen a lot of awful places on their travels over to the States, this apartment where they are expected to live is still the worst thing they have ever seen. The most terrible thing of all is that they are lucky to get space with Mrs. Jukniene, because her apartment is not the worst. She has a separate room for the women and children. Jurgis promises that he and maybe Jonas will get a job, and then they will find their own place. Jurgis and Ona go for a walk through the streets, which are muddy and filled with flies and the smell of rot. The reason the air is filled with this awful smell is because these streets have been built on landfill: the city digs up all the earth to make bricks and then fills in the holes with garbage, which they then cover over. Jurgis and Ona are impressed by this inventive use of the land. Jurgis can still look at this landfill being created for people to live on and think that it's proof of human invention and can-do spirit. He still believes that America is the land of opportunity. He promises Ona he will get a job the next day.

The opening of Chapter 2 describes how the foreman for Brown and Company chooses to hire Jurgis, due to his size and strength, and then the narrative continues as a flashback, providing information about how Jurgis and Ona meet and come to America. In Lithuania, both of their families were economically oppressed. After Ona's father died, Jurgis had an opportunity to be with the woman he loved. He takes Ona, his love; Teta Elzbieta, her aunt; Elzbieta's six children; Marija, Ona's cousin; Jonas, Elzbieta's brother; and Jurgis' father, Antenas, to the New World. For the immigrants, America promised to be the land of opportunity, especially Chicago, where a member of their village had found success. From the onset of their trip, the family was cheated, first by their travel agent, then by officials in New York. After a long journey, and while they were still an hour away, the smells of Packingtown both greeted and offended them. By chance, they meet Jokubus Szedvilas -- the man from their village -- who runs a delicatessen. He welcomes them to Chicago and sends them to spend the night as boarders for Mrs. Jukniene.

The flashback is important for two reasons. First, it provides the exposition of the novel. The exposition is the explanatory information about characters, setting, and prior actions that enables readers to understand the action that follows. Readers get a glimpse of the life Jurgis and Ona left behind in Lithuania and of their difficult journey to Chicago. Sinclair uses a summary narrative here and throughout most of The Jungle. Instead of dramatizing their journey, he tells what happened. The flashback also illustrates a theme of the book: that oppression is not limited to America but rather to any country involved in a competitive economic system. The sights, sounds, and especially the smells of the factories, which initially repulse Jurgis and his family, serve as a contrast to both the forest they left behind and the city and lifestyle they eventually grow accustomed to. Sinclair foreshadows many of the hardships and difficulties Jurgis and his family endure. Sinclair must detail the bad  in order to capture the reality of the situation. By doing so, Sinclair uses the Zolaist approach to writing. The French novelist Emile Zola, one of the founders of the literary technique of naturalism, referred to human beings as "human beasts." This points to Sinclair's use of animal imagery throughout The Jungle. In this chapter, Sinclair makes use of second person to appeal to the reader, and he mentions scavenging the dump for food; however, this time the food is not just for the chickens but also for human consumption. As the novel progresses, Sinclair reveals more and more disturbing and disgusting details, to demonstrate the downside of capitalism. In spite of gloomy surroundings, Jurgis is hopeful and optimistic at the end of Chapter 2, declaring, "Tomorrow I shall go there and get a job!" Jurgis is a naif, used to illustrate appearance versus reality. A naif is a naive person who eventually learns the reality and hardships of the world. In the beginning, a naif is innocent, trusting both people and the socioeconomic system in which he lives; however, as others exploit him, he gradually learns the truth. As Jurgis travels through The Jungle, impatience and pessimism gradually replaces his eagerness and optimism. Glossary silpnas Lithuanian word meaning weak, faint, delicate. pall an overspreading covering, as of dark clouds or black smoke, that cloaks or obscures in a gloomy, depressing way. felicitous used or expressed in a way suitable to the occasion; appropriate. sordid squalid; depressingly wretched.

The narrator sketches background information about Jurgis and his family. Young and powerfully built, Jurgis came to Chicago from the rural countryside of Lithuania. In Lithuania, Ona's father died, leaving his family troubled by debt. They lost their farm and had little in cash savings. They spoke of traveling to America, where the wages were much higher. Ona did not want to leave her siblings or Teta Elzbieta behind. Teta Elzbieta's brother Jonas knew of a man who made a fortune in America, inspiring the family to work to make the trip possible. Jurgis worked for months to save money to help pay for the cost of the voyage. His father, Dede Antanas, resolved to go with his son and Ona's family. Marija Berczynskas, Ona's cousin, joined the family after suffering the abuse of an unkind employer in her homeland. She reckoned that her powerful physique would earn her more money and respect in America. Jurgis and his extended family, twelve in all, fell prey to various con artists in Lithuania and America. By the time they reached Chicago after landing in New York, their store of savings had dwindled. By a stroke of luck, Jonas spies the delicatessen of Jokubas Szedvilas, the Lithuanian man whom he claimed had made a fortune. Jokubas owns a delicatessen in Chicago but, rather than living like a king, he is suffering financial troubles. He directs Jonas and the family to a miserable, overcrowded boardinghouse run by an impoverished widow, where they take up residence. Jurgis and Ona go for a walk through their new neighborhood. The stench of rotting animal flesh and animal excrement, along with billowing smoke, fills the air. Children pick through the nearby garbage dump. Much of the land surrounding the stockyards is "made land," or filled dumps where buildings have now been constructed. After gazing at Packingtown in the distance for a few moments, Jurgis promises to "go there and get a job.


