Jurgis and Ona were very much in love; they had waited a long time--it
was now well into the second year, and Jurgis judged everything by the
criterion of its helping or hindering their union. All his thoughts were
there; he accepted the family because it was a part of Ona. And he was
interested in the house because it was to be Ona's home. Even the tricks
and cruelties he saw at Durham's had little meaning for him just then,
save as they might happen to affect his future with Ona.

The marriage would have been at once, if they had had their way; but
this would mean that they would have to do without any wedding feast,
and when they suggested this they came into conflict with the old
people. To Teta Elzbieta especially the very suggestion was an
affliction. What! she would cry. To be married on the roadside like a
parcel of beggars! No! No!--Elzbieta had some traditions behind her;
she had been a person of importance in her girlhood--had lived on a big
estate and had servants, and might have married well and been a lady,
but for the fact that there had been nine daughters and no sons in the
family. Even so, however, she knew what was decent, and clung to her
traditions with desperation. They were not going to lose all caste, even
if they had come to be unskilled laborers in Packingtown; and that Ona
had even talked of omitting a _veselija_ was enough to keep her stepmother
lying awake all night. It was in vain for them to say that they had
so few friends; they were bound to have friends in time, and then the
friends would talk about it. They must not give up what was right for a
little money--if they did, the money would never do them any good, they
could depend upon that. And Elzbieta would call upon Dede Antanas to
support her; there was a fear in the souls of these two, lest this
journey to a new country might somehow undermine the old home virtues of
their children. The very first Sunday they had all been taken to mass;
and poor as they were, Elzbieta had felt it advisable to invest a little
of her resources in a representation of the babe of Bethlehem, made
in plaster, and painted in brilliant colors. Though it was only a foot
high, there was a shrine with four snow-white steeples, and the Virgin
standing with her child in her arms, and the kings and shepherds and
wise men bowing down before him. It had cost fifty cents; but Elzbieta
had a feeling that money spent for such things was not to be counted too
closely, it would come back in hidden ways. The piece was beautiful on
the parlor mantel, and one could not have a home without some sort of
ornament.

The cost of the wedding feast would, of course, be returned to them;
but the problem was to raise it even temporarily. They had been in the
neighborhood so short a time that they could not get much credit, and
there was no one except Szedvilas from whom they could borrow even a
little. Evening after evening Jurgis and Ona would sit and figure the
expenses, calculating the term of their separation. They could not
possibly manage it decently for less than two hundred dollars, and even
though they were welcome to count in the whole of the earnings of Marija
and Jonas, as a loan, they could not hope to raise this sum in less
than four or five months. So Ona began thinking of seeking employment
herself, saying that if she had even ordinarily good luck, she might be
able to take two months off the time. They were just beginning to adjust
themselves to this necessity, when out of the clear sky there fell a
thunderbolt upon them--a calamity that scattered all their hopes to the
four winds.

About a block away from them there lived another Lithuanian family,
consisting of an elderly widow and one grown son; their name was
Majauszkis, and our friends struck up an acquaintance with them before
long. One evening they came over for a visit, and naturally the first
subject upon which the conversation turned was the neighborhood and its
history; and then Grandmother Majauszkiene, as the old lady was called,
proceeded to recite to them a string of horrors that fairly froze their
blood. She was a wrinkled-up and wizened personage--she must have been
eighty--and as she mumbled the grim story through her toothless gums,
she seemed a very old witch to them. Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived
in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element,
and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death as other people
might about weddings and holidays.

The thing came gradually. In the first place as to the house they
had bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed; it was about
fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint,
which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The
house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed
to make money by swindling poor people. The family had paid fifteen
hundred dollars for it, and it had not cost the builders five hundred,
when it was new. Grandmother Majauszkiene knew that because her son
belonged to a political organization with a contractor who put up
exactly such houses. They used the very flimsiest and cheapest material;
they built the houses a dozen at a time, and they cared about nothing at
all except the outside shine. The family could take her word as to the
trouble they would have, for she had been through it all--she and her
son had bought their house in exactly the same way. They had fooled the
company, however, for her son was a skilled man, who made as high as a
hundred dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not to marry,
they had been able to pay for the house.

Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were puzzled at this
remark; they did not quite see how paying for the house was "fooling the
company." Evidently they were very inexperienced. Cheap as the houses
were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would
not be able to pay for them. When they failed--if it were only by a
single month--they would lose the house and all that they had paid on
it, and then the company would sell it over again. And did they often
get a chance to do that? Dieve! (Grandmother Majauszkiene raised her
hands.) They did it--how often no one could say, but certainly more than
half of the time. They might ask any one who knew anything at all about
Packingtown as to that; she had been living here ever since this house
was built, and she could tell them all about it. And had it ever been
sold before? Susimilkie! Why, since it had been built, no less than four
families that their informant could name had tried to buy it and failed.
She would tell them a little about it.

The first family had been Germans. The families had all been of
different nationalities--there had been a representative of several
races that had displaced each other in the stockyards. Grandmother
Majauszkiene had come to America with her son at a time when so far as
she knew there was only one other Lithuanian family in the district;
the workers had all been Germans then--skilled cattle butchers that the
packers had brought from abroad to start the business. Afterward, as
cheaper labor had come, these Germans had moved away. The next were the
Irish--there had been six or eight years when Packingtown had been a
regular Irish city. There were a few colonies of them still here, enough
to run all the unions and the police force and get all the graft; but
most of those who were working in the packing houses had gone away at
the next drop in wages--after the big strike. The Bohemians had come
then, and after them the Poles. People said that old man Durham himself
was responsible for these immigrations; he had sworn that he would fix
the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike
on him, and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in
Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages at the
stockyards. The people had come in hordes; and old Durham had squeezed
them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces
and sending for new ones. The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands,
had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians
were giving way to the Slovaks. Who there was poorer and more miserable
than the Slovaks, Grandmother Majauszkiene had no idea, but the packers
would find them, never fear. It was easy to bring them, for wages were
really much higher, and it was only when it was too late that the poor
people found out that everything else was higher too. They were like
rats in a trap, that was the truth; and more of them were piling in
every day. By and by they would have their revenge, though, for the
thing was getting beyond human endurance, and the people would rise and
murder the packers. Grandmother Majauszkiene was a socialist, or some
such strange thing; another son of hers was working in the mines of
Siberia, and the old lady herself had made speeches in her time--which
made her seem all the more terrible to her present auditors.

They called her back to the story of the house. The German family had
been a good sort. To be sure there had been a great many of them, which
was a common failing in Packingtown; but they had worked hard, and the
father had been a steady man, and they had a good deal more than half
paid for the house. But he had been killed in an elevator accident in
Durham's.

Then there had come the Irish, and there had been lots of them, too;
the husband drank and beat the children--the neighbors could hear them
shrieking any night. They were behind with their rent all the time,
but the company was good to them; there was some politics back of that,
Grandmother Majauszkiene could not say just what, but the Laffertys had
belonged to the "War Whoop League," which was a sort of political club
of all the thugs and rowdies in the district; and if you belonged to
that, you could never be arrested for anything. Once upon a time old
Lafferty had been caught with a gang that had stolen cows from several
of the poor people of the neighborhood and butchered them in an old
shanty back of the yards and sold them. He had been in jail only three
days for it, and had come out laughing, and had not even lost his place
in the packing house. He had gone all to ruin with the drink, however,
and lost his power; one of his sons, who was a good man, had kept him
and the family up for a year or two, but then he had got sick with
consumption.

