For three weeks after his injury Jurgis never got up from bed. It was
a very obstinate sprain; the swelling would not go down, and the pain
still continued. At the end of that time, however, he could contain
himself no longer, and began trying to walk a little every day, laboring
to persuade himself that he was better. No arguments could stop him, and
three or four days later he declared that he was going back to work. He
limped to the cars and got to Brown's, where he found that the boss had
kept his place--that is, was willing to turn out into the snow the poor
devil he had hired in the meantime. Every now and then the pain would
force Jurgis to stop work, but he stuck it out till nearly an hour
before closing. Then he was forced to acknowledge that he could not go
on without fainting; it almost broke his heart to do it, and he stood
leaning against a pillar and weeping like a child. Two of the men had to
help him to the car, and when he got out he had to sit down and wait in
the snow till some one came along.

So they put him to bed again, and sent for the doctor, as they ought to
have done in the beginning. It transpired that he had twisted a tendon
out of place, and could never have gotten well without attention. Then
he gripped the sides of the bed, and shut his teeth together, and turned
white with agony, while the doctor pulled and wrenched away at his
swollen ankle. When finally the doctor left, he told him that he would
have to lie quiet for two months, and that if he went to work before
that time he might lame himself for life.

Three days later there came another heavy snowstorm, and Jonas and
Marija and Ona and little Stanislovas all set out together, an hour
before daybreak, to try to get to the yards. About noon the last two
came back, the boy screaming with pain. His fingers were all frosted,
it seemed. They had had to give up trying to get to the yards, and had
nearly perished in a drift. All that they knew how to do was to hold the
frozen fingers near the fire, and so little Stanislovas spent most of
the day dancing about in horrible agony, till Jurgis flew into a passion
of nervous rage and swore like a madman, declaring that he would
kill him if he did not stop. All that day and night the family was
half-crazed with fear that Ona and the boy had lost their places; and in
the morning they set out earlier than ever, after the little fellow had
been beaten with a stick by Jurgis. There could be no trifling in a case
like this, it was a matter of life and death; little Stanislovas could
not be expected to realize that he might a great deal better freeze
in the snowdrift than lose his job at the lard machine. Ona was quite
certain that she would find her place gone, and was all unnerved when
she finally got to Brown's, and found that the forelady herself had
failed to come, and was therefore compelled to be lenient.

One of the consequences of this episode was that the first joints of
three of the little boy's fingers were permanently disabled, and another
that thereafter he always had to be beaten before he set out to work,
whenever there was fresh snow on the ground. Jurgis was called upon to
do the beating, and as it hurt his foot he did it with a vengeance; but
it did not tend to add to the sweetness of his temper. They say that the
best dog will turn cross if he be kept chained all the time, and it
was the same with the man; he had not a thing to do all day but lie and
curse his fate, and the time came when he wanted to curse everything.

This was never for very long, however, for when Ona began to cry, Jurgis
could not stay angry. The poor fellow looked like a homeless ghost, with
his cheeks sunken in and his long black hair straggling into his eyes;
he was too discouraged to cut it, or to think about his appearance. His
muscles were wasting away, and what were left were soft and flabby. He
had no appetite, and they could not afford to tempt him with delicacies.
It was better, he said, that he should not eat, it was a saving. About
the end of March he had got hold of Ona's bankbook, and learned that
there was only three dollars left to them in the world.