In his capacity as delicatessen vender, Jokubas Szedvilas had many
acquaintances. Among these was one of the special policemen employed
by Durham, whose duty it frequently was to pick out men for employment.
Jokubas had never tried it, but he expressed a certainty that he could
get some of his friends a job through this man. It was agreed, after
consultation, that he should make the effort with old Antanas and with
Jonas. Jurgis was confident of his ability to get work for himself,
unassisted by any one. As we have said before, he was not mistaken in
this. He had gone to Brown's and stood there not more than half an hour
before one of the bosses noticed his form towering above the rest, and
signaled to him. The colloquy which followed was brief and to the point:

"Speak English?"

"No; Lit-uanian." (Jurgis had studied this word carefully.)

"Job?"

"Je." (A nod.)

"Worked here before?"

"No 'stand."

(Signals and gesticulations on the part of the boss. Vigorous shakes of
the head by Jurgis.)

"Shovel guts?"

"No 'stand." (More shakes of the head.)

"Zarnos. Pagaiksztis. Szluofa!" (Imitative motions.)

"Je."

"See door. Durys?" (Pointing.)

"Je."

"To-morrow, seven o'clock. Understand? Rytoj! Prieszpietys! Septyni!"

"Dekui, tamistai!" (Thank you, sir.) And that was all. Jurgis turned
away, and then in a sudden rush the full realization of his triumph
swept over him, and he gave a yell and a jump, and started off on a
run. He had a job! He had a job! And he went all the way home as if
upon wings, and burst into the house like a cyclone, to the rage of the
numerous lodgers who had just turned in for their daily sleep.

Meantime Jokubas had been to see his friend the policeman, and received
encouragement, so it was a happy party. There being no more to be done
that day, the shop was left under the care of Lucija, and her husband
sallied forth to show his friends the sights of Packingtown. Jokubas did
this with the air of a country gentleman escorting a party of visitors
over his estate; he was an old-time resident, and all these wonders
had grown up under his eyes, and he had a personal pride in them. The
packers might own the land, but he claimed the landscape, and there was
no one to say nay to this.

They passed down the busy street that led to the yards. It was still
early morning, and everything was at its high tide of activity. A steady
stream of employees was pouring through the gate--employees of the
higher sort, at this hour, clerks and stenographers and such. For the
women there were waiting big two-horse wagons, which set off at a gallop
as fast as they were filled. In the distance there was heard again
the lowing of the cattle, a sound as of a far-off ocean calling. They
followed it, this time, as eager as children in sight of a circus
menagerie--which, indeed, the scene a good deal resembled. They crossed
the railroad tracks, and then on each side of the street were the pens
full of cattle; they would have stopped to look, but Jokubas hurried
them on, to where there was a stairway and a raised gallery, from which
everything could be seen. Here they stood, staring, breathless with
wonder.

There is over a square mile of space in the yards, and more than half
of it is occupied by cattle pens; north and south as far as the eye can
reach there stretches a sea of pens. And they were all filled--so many
cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the world. Red cattle, black,
white, and yellow cattle; old cattle and young cattle; great bellowing
bulls and little calves not an hour born; meek-eyed milch cows and
fierce, long-horned Texas steers. The sound of them here was as of all
the barnyards of the universe; and as for counting them--it would have
taken all day simply to count the pens. Here and there ran long alleys,
blocked at intervals by gates; and Jokubas told them that the number of
these gates was twenty-five thousand. Jokubas had recently been reading
a newspaper article which was full of statistics such as that, and he
was very proud as he repeated them and made his guests cry out with
wonder. Jurgis too had a little of this sense of pride. Had he not just
gotten a job, and become a sharer in all this activity, a cog in this
marvelous machine? Here and there about the alleys galloped men upon
horseback, booted, and carrying long whips; they were very busy, calling
to each other, and to those who were driving the cattle. They were
drovers and stock raisers, who had come from far states, and brokers and
commission merchants, and buyers for all the big packing houses.

Here and there they would stop to inspect a bunch of cattle, and there
would be a parley, brief and businesslike. The buyer would nod or drop
his whip, and that would mean a bargain; and he would note it in his
little book, along with hundreds of others he had made that morning.
Then Jokubas pointed out the place where the cattle were driven to be
weighed, upon a great scale that would weigh a hundred thousand pounds
at once and record it automatically. It was near to the east entrance
that they stood, and all along this east side of the yards ran the
railroad tracks, into which the cars were run, loaded with cattle.
All night long this had been going on, and now the pens were full; by
tonight they would all be empty, and the same thing would be done again.

"And what will become of all these creatures?" cried Teta Elzbieta.