That was another thing, Grandmother Majauszkiene interrupted
herself--this house was unlucky. Every family that lived in it, some one
was sure to get consumption. Nobody could tell why that was; there must
be something about the house, or the way it was built--some folks said
it was because the building had been begun in the dark of the moon.
There were dozens of houses that way in Packingtown. Sometimes there
would be a particular room that you could point out--if anybody slept in
that room he was just as good as dead. With this house it had been the
Irish first; and then a Bohemian family had lost a child of it--though,
to be sure, that was uncertain, since it was hard to tell what was the
matter with children who worked in the yards. In those days there had
been no law about the age of children--the packers had worked all but
the babies. At this remark the family looked puzzled, and Grandmother
Majauszkiene again had to make an explanation--that it was against the
law for children to work before they were sixteen. What was the sense of
that? they asked. They had been thinking of letting little Stanislovas
go to work. Well, there was no need to worry, Grandmother Majauszkiene
said--the law made no difference except that it forced people to lie
about the ages of their children. One would like to know what the
lawmakers expected them to do; there were families that had no possible
means of support except the children, and the law provided them no
other way of getting a living. Very often a man could get no work in
Packingtown for months, while a child could go and get a place easily;
there was always some new machine, by which the packers could get as
much work out of a child as they had been able to get out of a man, and
for a third of the pay.

To come back to the house again, it was the woman of the next family
that had died. That was after they had been there nearly four years, and
this woman had had twins regularly every year--and there had been more
than you could count when they moved in. After she died the man would
go to work all day and leave them to shift for themselves--the neighbors
would help them now and then, for they would almost freeze to death. At
the end there were three days that they were alone, before it was found
out that the father was dead. He was a "floorsman" at Jones's, and a
wounded steer had broken loose and mashed him against a pillar. Then the
children had been taken away, and the company had sold the house that
very same week to a party of emigrants.

So this grim old women went on with her tale of horrors. How much of it
was exaggeration--who could tell? It was only too plausible. There
was that about consumption, for instance. They knew nothing about
consumption whatever, except that it made people cough; and for two
weeks they had been worrying about a coughing-spell of Antanas. It
seemed to shake him all over, and it never stopped; you could see a red
stain wherever he had spit upon the floor.

And yet all these things were as nothing to what came a little later.
They had begun to question the old lady as to why one family had been
unable to pay, trying to show her by figures that it ought to have been
possible; and Grandmother Majauszkiene had disputed their figures--"You
say twelve dollars a month; but that does not include the interest."

Then they stared at her. "Interest!" they cried.

"Interest on the money you still owe," she answered.

"But we don't have to pay any interest!" they exclaimed, three or four
at once. "We only have to pay twelve dollars each month."

And for this she laughed at them. "You are like all the rest," she said;
"they trick you and eat you alive. They never sell the houses without
interest. Get your deed, and see."

Then, with a horrible sinking of the heart, Teta Elzbieta unlocked her
bureau and brought out the paper that had already caused them so many
agonies. Now they sat round, scarcely breathing, while the old lady, who
could read English, ran over it. "Yes," she said, finally, "here it is,
of course: 'With interest thereon monthly, at the rate of seven per cent
per annum.'"

And there followed a dead silence. "What does that mean?" asked Jurgis
finally, almost in a whisper.

"That means," replied the other, "that you have to pay them seven
dollars next month, as well as the twelve dollars."

Then again there was not a sound. It was sickening, like a nightmare,
in which suddenly something gives way beneath you, and you feel yourself
sinking, sinking, down into bottomless abysses. As if in a flash of
lightning they saw themselves--victims of a relentless fate, cornered,
trapped, in the grip of destruction. All the fair structure of their
hopes came crashing about their ears.--And all the time the old woman
was going on talking. They wished that she would be still; her voice
sounded like the croaking of some dismal raven. Jurgis sat with his
hands clenched and beads of perspiration on his forehead, and there was
a great lump in Ona's throat, choking her. Then suddenly Teta Elzbieta
broke the silence with a wail, and Marija began to wring her hands and
sob, "Ai! Ai! Beda man!"

All their outcry did them no good, of course. There sat Grandmother
Majauszkiene, unrelenting, typifying fate. No, of course it was not
fair, but then fairness had nothing to do with it. And of course they
had not known it. They had not been intended to know it. But it was in
the deed, and that was all that was necessary, as they would find when
the time came.

Somehow or other they got rid of their guest, and then they passed a
night of lamentation. The children woke up and found out that something
was wrong, and they wailed and would not be comforted. In the morning,
of course, most of them had to go to work, the packing houses would not
stop for their sorrows; but by seven o'clock Ona and her stepmother were
standing at the door of the office of the agent. Yes, he told them, when
he came, it was quite true that they would have to pay interest. And
then Teta Elzbieta broke forth into protestations and reproaches, so
that the people outside stopped and peered in at the window. The agent
was as bland as ever. He was deeply pained, he said. He had not told
them, simply because he had supposed they would understand that they had
to pay interest upon their debt, as a matter of course.

So they came away, and Ona went down to the yards, and at noontime saw
Jurgis and told him. Jurgis took it stolidly--he had made up his mind to
it by this time. It was part of fate; they would manage it somehow--he
made his usual answer, "I will work harder." It would upset their plans
for a time; and it would perhaps be necessary for Ona to get work
after all. Then Ona added that Teta Elzbieta had decided that little
Stanislovas would have to work too. It was not fair to let Jurgis and
her support the family--the family would have to help as it could.
Previously Jurgis had scouted this idea, but now knit his brows and
nodded his head slowly--yes, perhaps it would be best; they would all
have to make some sacrifices now.

So Ona set out that day to hunt for work; and at night Marija came home
saying that she had met a girl named Jasaityte who had a friend that
worked in one of the wrapping rooms in Brown's, and might get a place
for Ona there; only the forelady was the kind that takes presents--it
was no use for any one to ask her for a place unless at the same time
they slipped a ten-dollar bill into her hand. Jurgis was not in the
least surprised at this now--he merely asked what the wages of the place
would be. So negotiations were opened, and after an interview Ona came
home and reported that the forelady seemed to like her, and had said
that, while she was not sure, she thought she might be able to put her
at work sewing covers on hams, a job at which she would earn as much as
eight or ten dollars a week. That was a bid, so Marija reported, after
consulting her friend; and then there was an anxious conference at home.
The work was done in one of the cellars, and Jurgis did not want Ona to
work in such a place; but then it was easy work, and one could not have
everything. So in the end Ona, with a ten-dollar bill burning a hole in
her palm, had another interview with the forelady.

Meantime Teta Elzbieta had taken Stanislovas to the priest and gotten a
certificate to the effect that he was two years older than he was; and
with it the little boy now sallied forth to make his fortune in the
world. It chanced that Durham had just put in a wonderful new lard
machine, and when the special policeman in front of the time station
saw Stanislovas and his document, he smiled to himself and told him to
go--"Czia! Czia!" pointing. And so Stanislovas went down a long stone
corridor, and up a flight of stairs, which took him into a room lighted
by electricity, with the new machines for filling lard cans at work
in it. The lard was finished on the floor above, and it came in little
jets, like beautiful, wriggling, snow-white snakes of unpleasant odor.
There were several kinds and sizes of jets, and after a certain precise
quantity had come out, each stopped automatically, and the wonderful
machine made a turn, and took the can under another jet, and so on,
until it was filled neatly to the brim, and pressed tightly, and
smoothed off. To attend to all this and fill several hundred cans of
lard per hour, there were necessary two human creatures, one of whom
knew how to place an empty lard can on a certain spot every few seconds,
and the other of whom knew how to take a full lard can off a certain
spot every few seconds and set it upon a tray.