But perhaps the worst of the consequences of this long siege was that
they lost another member of their family; Brother Jonas disappeared. One
Saturday night he did not come home, and thereafter all their efforts to
get trace of him were futile. It was said by the boss at Durham's that
he had gotten his week's money and left there. That might not be true,
of course, for sometimes they would say that when a man had been killed;
it was the easiest way out of it for all concerned. When, for instance,
a man had fallen into one of the rendering tanks and had been made into
pure leaf lard and peerless fertilizer, there was no use letting the
fact out and making his family unhappy. More probable, however, was
the theory that Jonas had deserted them, and gone on the road, seeking
happiness. He had been discontented for a long time, and not without
some cause. He paid good board, and was yet obliged to live in a family
where nobody had enough to eat. And Marija would keep giving them all
her money, and of course he could not but feel that he was called upon
to do the same. Then there were crying brats, and all sorts of misery;
a man would have had to be a good deal of a hero to stand it all without
grumbling, and Jonas was not in the least a hero--he was simply a
weatherbeaten old fellow who liked to have a good supper and sit in the
corner by the fire and smoke his pipe in peace before he went to bed.
Here there was not room by the fire, and through the winter the kitchen
had seldom been warm enough for comfort. So, with the springtime, what
was more likely than that the wild idea of escaping had come to him?
Two years he had been yoked like a horse to a half-ton truck in Durham's
dark cellars, with never a rest, save on Sundays and four holidays in
the year, and with never a word of thanks--only kicks and blows and
curses, such as no decent dog would have stood. And now the winter was
over, and the spring winds were blowing--and with a day's walk a man
might put the smoke of Packingtown behind him forever, and be where the
grass was green and the flowers all the colors of the rainbow!

But now the income of the family was cut down more than one-third, and
the food demand was cut only one-eleventh, so that they were worse off
than ever. Also they were borrowing money from Marija, and eating up
her bank account, and spoiling once again her hopes of marriage and
happiness. And they were even going into debt to Tamoszius Kuszleika
and letting him impoverish himself. Poor Tamoszius was a man without
any relatives, and with a wonderful talent besides, and he ought to
have made money and prospered; but he had fallen in love, and so given
hostages to fortune, and was doomed to be dragged down too.

So it was finally decided that two more of the children would have to
leave school. Next to Stanislovas, who was now fifteen, there was a
girl, little Kotrina, who was two years younger, and then two boys,
Vilimas, who was eleven, and Nikalojus, who was ten. Both of these last
were bright boys, and there was no reason why their family should starve
when tens of thousands of children no older were earning their own
livings. So one morning they were given a quarter apiece and a roll with
a sausage in it, and, with their minds top-heavy with good advice, were
sent out to make their way to the city and learn to sell newspapers.
They came back late at night in tears, having walked for the five or
six miles to report that a man had offered to take them to a place where
they sold newspapers, and had taken their money and gone into a store to
get them, and nevermore been seen. So they both received a whipping, and
the next morning set out again. This time they found the newspaper
place, and procured their stock; and after wandering about till nearly
noontime, saying "Paper?" to every one they saw, they had all their
stock taken away and received a thrashing besides from a big newsman
upon whose territory they had trespassed. Fortunately, however, they
had already sold some papers, and came back with nearly as much as they
started with.

After a week of mishaps such as these, the two little fellows began to
learn the ways of the trade--the names of the different papers, and how
many of each to get, and what sort of people to offer them to, and where
to go and where to stay away from. After this, leaving home at four
o'clock in the morning, and running about the streets, first with
morning papers and then with evening, they might come home late at night
with twenty or thirty cents apiece--possibly as much as forty cents.
From this they had to deduct their carfare, since the distance was so
great; but after a while they made friends, and learned still more, and
then they would save their carfare. They would get on a car when the
conductor was not looking, and hide in the crowd; and three times out
of four he would not ask for their fares, either not seeing them,
or thinking they had already paid; or if he did ask, they would hunt
through their pockets, and then begin to cry, and either have their
fares paid by some kind old lady, or else try the trick again on a new
car. All this was fair play, they felt. Whose fault was it that at the
hours when workingmen were going to their work and back, the cars were
so crowded that the conductors could not collect all the fares? And
besides, the companies were thieves, people said--had stolen all their
franchises with the help of scoundrelly politicians!