"By tonight," Jokubas answered, "they will all be killed and cut up;
and over there on the other side of the packing houses are more railroad
tracks, where the cars come to take them away."

There were two hundred and fifty miles of track within the yards, their
guide went on to tell them. They brought about ten thousand head of
cattle every day, and as many hogs, and half as many sheep--which meant
some eight or ten million live creatures turned into food every year.
One stood and watched, and little by little caught the drift of the
tide, as it set in the direction of the packing houses. There were
groups of cattle being driven to the chutes, which were roadways about
fifteen feet wide, raised high above the pens. In these chutes the
stream of animals was continuous; it was quite uncanny to watch them,
pressing on to their fate, all unsuspicious a very river of death. Our
friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors
of human destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it
all. The chutes into which the hogs went climbed high up--to the very
top of the distant buildings; and Jokubas explained that the hogs went
up by the power of their own legs, and then their weight carried them
back through all the processes necessary to make them into pork.

"They don't waste anything here," said the guide, and then he laughed
and added a witticism, which he was pleased that his unsophisticated
friends should take to be his own: "They use everything about the hog
except the squeal." In front of Brown's General Office building there
grows a tiny plot of grass, and this, you may learn, is the only bit
of green thing in Packingtown; likewise this jest about the hog and his
squeal, the stock in trade of all the guides, is the one gleam of humor
that you will find there.

After they had seen enough of the pens, the party went up the street,
to the mass of buildings which occupy the center of the yards. These
buildings, made of brick and stained with innumerable layers of
Packingtown smoke, were painted all over with advertising signs, from
which the visitor realized suddenly that he had come to the home of many
of the torments of his life. It was here that they made those products
with the wonders of which they pestered him so--by placards that defaced
the landscape when he traveled, and by staring advertisements in the
newspapers and magazines--by silly little jingles that he could not get
out of his mind, and gaudy pictures that lurked for him around every
street corner. Here was where they made Brown's Imperial Hams and
Bacon, Brown's Dressed Beef, Brown's Excelsior Sausages! Here was the
headquarters of Durham's Pure Leaf Lard, of Durham's Breakfast Bacon,
Durham's Canned Beef, Potted Ham, Deviled Chicken, Peerless Fertilizer!

Entering one of the Durham buildings, they found a number of other
visitors waiting; and before long there came a guide, to escort them
through the place. They make a great feature of showing strangers
through the packing plants, for it is a good advertisement. But Ponas
Jokubas whispered maliciously that the visitors did not see any more
than the packers wanted them to. They climbed a long series of stairways
outside of the building, to the top of its five or six stories. Here was
the chute, with its river of hogs, all patiently toiling upward; there
was a place for them to rest to cool off, and then through another
passageway they went into a room from which there is no returning for
hogs.

It was a long, narrow room, with a gallery along it for visitors. At the
head there was a great iron wheel, about twenty feet in circumference,
with rings here and there along its edge. Upon both sides of this wheel
there was a narrow space, into which came the hogs at the end of their
journey; in the midst of them stood a great burly Negro, bare-armed and
bare-chested. He was resting for the moment, for the wheel had stopped
while men were cleaning up. In a minute or two, however, it began slowly
to revolve, and then the men upon each side of it sprang to work. They
had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the
other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel.
So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and
borne aloft.

At the same instant the car was assailed by a most terrifying shriek;
the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back.
The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing--for
once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of
the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing down the
room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another,
until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and
kicking in frenzy--and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous
to the eardrums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to
hold--that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high
squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony; there would come a
momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever, surging up
to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the visitors--the men
would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand
with hands clenched, and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears
starting in their eyes.

Meantime, heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were
going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors
made any difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs, and
one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long
line of hogs, with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away together; until at
last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of
boiling water.

It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was
porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics. And yet
somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the
hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were
so very human in their protests--and so perfectly within their rights!
They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury,
as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded,
impersonal way, without a pretense of apology, without the homage of
a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering
machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime
committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and
of memory.

One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical,
without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog
squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was
nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where
they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was
a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were
brown, some were spotted; some were old, some young; some were long and
lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his
own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full
of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And
trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a
black shadow hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway.
Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg.
Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were
nothing to it--it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his
feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched
him gasp out his life. And now was one to believe that there was nowhere
a god of hogs, to whom this hog personality was precious, to whom these
hog squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his
arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him
the meaning of his sacrifice? Perhaps some glimpse of all this was in
the thoughts of our humble-minded Jurgis, as he turned to go on with the
rest of the party, and muttered: "Dieve--but I'm glad I'm not a hog!"