And so, after little Stanislovas had stood gazing timidly about him for
a few minutes, a man approached him, and asked what he wanted, to which
Stanislovas said, "Job." Then the man said "How old?" and Stanislovas
answered, "Sixtin." Once or twice every year a state inspector would
come wandering through the packing plants, asking a child here and there
how old he was; and so the packers were very careful to comply with the
law, which cost them as much trouble as was now involved in the boss's
taking the document from the little boy, and glancing at it, and then
sending it to the office to be filed away. Then he set some one else at
a different job, and showed the lad how to place a lard can every time
the empty arm of the remorseless machine came to him; and so was decided
the place in the universe of little Stanislovas, and his destiny till
the end of his days. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, it
was fated that he should stand upon a certain square foot of floor from
seven in the morning until noon, and again from half-past twelve till
half-past five, making never a motion and thinking never a thought,
save for the setting of lard cans. In summer the stench of the warm lard
would be nauseating, and in winter the cans would all but freeze to his
naked little fingers in the unheated cellar. Half the year it would be
dark as night when he went in to work, and dark as night again when
he came out, and so he would never know what the sun looked like on
weekdays. And for this, at the end of the week, he would carry home
three dollars to his family, being his pay at the rate of five cents per
hour--just about his proper share of the total earnings of the million
and three-quarters of children who are now engaged in earning their
livings in the United States.

And meantime, because they were young, and hope is not to be stifled
before its time, Jurgis and Ona were again calculating; for they had
discovered that the wages of Stanislovas would a little more than pay
the interest, which left them just about as they had been before! It
would be but fair to them to say that the little boy was delighted with
his work, and at the idea of earning a lot of money; and also that the
two were very much in love with each other.

Jurgis and Ona are in love and desire to make plans for their wedding. Ona suggests to Teta Elzbieta that they do without the veselija, but this keeps her "lying awake all night. They decide to wait in order to save up money for a proper wedding feast. They know it will take four to five months to raise such a sum. The family meets an old Lithuanian woman who lives only a block away. The old woman brings nothing but bad news. This woman, Grandmother Majauszkiene, "had lived in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element. The old woman tells them that the house they bought was, in fact, not new. It had been built by a company whose only goal is to sell the house, then raise the rent so high that the buyer cannot afford it. The buyer will be evicted, and the company will resell the house. The house that the family bought had previously been sold four times. Grandmother Majauszkiene gives the family a brief history of Packingtown. The first immigrant group in Packingtown were the Germans, skilled butchers brought in by the packers from abroad to start the company. Cheap labor from Ireland soon arrived, and the Germans left. For six or eight years, Packingtown had been an Irish city, but then the Irish went on strike, and Durham imported cheaper labor to replace them. There were still some Irish left, running the unions and the police, but most had been displaced by the Bohemians who had been displaced by the Poles. Lithuanians were now the cheaper labor ,and even their jobs are being threatened by the Slovaks, for they are the poorest immigrants yet and will work for very little money. Packingtown is a place for "rats in a trap," though as a socialist, Grandmother Majauszkiene believed that soon the people will rise up and murder the packers. The old grandmother tells them that all the families who had lived in their house had suffered from some kind of bad luck. Someone always gets consumption, which makes the family worry about Dede Antanas and his persistent cough. All of the families have lost a child working in the yards since "in those days there had been no law about the age of children--the packers had worked all but the babies. Grandmother Majauszkiene also tells them most of the families had not been able to keep up with the rent because of the interest payments. This shocks the family because they did not realize they are supposed to pay interest. Grandmother Majauszkiene shows them in their deed that they are responsible for seven percent--an extra seven dollars per month in rent that they had not expected to pay. The family is distraught and when Ona tells Jurgis of this development, he accepts it as fate and promises to work harder. He agrees that both Ona and young Stanislovas should work. Ona bribes one of the foreladies at the packing plant and gets a job in the wrapping-room at Brown's. Teta Elzbieta goes to a priest and gets a fraudulent document saying that Stanislovas is sixteen, older than he actually is, and he takes a position working with a machine that packs lard into cans. He earns three dollars a week for his work. Because Ona and Jurgis are young and still in love, they continue to plan for the wedding, glad that Stanislovas's job covers the extra interest payment they had not known about

Jurgis and Ona are in love, and they can't wait to get married. Still, Teta Elzbieta insists that they hold a proper wedding feast, even if their family is poor. Otherwise, they will have given up all of their home country traditions. They are certain that the cost of the wedding feast will be returned at the feast, but they aren't sure how to raise enough upfront money to hold it in the first place. Ona begins to consider getting a job. Then, something awful happens that makes all of their new security fall apart. There is another Lithuanian family living nearby, the Majauzkis family. Grandmother Majauszkiene says that her house, which is fifteen years old, has been built by a company that makes all of its profits cheating poor people. They build houses on the cheap, without caring about anything except the outside appearance, and then mark up the cost thirty times over. The whole point of this real estate scam is to attract people who have just enough money for the huge down payment, but not enough to keep up with the monthly payments. Once they miss one monthly payment, the whole family will be evicted. And then the company will be able to sell the house again, to another poor family, for another huge down payment. There have been wave after wave of different nationalities coming to Packingtown to work for these factories: first the Germans, then the Irish, then the Polish, then the Lithuanians, then the Slovaks. Each wave of immigrants only stays until the factory managers find another group willing to work for less. They attract people from different European countries by spreading stories in those countries about better wages and higher quality of life. What they don't tell you is that, yeah, the pay is better in America than it is in Lithuania, but the cost of living is much, much higher. So that money doesn't go as far as it would in the Old Country. So, there have been several families who have lived in Jurgis's house before they moved in. None of these families have been able to keep up their payments, and they have all been evicted. What's more, every family that has lived in that house has had at least one member who has caught tuberculosis. Grandmother Majauszkiene continues her list of horrors: she points out that children in this area often get sick because they have to go to work so young. The law may say you can only start work at sixteen, but there is no enforcement, and the meatpacking plants are always happy to hire kids who will do the same work as an adult for a third of the money. The family members hearing all of this are shocked - they don't really understand about tuberculosis, but they have noticed that Antanas has been coughing solidly for the last two weeks. The worst thing that Grandmother Majauszkiene has to tell them is about interest: she informs them that their monthly payment is $12 not including interest. They had no idea that their payments would also include interest on the money they still owe . They bring their house deed to Grandmother Majauszkiene to examine, and she points out one line that they had missed, demanding 7% monthly interest. So, the upshot is that they don't just have to pay $12 per month; they have to pay $7 on top of that. The family begins to cry out in agony: they are sure they are ruined. The whole family spends the evening weeping and protesting, but the next morning, they still have to go to work. They have no choice: Ona has to get a job, and so does thirteen-year-old Stanislovas. Jurgis agrees: they all have to make sacrifices now. Marija has a connection to a girl at Brown's, so they manage to arrange a place for Ona in the wrapping department at the packing plant. Jurgis isn't happy about it because Ona will be working in the basement, but at least the work will just be sewing, and thus pretty easy. Meanwhile, Teta Elzbieta takes Stanislovas to a priest to get his age certified as two years higher than it actually is. Stanislovas gets a job manning a machine that sprays lard into cans for selling. The person who hires him asks him how old he is, Stanislovas says sixteen, and that's that - the company feels that it has done its legal duty, even though Stanislovas is clearly still a kid. And with that, Stanislovas's fate is decided: he will be uncomfortable, and he will work hard year after year; he will never see the sun during the week, and he will never learn anything new. But Jurgis and Ona are still optimistic. Their hope for the future isn't gone - yet.