Now that the winter was by, and there was no more danger of snow, and no
more coal to buy, and another room warm enough to put the children into
when they cried, and enough money to get along from week to week
with, Jurgis was less terrible than he had been. A man can get used
to anything in the course of time, and Jurgis had gotten used to lying
about the house. Ona saw this, and was very careful not to destroy his
peace of mind, by letting him know how very much pain she was suffering.
It was now the time of the spring rains, and Ona had often to ride to
her work, in spite of the expense; she was getting paler every day, and
sometimes, in spite of her good resolutions, it pained her that Jurgis
did not notice it. She wondered if he cared for her as much as ever, if
all this misery was not wearing out his love. She had to be away from
him all the time, and bear her own troubles while he was bearing his;
and then, when she came home, she was so worn out; and whenever they
talked they had only their worries to talk of--truly it was hard, in
such a life, to keep any sentiment alive. The woe of this would flame up
in Ona sometimes--at night she would suddenly clasp her big husband
in her arms and break into passionate weeping, demanding to know if
he really loved her. Poor Jurgis, who had in truth grown more
matter-of-fact, under the endless pressure of penury, would not know
what to make of these things, and could only try to recollect when
he had last been cross; and so Ona would have to forgive him and sob
herself to sleep.

The latter part of April Jurgis went to see the doctor, and was given a
bandage to lace about his ankle, and told that he might go back to work.
It needed more than the permission of the doctor, however, for when he
showed up on the killing floor of Brown's, he was told by the foreman
that it had not been possible to keep his job for him. Jurgis knew that
this meant simply that the foreman had found some one else to do the
work as well and did not want to bother to make a change. He stood in
the doorway, looking mournfully on, seeing his friends and companions at
work, and feeling like an outcast. Then he went out and took his place
with the mob of the unemployed.

This time, however, Jurgis did not have the same fine confidence, nor
the same reason for it. He was no longer the finest-looking man in the
throng, and the bosses no longer made for him; he was thin and haggard,
and his clothes were seedy, and he looked miserable. And there were
hundreds who looked and felt just like him, and who had been wandering
about Packingtown for months begging for work. This was a critical time
in Jurgis' life, and if he had been a weaker man he would have gone
the way the rest did. Those out-of-work wretches would stand about the
packing houses every morning till the police drove them away, and then
they would scatter among the saloons. Very few of them had the nerve
to face the rebuffs that they would encounter by trying to get into the
buildings to interview the bosses; if they did not get a chance in the
morning, there would be nothing to do but hang about the saloons the
rest of the day and night. Jurgis was saved from all this--partly, to
be sure, because it was pleasant weather, and there was no need to
be indoors; but mainly because he carried with him always the pitiful
little face of his wife. He must get work, he told himself, fighting
the battle with despair every hour of the day. He must get work! He must
have a place again and some money saved up, before the next winter came.

But there was no work for him. He sought out all the members of his
union--Jurgis had stuck to the union through all this--and begged them
to speak a word for him. He went to every one he knew, asking for a
chance, there or anywhere. He wandered all day through the buildings;
and in a week or two, when he had been all over the yards, and into
every room to which he had access, and learned that there was not a job
anywhere, he persuaded himself that there might have been a change in
the places he had first visited, and began the round all over; till
finally the watchmen and the "spotters" of the companies came to know
him by sight and to order him out with threats. Then there was nothing
more for him to do but go with the crowd in the morning, and keep in
the front row and look eager, and when he failed, go back home, and play
with little Kotrina and the baby.

The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jurgis saw so plainly the
meaning of it. In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he
had gotten a job the first day; but now he was second-hand, a damaged
article, so to speak, and they did not want him. They had got the
best of him--they had worn him out, with their speeding-up and their
carelessness, and now they had thrown him away! And Jurgis would make
the acquaintance of others of these unemployed men and find that they
had all had the same experience. There were some, of course, who had
wandered in from other places, who had been ground up in other mills;
there were others who were out from their own fault--some, for instance,
who had not been able to stand the awful grind without drink. The vast
majority, however, were simply the worn-out parts of the great merciless
packing machine; they had toiled there, and kept up with the pace, some
of them for ten or twenty years, until finally the time had come when
they could not keep up with it any more. Some had been frankly told
that they were too old, that a sprier man was needed; others had given
occasion, by some act of carelessness or incompetence; with most,
however, the occasion had been the same as with Jurgis. They had been
overworked and underfed so long, and finally some disease had laid them
on their backs; or they had cut themselves, and had blood poisoning, or
met with some other accident. When a man came back after that, he would
get his place back only by the courtesy of the boss. To this there was
no exception, save when the accident was one for which the firm was
liable; in that case they would send a slippery lawyer to see him, first
to try to get him to sign away his claims, but if he was too smart for
that, to promise him that he and his should always be provided with
work. This promise they would keep, strictly and to the letter--for two
years. Two years was the "statute of limitations," and after that the
victim could not sue.