The carcass hog was scooped out of the vat by machinery, and then it
fell to the second floor, passing on the way through a wonderful machine
with numerous scrapers, which adjusted themselves to the size and shape
of the animal, and sent it out at the other end with nearly all of its
bristles removed. It was then again strung up by machinery, and sent
upon another trolley ride; this time passing between two lines of men,
who sat upon a raised platform, each doing a certain single thing to
the carcass as it came to him. One scraped the outside of a leg; another
scraped the inside of the same leg. One with a swift stroke cut the
throat; another with two swift strokes severed the head, which fell
to the floor and vanished through a hole. Another made a slit down
the body; a second opened the body wider; a third with a saw cut the
breastbone; a fourth loosened the entrails; a fifth pulled them out--and
they also slid through a hole in the floor. There were men to scrape
each side and men to scrape the back; there were men to clean the
carcass inside, to trim it and wash it. Looking down this room, one saw,
creeping slowly, a line of dangling hogs a hundred yards in length; and
for every yard there was a man, working as if a demon were after him. At
the end of this hog's progress every inch of the carcass had been gone
over several times; and then it was rolled into the chilling room, where
it stayed for twenty-four hours, and where a stranger might lose himself
in a forest of freezing hogs.

Before the carcass was admitted here, however, it had to pass a
government inspector, who sat in the doorway and felt of the glands in
the neck for tuberculosis. This government inspector did not have the
manner of a man who was worked to death; he was apparently not haunted
by a fear that the hog might get by him before he had finished his
testing. If you were a sociable person, he was quite willing to enter
into conversation with you, and to explain to you the deadly nature
of the ptomaines which are found in tubercular pork; and while he was
talking with you you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a
dozen carcasses were passing him untouched. This inspector wore a blue
uniform, with brass buttons, and he gave an atmosphere of authority to
the scene, and, as it were, put the stamp of official approval upon the
things which were done in Durham's.

Jurgis went down the line with the rest of the visitors, staring
open-mouthed, lost in wonder. He had dressed hogs himself in the forest
of Lithuania; but he had never expected to live to see one hog dressed
by several hundred men. It was like a wonderful poem to him, and he
took it all in guilelessly--even to the conspicuous signs demanding
immaculate cleanliness of the employees. Jurgis was vexed when the
cynical Jokubas translated these signs with sarcastic comments, offering
to take them to the secret rooms where the spoiled meats went to be
doctored.

The party descended to the next floor, where the various waste materials
were treated. Here came the entrails, to be scraped and washed clean for
sausage casings; men and women worked here in the midst of a sickening
stench, which caused the visitors to hasten by, gasping. To another room
came all the scraps to be "tanked," which meant boiling and pumping off
the grease to make soap and lard; below they took out the refuse, and
this, too, was a region in which the visitors did not linger. In still
other places men were engaged in cutting up the carcasses that had been
through the chilling rooms. First there were the "splitters," the most
expert workmen in the plant, who earned as high as fifty cents an hour,
and did not a thing all day except chop hogs down the middle. Then there
were "cleaver men," great giants with muscles of iron; each had two men
to attend him--to slide the half carcass in front of him on the table,
and hold it while he chopped it, and then turn each piece so that he
might chop it once more. His cleaver had a blade about two feet long,
and he never made but one cut; he made it so neatly, too, that his
implement did not smite through and dull itself--there was just enough
force for a perfect cut, and no more. So through various yawning
holes there slipped to the floor below--to one room hams, to another
forequarters, to another sides of pork. One might go down to this floor
and see the pickling rooms, where the hams were put into vats, and the
great smoke rooms, with their airtight iron doors. In other rooms they
prepared salt pork--there were whole cellars full of it, built up in
great towers to the ceiling. In yet other rooms they were putting up
meats in boxes and barrels, and wrapping hams and bacon in oiled paper,
sealing and labeling and sewing them. From the doors of these rooms went
men with loaded trucks, to the platform where freight cars were waiting
to be filled; and one went out there and realized with a start that he
had come at last to the ground floor of this enormous building.

Then the party went across the street to where they did the killing
of beef--where every hour they turned four or five hundred cattle into
meat. Unlike the place they had left, all this work was done on one
floor; and instead of there being one line of carcasses which moved to
the workmen, there were fifteen or twenty lines, and the men moved
from one to another of these. This made a scene of intense activity, a
picture of human power wonderful to watch. It was all in one great room,
like a circus amphitheater, with a gallery for visitors running over the
center.

Along one side of the room ran a narrow gallery, a few feet from the
floor; into which gallery the cattle were driven by men with goads which
gave them electric shocks. Once crowded in here, the creatures were
prisoned, each in a separate pen, by gates that shut, leaving them no
room to turn around; and while they stood bellowing and plunging, over
the top of the pen there leaned one of the "knockers," armed with a
sledge hammer, and watching for a chance to deal a blow. The room echoed
with the thuds in quick succession, and the stamping and kicking of the
steers. The instant the animal had fallen, the "knocker" passed on to
another; while a second man raised a lever, and the side of the pen was
raised, and the animal, still kicking and struggling, slid out to
the "killing bed." Here a man put shackles about one leg, and pressed
another lever, and the body was jerked up into the air. There were
fifteen or twenty such pens, and it was a matter of only a couple of
minutes to knock fifteen or twenty cattle and roll them out. Then once
more the gates were opened, and another lot rushed in; and so out of
each pen there rolled a steady stream of carcasses, which the men upon
the killing beds had to get out of the way.