From an old Lithuanian widow, Grandmother Majauszkiene, Jurgis and his family learn that their house is not brand new; in fact, it is fifteen years old. Jurgis is the fifth person to attempt to pay for this particular house, paying a price that is already three times the cost to build it. Majauszkiene also mentions paying interest on the mortgage; this is news to Jurgis, who again vows to work harder. Now Ona and Stanislovas, one of Elzbieta's children, must seek employment. Ona pays $10 to get a job at Brown's, and Stanislovas lies about his age, with help from the priest, and lands a job tending a lard machine. With another disaster seemingly averted, Jurgis and Ona once again begin to discuss plans for their wedding.

Although Chapter 6 begins and ends with mention of the love between Jurgis and Ona, the pages in between show how the public manifestation of their love -- their wedding -- must be postponed as bills and adversity dominate their lives. In the middle of their misfortune, Jurgis and Ona meet Grandmother Majauszkiene. As a character, Grandmother Majauszkiene serves two major purposes. The first deals with the influx of immigrants. Having worked hard enough and long enough to purchase her house, she has lived in the neighborhood long enough to see many families come and go, attempting unsuccessfully to make timely house payments. Tragedy strikes each family and ethnic group -- the Germans, the Irish, the Bohemians, and the Poles -- but the builders, who represent industry, don't care about the struggles of working people. Grandmother Majauszkiene is also the first socialist Jurgis encounters. Not much is made of her political affiliation; in fact it is referred to as a "strange thing." It is strange only because it is different, and it isn't talked about because Jurgis is not yet in a position to be willing to listen to and appreciate the party's message. The dependence on money is of paramount importance from this chapter until the end of the book. Constantly Jurgis works harder and harder, only to find himself further and further in debt. The house, due to the added and hidden expenses, ends up costing much more than it initially appears to. The false sense of security that buying the house suggests parallels the false sense of security immigrants have when coming to America. Immigrants are seduced by promises of riches and success and are willing to work extremely hard to turn their dreams into reality; but Sinclair argues that the system isn't designed to promote success. In fact, as more and more youths are forced to join the labor force in order to help keep their families alive; the very American dream that lured immigrant families to America destroys those families. Glossary lose all caste to lose social status or position. consumption a disease causing the wasting away of the body, especially, formerly, tuberculosis of the lungs.

Grandmother Majauszkiene, a wizened old Lithuanian neighbor, explains to the family that houses such as the one they have taken are a swindle. She and her son were lucky enough to make the payments long enough to own the house but most people are never able to do so. She explains that the houses are more than fifteen years old and that they were built with the cheapest, shoddiest materials. No one is able to buy the houses because, for the Packingtown workers, missing even one month's payment means eviction and the forfeiture of everything paid on it. The family is shocked to learn that they have to pay interest on their debt, bringing the actual monthly payment close to twenty dollars. Grandmother Majauszkiene came to Packingtown when the work force was mostly German. The Irish took the Germans' place, and now the Slovaks have taken the place of the Irish. The companies grind down and wear out successive generations of immigrant workers. Four families tried to buy the home that Ona, Jurgis, and their family now live in. One by one, each failed due to the death of a key wage earner through accident or illness. By paying ten dollars to the forelady, Ona obtains a job sewing covers on hams in a cellar. The young Stanislovas lies about his age and obtains a job working a lard-canning machine

The family's encounter with Grandmother Majauszkiene foreshadows these immigrants' eventual fate. The real-estate companies have trapped them in a scheme by selling them a house that is shiny and pretty on the outside but rotten on the inside. In this way, the house is similar to the tins containing rotten and diseased meats--like these meat products, the house is sold on its appearance. This ruse also exemplifies the betrayal of the American Dream by capitalism. The home is the symbolic center of the family, and owning one's own home is a central tenet of the American Dream. The real-estate company's swindling of Jurgis and his family suggests that the capitalism that makes the American Dream possible also, paradoxically, destroys it. Grandmother Majauszkiene has seen successive generations of immigrant laborers crowd into Packingtown where they are ground down and worn out. Those who survive enter the web of graft and corruption and, by doing so, advance in power and status, mostly by abusing the next generation of immigrants. The successive waves of wage laborers who come to Packingtown to face abuse and degradation recall the image of the animals being herded to slaughter in the stockyards. These immigrants either fail to succeed or they compromise their moral principles. Either way, as with the ill-fated animals, forces beyond their control determine their respective fates. An important premise of the novel is that the political and governmental systems that support American capitalism are as rotten and corrupt as the business world itself. Sinclair makes clear that the few labor reform laws aimed at preventing abusive labor practices are largely ineffective. The child labor laws forbidding children under the age of sixteen to work do nothing to keep children from being forced to labor at grueling jobs, since the desperate need for money necessitates that these youths work any job that they can. The very structure of capitalist economics, in Sinclair's portrayal, demands such a sacrifice in order for one to survive. Throughout The Jungle, Sinclair uses narrative incidents such as Stanislovas's exploitation as evidence to support the argument that working from within capitalism is not effective. Socialism, he argues, is the only viable political and economic system. Jurgis's naturalization to become an American citizen, which might otherwise be seen as an encouraging step on his way toward achieving the American Dream, is tainted with corruption. The democratic process is entirely besmirched by politicians with hands caught in the deep pockets of big capitalists. Elections are rigged through an extensive vote-buying scheme, and members of the Chicago criminal underworld take advantage of ignorant, impoverished wage laborers to pervert the democratic process according to the wishes of big businessmen and their cronies.


All summer long the family toiled, and in the fall they had money
enough for Jurgis and Ona to be married according to home traditions of
decency. In the latter part of November they hired a hall, and invited
all their new acquaintances, who came and left them over a hundred
dollars in debt.

It was a bitter and cruel experience, and it plunged them into an agony
of despair. Such a time, of all times, for them to have it, when their
hearts were made tender! Such a pitiful beginning it was for their
married life; they loved each other so, and they could not have the
briefest respite! It was a time when everything cried out to them that
they ought to be happy; when wonder burned in their hearts, and leaped
into flame at the slightest breath. They were shaken to the depths of
them, with the awe of love realized--and was it so very weak of them
that they cried out for a little peace? They had opened their hearts,
like flowers to the springtime, and the merciless winter had fallen upon
them. They wondered if ever any love that had blossomed in the world had
been so crushed and trampled!

Over them, relentless and savage, there cracked the lash of want; the
morning after the wedding it sought them as they slept, and drove
them out before daybreak to work. Ona was scarcely able to stand with
exhaustion; but if she were to lose her place they would be ruined, and
she would surely lose it if she were not on time that day. They all
had to go, even little Stanislovas, who was ill from overindulgence in
sausages and sarsaparilla. All that day he stood at his lard machine,
rocking unsteadily, his eyes closing in spite of him; and he all but
lost his place even so, for the foreman booted him twice to waken him.

It was fully a week before they were all normal again, and meantime,
with whining children and cross adults, the house was not a pleasant
place to live in. Jurgis lost his temper very little, however, all
things considered. It was because of Ona; the least glance at her was
always enough to make him control himself. She was so sensitive--she was
not fitted for such a life as this; and a hundred times a day, when he
thought of her, he would clench his hands and fling himself again at the
task before him. She was too good for him, he told himself, and he was
afraid, because she was his. So long he had hungered to possess her,
but now that the time had come he knew that he had not earned the right;
that she trusted him so was all her own simple goodness, and no virtue
of his. But he was resolved that she should never find this out, and so
was always on the watch to see that he did not betray any of his ugly
self; he would take care even in little matters, such as his manners,
and his habit of swearing when things went wrong. The tears came so
easily into Ona's eyes, and she would look at him so appealingly--it
kept Jurgis quite busy making resolutions, in addition to all the other
things he had on his mind. It was true that more things were going on at
this time in the mind of Jurgis than ever had in all his life before.

He had to protect her, to do battle for her against the horror he saw
about them. He was all that she had to look to, and if he failed she
would be lost; he would wrap his arms about her, and try to hide her
from the world. He had learned the ways of things about him now. It was
a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost. You did not
give feasts to other people, you waited for them to give feasts to
you. You went about with your soul full of suspicion and hatred; you
understood that you were environed by hostile powers that were trying to
get your money, and who used all the virtues to bait their traps with.
The store-keepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of lies to
entice you; the very fences by the wayside, the lampposts and telegraph
poles, were pasted over with lies. The great corporation which employed
you lied to you, and lied to the whole country--from top to bottom it
was nothing but one gigantic lie.

So Jurgis said that he understood it; and yet it was really pitiful, for
the struggle was so unfair--some had so much the advantage! Here he was,
for instance, vowing upon his knees that he would save Ona from harm,
and only a week later she was suffering atrociously, and from the blow
of an enemy that he could not possibly have thwarted. There came a day
when the rain fell in torrents; and it being December, to be wet with it
and have to sit all day long in one of the cold cellars of Brown's was
no laughing matter. Ona was a working girl, and did not own waterproofs
and such things, and so Jurgis took her and put her on the streetcar.
Now it chanced that this car line was owned by gentlemen who were trying
to make money. And the city having passed an ordinance requiring them to
give transfers, they had fallen into a rage; and first they had made a
rule that transfers could be had only when the fare was paid; and later,
growing still uglier, they had made another--that the passenger must ask
for the transfer, the conductor was not allowed to offer it. Now Ona
had been told that she was to get a transfer; but it was not her way to
speak up, and so she merely waited, following the conductor about with
her eyes, wondering when he would think of her. When at last the time
came for her to get out, she asked for the transfer, and was refused.
Not knowing what to make of this, she began to argue with the conductor,
in a language of which he did not understand a word. After warning her
several times, he pulled the bell and the car went on--at which Ona
burst into tears. At the next corner she got out, of course; and as she
had no more money, she had to walk the rest of the way to the yards in
the pouring rain. And so all day long she sat shivering, and came home
at night with her teeth chattering and pains in her head and back. For
two weeks afterward she suffered cruelly--and yet every day she had to
drag herself to her work. The forewoman was especially severe with Ona,
because she believed that she was obstinate on account of having been
refused a holiday the day after her wedding. Ona had an idea that her
"forelady" did not like to have her girls marry--perhaps because she was
old and ugly and unmarried herself.

There were many such dangers, in which the odds were all against them.
Their children were not as well as they had been at home; but how could
they know that there was no sewer to their house, and that the drainage
of fifteen years was in a cesspool under it? How could they know that
the pale-blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and
doctored with formaldehyde besides? When the children were not well
at home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now she was
obliged to go to the drugstore and buy extracts--and how was she to know
that they were all adulterated? How could they find out that their tea
and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned
peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with
aniline dyes? And even if they had known it, what good would it have
done them, since there was no place within miles of them where any other
sort was to be had? The bitter winter was coming, and they had to save
money to get more clothing and bedding; but it would not matter in the
least how much they saved, they could not get anything to keep them
warm. All the clothing that was to be had in the stores was made of
cotton and shoddy, which is made by tearing old clothes to pieces and
weaving the fiber again. If they paid higher prices, they might get
frills and fanciness, or be cheated; but genuine quality they could not
obtain for love nor money. A young friend of Szedvilas', recently come
from abroad, had become a clerk in a store on Ashland Avenue, and he
narrated with glee a trick that had been played upon an unsuspecting
countryman by his boss. The customer had desired to purchase an alarm
clock, and the boss had shown him two exactly similar, telling him that
the price of one was a dollar and of the other a dollar seventy-five.
Upon being asked what the difference was, the man had wound up the first
halfway and the second all the way, and showed the customer how the
latter made twice as much noise; upon which the customer remarked that
he was a sound sleeper, and had better take the more expensive clock!

There is a poet who sings that

     "Deeper their heart grows and nobler their bearing,
     Whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died."

But it was not likely that he had reference to the kind of anguish that
comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and
yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating--unredeemed by the
slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish
that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted
into the vocabulary of poets--the details of it cannot be told in
polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one expect to excite
sympathy among lovers of good literature by telling how a family found
their home alive with vermin, and of all the suffering and inconvenience
and humiliation they were put to, and the hard-earned money they spent,
in efforts to get rid of them? After long hesitation and uncertainty
they paid twenty-five cents for a big package of insect powder--a patent
preparation which chanced to be ninety-five per cent gypsum, a harmless
earth which had cost about two cents to prepare. Of course it had not
the least effect, except upon a few roaches which had the misfortune to
drink water after eating it, and so got their inwards set in a coating
of plaster of Paris. The family, having no idea of this, and no more
money to throw away, had nothing to do but give up and submit to one
more misery for the rest of their days.

Then there was old Antanas. The winter came, and the place where he
worked was a dark, unheated cellar, where you could see your breath all
day, and where your fingers sometimes tried to freeze. So the old man's
cough grew every day worse, until there came a time when it hardly ever
stopped, and he had become a nuisance about the place. Then, too, a
still more dreadful thing happened to him; he worked in a place where
his feet were soaked in chemicals, and it was not long before they had
eaten through his new boots. Then sores began to break out on his feet,
and grow worse and worse. Whether it was that his blood was bad, or
there had been a cut, he could not say; but he asked the men about it,
and learned that it was a regular thing--it was the saltpeter. Every one
felt it, sooner or later, and then it was all up with him, at least for
that sort of work. The sores would never heal--in the end his toes would
drop off, if he did not quit. Yet old Antanas would not quit; he saw the
suffering of his family, and he remembered what it had cost him to get
a job. So he tied up his feet, and went on limping about and coughing,
until at last he fell to pieces, all at once and in a heap, like the
One-Horse Shay. They carried him to a dry place and laid him on the
floor, and that night two of the men helped him home. The poor old man
was put to bed, and though he tried it every morning until the end, he
never could get up again. He would lie there and cough and cough, day
and night, wasting away to a mere skeleton. There came a time when there
was so little flesh on him that the bones began to poke through--which
was a horrible thing to see or even to think of. And one night he had
a choking fit, and a little river of blood came out of his mouth. The
family, wild with terror, sent for a doctor, and paid half a dollar to
be told that there was nothing to be done. Mercifully the doctor did not
say this so that the old man could hear, for he was still clinging to
the faith that tomorrow or next day he would be better, and could go
back to his job. The company had sent word to him that they would keep
it for him--or rather Jurgis had bribed one of the men to come one
Sunday afternoon and say they had. Dede Antanas continued to believe
it, while three more hemorrhages came; and then at last one morning they
found him stiff and cold. Things were not going well with them then,
and though it nearly broke Teta Elzbieta's heart, they were forced to
dispense with nearly all the decencies of a funeral; they had only a
hearse, and one hack for the women and children; and Jurgis, who was
learning things fast, spent all Sunday making a bargain for these, and
he made it in the presence of witnesses, so that when the man tried to
charge him for all sorts of incidentals, he did not have to pay. For
twenty-five years old Antanas Rudkus and his son had dwelt in the forest
together, and it was hard to part in this way; perhaps it was just as
well that Jurgis had to give all his attention to the task of having
a funeral without being bankrupted, and so had no time to indulge in
memories and grief.