The manner in which they did this was something to be seen and never
forgotten. They worked with furious intensity, literally upon the
run--at a pace with which there is nothing to be compared except a
football game. It was all highly specialized labor, each man having his
task to do; generally this would consist of only two or three specific
cuts, and he would pass down the line of fifteen or twenty carcasses,
making these cuts upon each. First there came the "butcher," to bleed
them; this meant one swift stroke, so swift that you could not see
it--only the flash of the knife; and before you could realize it, the
man had darted on to the next line, and a stream of bright red was
pouring out upon the floor. This floor was half an inch deep with blood,
in spite of the best efforts of men who kept shoveling it through holes;
it must have made the floor slippery, but no one could have guessed this
by watching the men at work.

The carcass hung for a few minutes to bleed; there was no time lost,
however, for there were several hanging in each line, and one was always
ready. It was let down to the ground, and there came the "headsman,"
whose task it was to sever the head, with two or three swift strokes.
Then came the "floorsman," to make the first cut in the skin; and then
another to finish ripping the skin down the center; and then half a
dozen more in swift succession, to finish the skinning. After they were
through, the carcass was again swung up; and while a man with a stick
examined the skin, to make sure that it had not been cut, and another
rolled it up and tumbled it through one of the inevitable holes in the
floor, the beef proceeded on its journey. There were men to cut it, and
men to split it, and men to gut it and scrape it clean inside. There
were some with hose which threw jets of boiling water upon it, and
others who removed the feet and added the final touches. In the end, as
with the hogs, the finished beef was run into the chilling room, to hang
its appointed time.

The visitors were taken there and shown them, all neatly hung in rows,
labeled conspicuously with the tags of the government inspectors--and
some, which had been killed by a special process, marked with the
sign of the kosher rabbi, certifying that it was fit for sale to the
orthodox. And then the visitors were taken to the other parts of the
building, to see what became of each particle of the waste material
that had vanished through the floor; and to the pickling rooms, and the
salting rooms, the canning rooms, and the packing rooms, where choice
meat was prepared for shipping in refrigerator cars, destined to be
eaten in all the four corners of civilization. Afterward they went
outside, wandering about among the mazes of buildings in which was done
the work auxiliary to this great industry. There was scarcely a
thing needed in the business that Durham and Company did not make for
themselves. There was a great steam power plant and an electricity
plant. There was a barrel factory, and a boiler-repair shop. There was a
building to which the grease was piped, and made into soap and lard; and
then there was a factory for making lard cans, and another for making
soap boxes. There was a building in which the bristles were cleaned
and dried, for the making of hair cushions and such things; there was a
building where the skins were dried and tanned, there was another where
heads and feet were made into glue, and another where bones were made
into fertilizer. No tiniest particle of organic matter was wasted in
Durham's. Out of the horns of the cattle they made combs, buttons,
hairpins, and imitation ivory; out of the shinbones and other big bones
they cut knife and toothbrush handles, and mouthpieces for pipes; out of
the hoofs they cut hairpins and buttons, before they made the rest into
glue. From such things as feet, knuckles, hide clippings, and sinews
came such strange and unlikely products as gelatin, isinglass,
and phosphorus, bone black, shoe blacking, and bone oil. They had
curled-hair works for the cattle tails, and a "wool pullery" for the
sheepskins; they made pepsin from the stomachs of the pigs, and albumen
from the blood, and violin strings from the ill-smelling entrails. When
there was nothing else to be done with a thing, they first put it into a
tank and got out of it all the tallow and grease, and then they made it
into fertilizer. All these industries were gathered into buildings near
by, connected by galleries and railroads with the main establishment;
and it was estimated that they had handled nearly a quarter of a
billion of animals since the founding of the plant by the elder Durham
a generation and more ago. If you counted with it the other big
plants--and they were now really all one--it was, so Jokubas informed
them, the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in
one place. It employed thirty thousand men; it supported directly two
hundred and fifty thousand people in its neighborhood, and indirectly it
supported half a million. It sent its products to every country in
the civilized world, and it furnished the food for no less than thirty
million people!

To all of these things our friends would listen open-mouthed--it seemed
to them impossible of belief that anything so stupendous could have been
devised by mortal man. That was why to Jurgis it seemed almost profanity
to speak about the place as did Jokubas, skeptically; it was a thing
as tremendous as the universe--the laws and ways of its working no more
than the universe to be questioned or understood. All that a mere man
could do, it seemed to Jurgis, was to take a thing like this as he found
it, and do as he was told; to be given a place in it and a share in
its wonderful activities was a blessing to be grateful for, as one was
grateful for the sunshine and the rain. Jurgis was even glad that he had
not seen the place before meeting with his triumph, for he felt that the
size of it would have overwhelmed him. But now he had been admitted--he
was a part of it all! He had the feeling that this whole huge
establishment had taken him under its protection, and had become
responsible for his welfare. So guileless was he, and ignorant of the
nature of business, that he did not even realize that he had become an
employee of Brown's, and that Brown and Durham were supposed by all the
world to be deadly rivals--were even required to be deadly rivals by the
law of the land, and ordered to try to ruin each other under penalty of
fine and imprisonment!