Now the dreadful winter was come upon them. In the forests, all summer
long, the branches of the trees do battle for light, and some of them
lose and die; and then come the raging blasts, and the storms of snow
and hail, and strew the ground with these weaker branches. Just so it
was in Packingtown; the whole district braced itself for the struggle
that was an agony, and those whose time was come died off in hordes.
All the year round they had been serving as cogs in the great packing
machine; and now was the time for the renovating of it, and the
replacing of damaged parts. There came pneumonia and grippe, stalking
among them, seeking for weakened constitutions; there was the annual
harvest of those whom tuberculosis had been dragging down. There came
cruel, cold, and biting winds, and blizzards of snow, all testing
relentlessly for failing muscles and impoverished blood. Sooner or later
came the day when the unfit one did not report for work; and then, with
no time lost in waiting, and no inquiries or regrets, there was a chance
for a new hand.

The new hands were here by the thousands. All day long the gates of the
packing houses were besieged by starving and penniless men; they came,
literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting with each
other for a chance for life. Blizzards and cold made no difference to
them, they were always on hand; they were on hand two hours before the
sun rose, an hour before the work began. Sometimes their faces
froze, sometimes their feet and their hands; sometimes they froze all
together--but still they came, for they had no other place to go. One
day Durham advertised in the paper for two hundred men to cut ice; and
all that day the homeless and starving of the city came trudging through
the snow from all over its two hundred square miles. That night
forty score of them crowded into the station house of the stockyards
district--they filled the rooms, sleeping in each other's laps, toboggan
fashion, and they piled on top of each other in the corridors, till the
police shut the doors and left some to freeze outside. On the morrow,
before daybreak, there were three thousand at Durham's, and the police
reserves had to be sent for to quell the riot. Then Durham's bosses
picked out twenty of the biggest; the "two hundred" proved to have been
a printer's error.

Four or five miles to the eastward lay the lake, and over this the
bitter winds came raging. Sometimes the thermometer would fall to ten or
twenty degrees below zero at night, and in the morning the streets would
be piled with snowdrifts up to the first-floor windows. The streets
through which our friends had to go to their work were all unpaved and
full of deep holes and gullies; in summer, when it rained hard, a man
might have to wade to his waist to get to his house; and now in winter
it was no joke getting through these places, before light in the morning
and after dark at night. They would wrap up in all they owned, but they
could not wrap up against exhaustion; and many a man gave out in these
battles with the snowdrifts, and lay down and fell asleep.

And if it was bad for the men, one may imagine how the women and
children fared. Some would ride in the cars, if the cars were running;
but when you are making only five cents an hour, as was little
Stanislovas, you do not like to spend that much to ride two miles. The
children would come to the yards with great shawls about their ears,
and so tied up that you could hardly find them--and still there would be
accidents. One bitter morning in February the little boy who worked at
the lard machine with Stanislovas came about an hour late, and screaming
with pain. They unwrapped him, and a man began vigorously rubbing his
ears; and as they were frozen stiff, it took only two or three rubs to
break them short off. As a result of this, little Stanislovas conceived
a terror of the cold that was almost a mania. Every morning, when it
came time to start for the yards, he would begin to cry and protest.
Nobody knew quite how to manage him, for threats did no good--it seemed
to be something that he could not control, and they feared sometimes
that he would go into convulsions. In the end it had to be arranged that
he always went with Jurgis, and came home with him again; and often,
when the snow was deep, the man would carry him the whole way on his
shoulders. Sometimes Jurgis would be working until late at night, and
then it was pitiful, for there was no place for the little fellow to
wait, save in the doorways or in a corner of the killing beds, and he
would all but fall asleep there, and freeze to death.

There was no heat upon the killing beds; the men might exactly as well
have worked out of doors all winter. For that matter, there was very
little heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms and
such places--and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most
risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they had
to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on above
the waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On the killing beds you were
apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned
against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand
upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving your
skin on it. The men would tie up their feet in newspapers and old sacks,
and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soaked again,
and so on, until by nighttime a man would be walking on great lumps the
size of the feet of an elephant. Now and then, when the bosses were
not looking, you would see them plunging their feet and ankles into the
steaming hot carcass of the steer, or darting across the room to
the hot-water jets. The cruelest thing of all was that nearly all of
them--all of those who used knives--were unable to wear gloves, and
their arms would be white with frost and their hands would grow numb,
and then of course there would be accidents. Also the air would be full
of steam, from the hot water and the hot blood, so that you could not
see five feet before you; and then, with men rushing about at the speed
they kept up on the killing beds, and all with butcher knives, like
razors, in their hands--well, it was to be counted as a wonder that
there were not more men slaughtered than cattle.

And yet all this inconvenience they might have put up with, if only it
had not been for one thing--if only there had been some place where they
might eat. Jurgis had either to eat his dinner amid the stench in which
he had worked, or else to rush, as did all his companions, to any one of
the hundreds of liquor stores which stretched out their arms to him. To
the west of the yards ran Ashland Avenue, and here was an unbroken
line of saloons--"Whiskey Row," they called it; to the north was
Forty-seventh Street, where there were half a dozen to the block, and at
the angle of the two was "Whiskey Point," a space of fifteen or twenty
acres, and containing one glue factory and about two hundred saloons.

One might walk among these and take his choice: "Hot pea-soup and boiled
cabbage today." "Sauerkraut and hot frankfurters. Walk in." "Bean soup
and stewed lamb. Welcome." All of these things were printed in many
languages, as were also the names of the resorts, which were infinite
in their variety and appeal. There was the "Home Circle" and the
"Cosey Corner"; there were "Firesides" and "Hearthstones" and "Pleasure
Palaces" and "Wonderlands" and "Dream Castles" and "Love's Delights."
Whatever else they were called, they were sure to be called "Union
Headquarters," and to hold out a welcome to workingmen; and there was
always a warm stove, and a chair near it, and some friends to laugh and
talk with. There was only one condition attached,--you must drink. If
you went in not intending to drink, you would be put out in no time, and
if you were slow about going, like as not you would get your head split
open with a beer bottle in the bargain. But all of the men understood
the convention and drank; they believed that by it they were getting
something for nothing--for they did not need to take more than one
drink, and upon the strength of it they might fill themselves up with a
good hot dinner. This did not always work out in practice, however, for
there was pretty sure to be a friend who would treat you, and then you
would have to treat him. Then some one else would come in--and, anyhow,
a few drinks were good for a man who worked hard. As he went back he did
not shiver so, he had more courage for his task; the deadly brutalizing
monotony of it did not afflict him so,--he had ideas while he worked,
and took a more cheerful view of his circumstances. On the way home,
however, the shivering was apt to come on him again; and so he would
have to stop once or twice to warm up against the cruel cold. As there
were hot things to eat in this saloon too, he might get home late to his
supper, or he might not get home at all. And then his wife might set out
to look for him, and she too would feel the cold; and perhaps she would
have some of the children with her--and so a whole family would drift
into drinking, as the current of a river drifts downstream. As if to
complete the chain, the packers all paid their men in checks, refusing
all requests to pay in coin; and where in Packingtown could a man go to
have his check cashed but to a saloon, where he could pay for the favor
by spending a part of the money?