Jokubas Szedvilas, who is a long time resident of Packingtown, tells his new company that he will secure jobs for them through a policeman that he knows. The policeman works for Durham, and he finds suitable men for employment. Jurgis is confident that he can find employment on his own, and he goes to Brown's, where he is immediately picked out of the line because of his size. One of the bosses asks him if he can "shovel guts," and Jurgis, though he does not understand the English of the boss, accepts a job. The boss tells him he must show up at seven the next morning. Jurgis is ecstatic that he has found work so quickly. To celebrate, Jokubas takes his new friends on a tour of Packingtown. For Jokubas, "the packers might own the land, but he claimed the landscape. He takes them down to the yards where there are pens of cattle for as far as the eye can see. Jurgis feels pride in taking part in all of this because he ha just gotten a job and "become a sharer in all this activity, a cog in this marvelous machine. Teta Elzbieta asks what becomes of all the cattle when they are bought and sold in the stockyards. Jokubas tells her that they are all weighed, loaded on trains, and taken to the slaughterhouses, where they will be killed and cut up for food. Everyone could think "only of the wonderful efficiency of it all. The party goes up to Durham's, one of the meatpacking plants, and begins a tour of the factory. The tours are advertisements for the companies and the multiple products that they sell: "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard. Durham's Breakfast Bacon, Durham's Canned Beef, Potted Ham, Devilled Chicken, Peerless Fertilizer. They climb a series of stairways and see the chute where hogs come into the factory. The hogs come into a narrow room where men chain their legs, and they are lifted up by a wheel to a trolley. The hogs begin to squeal a sound that is "appalling, perilous to the ear-drums," and many of the visitors laugh nervously at each other while some of the women have tears in their eyes. On the packing floor, men cut the throats of the hogs and throw them into vats of boiling water. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. A visitor cannot help but become philosophical about the process and think on the idea of an afterlife for hogs, and on how each hog "had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope, and a heart's desire. Upon watching the slaughtering, Jurgis says, "I'm glad I'm not a hog. Once the hog is done in the boiling water, it is scooped up by a machine and put on another trolley. Two lines of men stand on each side of the trolley. Each man is responsible for a specific job: one scrapes the legs, one cuts off the head, one saws through the breastbone, and one pulls out the guts. At the end of the trolley, the hog has been gone over several times, and an incompetent and lazy government inspector either looks over or ignores it. It then goes to the splitter, the most expert workers in the factory, who cut the hog in two. It is then butchered, and each part goes to different parts of the factories to be processed and shipped out. Signs everywhere demand cleanliness from the employees, and Jokubas translates these to Jurgis in a sarcastic manner. The visitors move to another gallery. This one views the cattle-slaughtering process. As the cattle are loaded into a pen, a man stands over them and bludgeons their heads with a large hammer. As the animals fall, they are moved to the "killing-bed," where they are strung upside down by chains, and the butcher slices their throats, letting the blood drain to the floor. Though men attempt to sweep all the blood into holes in the floor, they cannot keep up the pace, so the men do their work while standing in half an inch of blood. The heads are taken off, and the skin is sliced off. The carcasses of beef are then butchered. No part of the animal is wasted. The parts are made into diverse products: soaps, glue, violin strings, gelatin, lard, and fertilizer. The process amazes Jurgis, and he sees that he has been "given a place in it and a share in its wonderful activities. He does not even realize that he has been hired at Brown's, a competing plant that is supposed to be a "deadly rival" to Durham. Jokubas tells them that Durham has handled nearly a quarter of a billion animals since its founding. All of the meat packing factories are now almost as one, "the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place

Jokubas Szedvilas has a friend, a policeman who also works as a kind of talent scout for Durham's meatpacking plant. He thinks that he can convince this friend to get Jonas and Antanas a job. Jurgis is so confident that he tells Jokubas he doesn't need help to find employment. He goes to Brown's meatpacking plant and stands there for half an hour before a boss notices his size and strength. After a brief dialogue , Jurgis realizes he has a job. He's supposed to report the next morning at 7:00 AM. Jurgis runs home, absolutely thrilled, to report that he has found a job. What is more, Jokubas thinks he's gotten employment for Antanas and Jonas. So the whole group of men is delighted. Jokubas leaves his deli in the care of his wife, Lucija, so that he can show the new immigrants the sights of Packingtown . Jokubas leads them across the railroad tracks to a raised platform where they can look down at the cattle pens. These pens cover a square mile of space; they are filled with more cattle than the eye can see. Jurgis feels a sense of pride that he now has a job and is a part of this marvelous machine that is the slaughterhouse. They observe men on horseback with herds of cattle agreeing on prices for their steers. These cows are then weighed and ushered into their holding pens. This bargaining goes on all night, so that, by morning, the pens are full. By evening, the pens are empty. Teta Elzbieta asks what will happen to these animals. Jokubas answers that they will all be killed and cut up. The stockyards are right next to the railroad tracks for a reason: all of this beef is immediately placed into railroad cars and shipped elsewhere. And it's not just beef: an equal number of pigs and half the number of sheep arrive at these stockyards everyday, to be turned into ham, pork, mutton, and lamb. These animals are completely unaware of what is going to happen to them. They march into the chutes that will lead them to the slaughterhouse without any signs of fear. Jokubas reports proudly that there is no waste at these stockyards: "They use everything about the hog except the squeal" . The group goes on to the brick buildings that actually process all of this meat for the Durham company. not feeling strong-stomached, or eating - especially if it's a ham sandwich.) Jokubas, Jurgis, and his family stop at a gathering place for visitors and wait for a guide who will take them on a tour of Brown's meatpacking plant. They are led to a viewing room where they can see hogs being processed. What the visitors see is this: a hog comes down a metal chute. Workers at the bottom of the chute chain one of the hog's legs to a ring attached to a rotating wheel in the ceiling. As the wheel rotates, the hog is yanked off of its feet. Suspended from one leg as the wheel slowly moves, the hog begins to shriek and squeal. The visitors are all upset by the sounds of these animals crying out, but the workers are so used to it that they continue their work. As the hogs come around, hanging from one leg and shrieking, the workmen quickly slit their throats. The hogs slowly die. As the wheel continues to rotate, these hog carcasses are dropped into vats of boiling water. The hog carcass is pulled out of the vat of water and dropped by machines into a second floor of the slaughterhouse. At this second floor, machines scrape each hog carcass clean of its skin and bristles . The hog carcass is placed on an assembly line where two rows of men sit waiting to do their own particular tasks: one guy scrapes the outside of a leg, one the inside. One guy cuts halfway through the hog's neck, and a second guy cuts its head off entirely. The list goes on. There is a hole in the floor to collect the throw-away parts of the pig - the guts and the head and so on. The carcass then reaches the end of the line, where it is placed in a freezer for twenty-four hours. There is also a government inspector on site, but he's the only guy in the factory who doesn't seem too bothered about working hard and fast. He's supposed to check the pig glands to make sure that they don't have tuberculosis . But, if you talk to him, he's happy to look away from his work, even though a dozen carcasses will go by unchecked. Jurgis is amazed at this spectacle. He has slaughtered pigs before in Lithuania, but he's never seen an assembly line where many men will do different things to one pig corpse. Jurgis is honestly impressed. He's irritated at Jokubas for his hints that even spoiled meat gets sent out of these factories for people to eat. The tour continues down to the next floor, where the guts of the pig are scraped clean for sausage. The smell is absolutely awful. Next up is a room where the scraps are "tanked": boiled and rendered so that all the extra fat can be skimmed off for lard and soap. Elsewhere, there are guys who are taking apart the chilled pig carcasses: "Splitters," guys who make the most money in the whole factory. These fellows do nothing all day except chop hog bodies down the middle. "Cleaver men," who quarter these hog bodies and send the different parts of the pig down different chutes for different processing . Different rooms contain workers making salt pork and bacon. At the doors of these rooms are delivery men waiting with trucks to bring all of these different animal products to the freight train stations for delivery across the country. At last, they are at the ground floor of the hog slaughterhouse. So Jurgis and his family head across to the cattle slaughterhouses, run by the Durham company. Cattle slaughtering happens all on one floor, and it's like a circus watching all of these people with their perfectly timed, interlocking jobs. The Durham company runs numerous factories on this spot: it's not just a slaughterhouse; they also make their own cans to store the lard they sell, and they have their own generators. Not only that, but these slaughtered cattle aren't just turned into meat: they become leather, glue, fertilizer, soap, and lard. Jokubas explains to his friends that these Chicago stockyards support the largest number of workers ever collected in one place for a single industry: 250,000 people directly depend on these plants for their livelihood. Its products feed 30 million. Jurgis is enchanted. He feels honored to have become a part of this enormous enterprise.

Szedvilas attempts to find a job for both Antanas and Jonas, but Jurgis refuses his help and is determined to find a job himself. After waiting just half an hour, Jurgis does indeed get a job shoveling guts from a killing floor. Upon hearing Jurgis' news, Szedvilas takes the new arrivals on a tour of Packingtown. First they see the seemingly endless supply of railroads and cattle. Next Szedvilas takes them to a hog factory. Here Jurgis sees the work of the packers -- at least what the owners allow the public to see. The technologically advanced pork assembly-line type of killing mechanism enables the industry to "use everything about the hog except the squeal." The dismembering of pigs contrasts with the beef plant Jurgis sees next. Not willing to waste a single portion of the animal, the Beef Trust -- the organization of meat industry owners -- even uses parts of the animal in the making of fertilizer. Tomorrow, Jurgis becomes a part of the system.