From all of these things Jurgis was saved because of Ona. He never would
take but the one drink at noontime; and so he got the reputation of
being a surly fellow, and was not quite welcome at the saloons, and had
to drift about from one to another. Then at night he would go straight
home, helping Ona and Stanislovas, or often putting the former on a car.
And when he got home perhaps he would have to trudge several blocks, and
come staggering back through the snowdrifts with a bag of coal upon
his shoulder. Home was not a very attractive place--at least not this
winter. They had only been able to buy one stove, and this was a small
one, and proved not big enough to warm even the kitchen in the bitterest
weather. This made it hard for Teta Elzbieta all day, and for the
children when they could not get to school. At night they would sit
huddled round this stove, while they ate their supper off their laps;
and then Jurgis and Jonas would smoke a pipe, after which they would all
crawl into their beds to get warm, after putting out the fire to save
the coal. Then they would have some frightful experiences with the cold.
They would sleep with all their clothes on, including their overcoats,
and put over them all the bedding and spare clothing they owned; the
children would sleep all crowded into one bed, and yet even so they
could not keep warm. The outside ones would be shivering and sobbing,
crawling over the others and trying to get down into the center, and
causing a fight. This old house with the leaky weatherboards was a
very different thing from their cabins at home, with great thick walls
plastered inside and outside with mud; and the cold which came upon them
was a living thing, a demon-presence in the room. They would waken in
the midnight hours, when everything was black; perhaps they would hear
it yelling outside, or perhaps there would be deathlike stillness--and
that would be worse yet. They could feel the cold as it crept in through
the cracks, reaching out for them with its icy, death-dealing fingers;
and they would crouch and cower, and try to hide from it, all in vain.
It would come, and it would come; a grisly thing, a specter born in
the black caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing the
tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction. It was
cruel iron-hard; and hour after hour they would cringe in its grasp,
alone, alone. There would be no one to hear them if they cried out;
there would be no help, no mercy. And so on until morning--when they
would go out to another day of toil, a little weaker, a little nearer to
the time when it would be their turn to be shaken from the tree.

The family toils all through the summer, and at the end of November, they rent out a hall and hold a wedding feast for Jurgis and Ona. Though they expect to make their money back through gifts, they find that they do not. Jurgis and Ona start their marriage over a hundred dollars in debt, a "bitter and cruel experience. They had opened their hearts, like flowers to the springtime, and the merciless winter had fallen upon them. Ona must go back to work the next day, where she is treated with more cruelty because she had asked for a holiday after her wedding. Stanislovas, sick from overeating and drinking at the wedding, almost loses his job when the foreman has to kick him awake twice. In December, Ona walks to work one day in the pouring rain and, because she works in a damp cold basement, she develops a cruel sickness for two weeks. The children also are not well in this new home. The family does not realize that the food and milk they buy is adulterated with water, preservatives, and colorings. Their medicine is not pure. Even the pest poison they buy for the house is nothing more than cheaply produced dirt that does nothing to get rid of the rodents and insects. If they paid higher prices, they might get frills and fanciness, or be cheated; but genuine quality they could not obtain for love nor money. Old Antanas has his own cruelty at his job. He develops a persistent and harsh cough. The chemicals that he stands in all day begin to eat away his boots and soon he develops sores and infections on his feet. One day, he falls apart, and men have to carry him home. Though he tries every day, he is no longer able to get out of bed and one night dies of hemorrhages caused by his coughing. Jurgis has no time for grief, however, because he gives "all his attention to the task of having a funeral without being bankrupted. Winter comes to Chicago, and just as the storms of snow and hail kill the weaker trees and plants that fight for sunlight, so too does winter find and kill the weaker members of Packingtown. Each winter thousands die of pneumonia, grippe, tuberculosis, or consumption. Thousands of new workers still come trying to find jobs, and they are left freezing in the cold, waiting for a chance to do work. A misprint in the newspaper advertises jobs for 200 men to break ice. Three thousand show up for the jobs, but only twenty are taken. Police are called in to quell riots. The temperature falls to ten or twenty below zero, and it is a difficult task just to make the two mile walk from their house to work. Stanislovas develops a fear of the cold after another boy comes to work with his ears frozen. When someone else tries to warm them, they break off and fall from his head. There is no heat in the factories, so men on the killing beds often stick their freezing feet into the warm dead carcasses of the cattle to warm them. The steam rising from the killing floor means that men often cannot see five feet in front of them, which makes cutting and butchering the cattle very dangerous work. Outside of the factories are saloons. These places offer the men a hot meal on their lunch breaks with the condition that they all must drink while they eat. These saloons are also union headquarters, so each man is treated well as long as they pay for their drinks. Drinking helps the day go by a bit faster, and it helps the men stay warm. Once work is over, however, they find they are cold again and must stop into the saloons again. If a wife and her children become worried about the man, they might venture out to find him and wander into the saloons as well, "and so a whole family would drift into drinking. Jurgis takes a drink at lunch but becomes known as a surly fellow and goes straight home after his shift. Home is full of its own miseries. Because it has poor insulation, the bitter cold comes through the cracks in the house. The small heater that the family can afford does not even heat one room of the house. The children all sleep in the same bed with all of their clothes on, piled under all of the bedding and clothing that the family owns. This still does not keep them warm, however. The cold has "icy, death-dealing fingers. It is a "grisly thing, a specter born in the black caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing the tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction. Each day, the family leaves for work "a little weaker, a little nearer to the time when it would be their turn to be shaken from the tree

Sinclair begins Chapter Five with a sarcastic assault on the advertising industry. Before the late nineteenth century, advertising had mostly consisted of selling space in newspapers and publications. Industries focused their advertisements on listing available items and services. With the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, advertising transitioned into an industry of influence; advertisers helped companies distinguish themselves and their products from other products. Sinclair attacks the advertising industry because of its duplicitous nature. Advertisements portray a product in the best light, yet in doing so they often lie to consumers about the quality of products. Jurgis and his family are too naive to know about such lies and tricks, so they believe that such advertisements are meant to inform them, not persuade them. This ignorance of the ways of capitalist society and its mechanisms of persuasion and trickery exemplify the innocence of Jurgis and his family. The family, in this way, is an archetype of innocence. An archetype is a character that represents common themes in culture. The loss of innocence archetype is most commonly associated with the story of Adam and Eve from the Hebrew Bible. These characters come into the world without understanding the way in which the culture around them has devolved into a "sinful" world that seeks to take advantage of them. The result is that such archetypes lose their naive understandings of the world by going through extreme hardships. Often the loss of innocence involves death. Tamoszius Kuszleika's speech to Jurgis explaining the mechanism of worker exploitation in the meat packing factories is one of the novel's important passages. Tamoszius is now his own character, yet he also retains some identification with Sinclair's own personality in the first chapter. By explaining the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation in the factories, Tamoszius acts as a kind of prophet, foretelling Jurgis's future in the industry as the story of everyman's struggle to survive. This is similar to Sinclair's own understanding of his role in writing the novel. In his innocence, Jurgis denies the principles of laissez-faire economics to Tamoszius. Laissez-faire is an economic system that stipulates that all industry should be free from governmental regulation or control. In laissez-faire economics, a society will succeed through the mechanisms of pure capitalism in which individuals and individual corporations can grow at any cost and without interference. Jurgis does not understand that such a system usually only applies in a macroeconomic sense, to large economies and industries. In the microeconomic sense, laissez-faire economics seeks to take advantage of those persons or industries that are smaller and less influential. No person is smaller in the novel than Jurgis, though he does not initially understand this dynamic. Grandmother Majauszkiene also serves a prophetic role in the novel. She gives the family the history of Packingtown and tells them of the particular history of their house. Everyone in that house undergoes intense hardships and each family has lost a child while living there. This is an instance of foreshadowing for, in a future chapter, Jurgis and Ona will lose two children. The loss of Jurgis's first-born son will be a turning point in the novel. In Chapter Seven, Sinclair uses Chicago's brutal weather as a metaphor for the family's growing difficulty and as a chance to foreshadow their demise. The weather is described in both realistic and metaphorical terms. As an example of realism, the cold rain of December causes severe illness in Ona. This begins her physical hardships, which directly cause her emotional and mental hardships. As a metaphor, Sinclair describes the way in which the weather kills the blooming trees and flowers of summer. The blooming foliage represents the dream of Jurgis and the family. The weather represents the general conditions that cause the family's demise.