Most of this chapter is a process definition; that is, it systematically describes the steps of killing and cleaning a hog. The tour Szedvilas provides Jurgis also enables the reader to experience the factories. For many, the mere thought of the killing floors is repulsive, and yet this is just the first of the horrors of Packingtown revealed in the book. Critics disagree about the success of Sinclair's hog allegory. Some think he is too extreme in his comparison and thus undermines the very point he wants to make. Others find it an extremely fitting way of recognizing the way the system used its own employees to walk to their deaths -- killing themselves for the sake of progress, technology, and profits. At the end of the chapter, Sinclair is openly critical of competition. His narrator blasts the laws of the land that supposedly require competitors, in this case Brown and Durham, to "try to ruin each other under penalty of fine and imprisonment!" This is the first of many anti-capitalistic remarks made throughout The Jungle. Unlike the previous allusions to the destructive nature of capitalism, now and subsequently throughout the text, Sinclair openly mentions the problems that he perceives as the direct result of a capitalistic society. Sinclair uses the word "you," but he now also uses the first person pronoun "our" when referring to "our friends." Three potential explanations for this usage exist. The first is reductive in nature; that is, Sinclair is just a mediocre author who makes an error in consistency and voice. Although he is not currently as esteemed as a few of his peers, this is not a satisfying explanation. A different interpretation suggests this as another example of Sinclair's attempt to gain sympathy for the family. Using "our" encourages readers to accept Jurgis and his family as members of their own families. A final suggestion is that Sinclair uses the rhetoric of the socialist movement -- where everyone is a "comrade" -- in an indirect manner, familiarizing readers with the notion of unity and oneness before directly mentioning socialism. Critics can debate Sinclair's style and use of language, but they cannot debate the fact that Sinclair presents Jurgis as "guileless" and "ignorant of the nature of business." At this point in time, Jurgis has complete faith in the American dream. Glossary colloquy a conversation, especially a formal discussion. menagerie a collection of wild or strange animals kept in cages or enclosures for exhibition. drover a person who herds droves of animals, especially to market. parley a talk or conference for the purpose of discussing a specific matter. ptomaines substances, some of which are poisonous, formed in decaying animal matter. isinglass a form of gelatin made from the internal membranes of fish bladders: used as a clarifying agent and adhesive. pepsin an extract of gastric juice enzymes from the stomachs of calves, pigs, etc., formerly used as a digestive aid. albumen water-soluble protein.

Jokubas takes the family on a tour of Packingtown. They are amazed to see pens packed with tens of thousands of cattle, pigs, and sheep. The suffering of the animals, which will all be killed by the end of the day, daunts even Jurgis's optimism. But the flurry of human activity fills Jurgis with wonder. Jokubas notes sarcastically the signs regarding the sanitation rules. The government inspector who checks the slaughtered pigs for signs of tuberculosis often lets several carcasses go unchecked. Spoiled meat is specially doctored in secret before it is scattered among the rest of the meat in preparation for canning and packing

This section continues Sinclair's demolition of the American Dream as he builds his argument against capitalism and for socialism. Jurgis, who still naively holds onto the American Dream, views the factories with undiluted optimism. Sinclair portrays him as utterly committed to the values of labor and family on which the American Dream is based. Again, he attempts to make Jurgis appear sympathetic to the average American reader. Unlike Jurgis, the more experienced Jokubas views the entire process with sarcasm because he knows better. He knows the corrupt owners of the vast meatpacking empire betray the values of the American Dream in every way possible. The vast stockyards, packed with cattle, pigs, and sheep, demonstrate the marvelous efficiency of the economic machinery of the meatpacking industry. However, the animals packed into the stockyards and herded into slaughter serve also as metaphors for the immigrant laborers who crowd into Packingtown looking for the opportunity to earn a piece of the American Dream. Like these ill-fated animals, the unsuspecting Jurgis and other immigrants are herded into the machinery of capitalism and slaughtered en masse. Sinclair's description of the unsanitary and disgusting practices of the meat-packing industry consists of a two-pronged attack. First, he details the lack of sanitation in the factories in order to garner sympathy for the wage laborers who must work there. But the real impact of his expose lies in his portrayal of the practice of selling diseased and rotten meat to the American public. Sinclair wants the reader to identify with the immigrant laborer through their victimization by the same enemy. The factory owners value their profits over the health of the workers and the public consumer. The real-estate scam is another attack on capitalism. The agent lies when he says that the houses are "going fast" to pressure the family into acting without considering all of the conditions. The flyer advertising the houses is misleading. Moreover, the deed specifies that the house is a "rental" until it is paid for. The purpose is to make it easy to evict families when they start missing payments. With its emphasis on maximum profit, the scheme prioritizes corporate gain at the expense of the consumer. A poor family is given no leeway for missed or late payments. Instead, the family is thrown out of its home in times of financial crisis. Tamoszius's explanation of "graft" to Jurgis portrays capitalism as a machine that encourages and values corruption--anyone hoping to get ahead must become corrupt. Therefore, capitalism attacks the fundamental moral idea behind the American Dream, namely that hard, honest work earns its just reward. Sinclair attempts to show that, within capitalist economics, one cannot advance by means of hard work and a strong commitment to good social values. Instead, the enterprising individual must become a liar, thief, and predator to keep from being exploited.