The family works all summer and, in fall, Ona and Jurgis get married. And of course, after all the cleaning up after the veselija, they find that all of their new acquaintances have left them a hundred dollars in debt . Jurgis and Ona are crushed - this seems like a terrible beginning to their married life. Jurgis can't stop noticing Ona, whom he thinks is too sensitive and good for this time of life. Jurgis feels that he has failed Ona, and promises himself to work harder to protect her from the awful realities of their lives. There are so many things that go wrong that they have absolutely no way to plan for: Ona gets caught in the drenching rain on her way to work one day so she gets sick. The children of the family keep getting sick. The family has no way of knowing that there is a cesspool under their house because there is no plumbing and no sewer line leading to their home. Teta Elzbieta doesn't know what kind of medicines to buy in this new place. And none of them recognize that their food has unknown additives and preservatives that aren't good for them. They can't find anything of quality to buy - everything is cheap and poorly made. The narrator cites a line from Matthew Arnold's poem, "Modern Sappho" . But the narrator points out that the kind of pathetic, ugly troubles that come with poverty don't make it into poetry. Poets don't even have a language to talk about the struggles that face people like Jurgis and Ona. And then there is Antanas. The cellar where he works is not heated, so his cough is growing worse and worse. The brining chemicals have also eaten through Antanas's boots, and have given him intense sores on his feet that won't heal. The men he works with tell him that he has to quit - not only will the sores never heal, but if Antanas keeps walking around barefoot in the saltpeter , his toes will drop off. Antanas refuses to quit, but his body can't handle the strain. Antanas collapses one day, and he just can't get up again. He coughs all day and all night, but he keeps hoping he will be well enough to get back to work the next morning. But, finally, Antanas dies. They are too poor to give him a proper funeral according to the old customs, even though Teta Elzbieta protests. Now winter has come, with its bitter, biting winds. The packing houses have long lines of poor men waiting outside, desperate for a job in these tough times. They fight and jostle for a place. And getting around the city in the cold and snow is difficult. The boy who works on the lard canning machine with Stanislovas comes out of the cold one day screaming in pain. The men at the factory start rubbing him down quickly to warm him up. But it only takes two or three rubs to break his ears right off, since they are frostbitten. This gives Stanislovas a deadly fear of the cold. Finally, he will only leave for work in the morning if Jurgis will take him through the snow. Jurgis often has to carry him on his shoulders. And since Stanislovas refuses to go home by himself, he will almost freeze to death waiting for Jurgis. The killing beds are also unheated. The men who handle knives can't wear gloves, which numbs their hands and makes them more likely to have accidents. What makes all of this so unpleasant is that there is nowhere to eat. Jurgis has two choices: he can either eat his meals surrounded by the stench of the stockyards, or he can rush to a bar and eat there. But you can't enter these bars without drinking, which means yet another expense. The only thing that keeps Jurgis from getting drunk during these meals is thoughts of Ona. For her, he stays sober. The house only has one small coal-burning stove for heat. The whole family has to huddle around it, including the children after they get home from school. At night, they have to sleep in all of their clothes to try and keep warm. The house has no insulation and is poorly built, so there are tons of drafts. The cold is like a living thing trying to get in at them. Their constant battle against the cold leaves them weaker day by day.

Summer passes into fall, and Jurgis and Ona are finally able to marry. The narrative flashback has now reached the time of the opening chapter. Unfortunately for the newlyweds, life is still tough and seemingly only getting tougher. Ona seems to be constantly sick, as are Elzbieta's children. And Dede Antanas develops both a dreadful cough and sores, which eventually lead to his death. Jurgis is too poor to pay for a proper burial. The winter takes its toll on everyone in Packingtown. A young boy who works with Stanislovas loses his ears to frostbite, and Stanislovas becomes deathly afraid of venturing out in the cold. Jurgis must now carry the boy to work. Most men turn to alcohol in order to escape from the harsh realities of their jobs and the weather; Jurgis does not out of respect for Ona. This winter, no one in Packingtown is living; they are all slowly dying.

Ironically, the event which should symbolize love and happiness -- the wedding -- ends up being the event that pushes the couple further into debt, adding more stress and frustration to their already harried lives. As Jurgis reflects about what has happened to him, he begins to lose some of his innocence. Chapter 7 illustrates Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest. All immigrants are facing harsh conditions; only the strong survive. Dede Antanas is old and weak and subsequently dies. Stanislovas, representing the young, doesn't suffer a physical death but does suffer an emotional death. Literally scared to death of the weather, Jurgis must physically force him to go to work. It is no wonder that the old and young -- who should not even be working in the first place -- are the first to die: They are not the strongest. The weakest die first, and just like dead branches on a tree, are the first to fall to the ground. Sinclair continues his jungle comparison by discussing people in terms of branches: Soon they are shaken from the tree. This tree is also used as an analogy for Lithuania. Unwittingly, Jurgis and his family moved from one jungle into another. In opposition to those who die are those who survive, and survival in this jungle, as foreshadowed in this chapter, means drinking and prostitution. This survival, though, is only a physical one, for the spirit is eventually destroyed. The body is also destroyed -- either through alcohol, injury, or disease. Glossary pathos the quality in something experienced or observed which arouses feelings of pity, sorrow, sympathy, or compassion. vermin various insects, bugs, or small animals regarded as pests because they are destructive or disease-carrying, such as flies, lice, rats, or weasels. saltpeter potassium nitrate, which is a colorless, crystalline compound used in fertilizers, gunpowder, and preservatives, etc. hack a carriage or coach for hire. grippe influenza.

Ona and Jurgis's veselija has put them over a hundred dollars in debt. Illness strikes the family frequently due to the unsanitary conditions of Packingtown, but no one can take a day off work to recover. Winter brings bitter cold and impassable snow drifts. The companies don't provide adequate heating at work. There is a wave of death in Packingtown as the bad weather and disease claims the weakened, the hungry, and the old, including Dede Antanas. Thousands wait to take the vacant places in the plants. Many men succumb to the allure of whiskey and beer and become alcoholics. Jurgis resists these temptations because he is determined to shield Ona and their family from the tortures of homelessness and starvation