What happened to a man after any of these things, all depended upon
the circumstances. If he were of the highly skilled workers, he would
probably have enough saved up to tide him over. The best paid men,
the "splitters," made fifty cents an hour, which would be five or six
dollars a day in the rush seasons, and one or two in the dullest. A
man could live and save on that; but then there were only half a dozen
splitters in each place, and one of them that Jurgis knew had a family
of twenty-two children, all hoping to grow up to be splitters like their
father. For an unskilled man, who made ten dollars a week in the rush
seasons and five in the dull, it all depended upon his age and the
number he had dependent upon him. An unmarried man could save, if he did
not drink, and if he was absolutely selfish--that is, if he paid no
heed to the demands of his old parents, or of his little brothers and
sisters, or of any other relatives he might have, as well as of the
members of his union, and his chums, and the people who might be
starving to death next door.

For three weeks after his injury, Jurgis never leaves his bed. He tries to go back to work, and finds that his boss has saved his job, but he is unable to work through the pain. A doctor examines him again and finds that he had twisted a tendon. The doctor works on his foot and then tells him that he must stay in bed for two months "and that if he went to work before that time he might lame himself for life. A few days later, there is another awful snowstorm and Stanislovas gets a nasty frost on his fingers. He tries to warm his fingers, but they are frozen. He damages his knuckles for life and screams in pain in the house until Jurgis beats him to be quiet. From that day forward, Stanislovas has to be beaten before he will leave the house during the cold. When the spring finally comes, the family loses one of its members. Jonas disappears and when the family asks his boss about him, his boss only says that he had collected his week's pay and left. This could mean that Jonas was killed on the job, for the bosses were adept at covering up accidents, but the family is almost sure that Jonas had left town to find work in the countryside. He was a very unhappy man and for two years "had been yoked like a horse to a half-ton truck in Durham's dark cellars" having to give much of his wages to the family so they could survive. Marija's savings begins to drain and the family borrows money from Tamoszius Kuszleika. Tamoszius gives them money because he is in love with Marija and is thus "doomed to be dragged down too. They decide that two of the children have to leave school to go to work. They are each given a quarter and are told to go sell newspapers. The first day, a man tells him that he will give them papers, but he takes their money and does not. The children receive a beating when they get home, but are sent out the next day with more money. The next day, they sell papers but have their stock stolen by a man after they intrude on his paper-selling territory. They cover their expenses that day, however, and slowly begin to learn the tricks of the paper trade. The children soon learn that they can sneak onto trolley cars to avoid paying the fare. They feel this is fair since "Whose fault was it that at the hours when workingmen were going to their work and back, the cars were so crowded that the conductors could not collect all the fares. They soon learn to whom they should sell papers and what parts of town to stay away from, and they begin to bring home money. Jurgis finally has permission by the doctor to return to work. He goes back to the killing floors but finds that the boss was forced to give his job away. Jurgis no longer has "the same fine confidence" and looks tired and beaten down while waiting in the lines for work. There is no work for him. Now he is a "second-hand. damaged article. and they did not want him. Jurgis has become another of the "worn-out parts of the great merciless packing-machine. Because Jurgis has a family to support, he faces dire poverty

Jurgis lies in bed for three weeks before deciding that he is healed and he has to go back to work. His boss is willing to take him back, and Jurgis manages to work almost a full day before he has to be led, crying, to a streetcar to go home. Finally, the family calls a doctor. It turns out that Jurgis hasn't just sprained his ankle - his tendon has been twisted out of place. He needs another two months of bed rest for it to heal. There is a heavy blizzard three days later. Jonas, Marija, Ona, and Stanislovas go to work together. Ona and Stanislovas come back at noon. Neither of them could get through the snowdrifts, and Stanislovas has gotten frostbite on several of his fingers. Jurgis beats Stanislovas the next morning to make him go out again into the cold the next morning. They cannot afford to have Stanislovas lose his job. This disastrous day has two results for Stanislovas: he loses the use of three of his fingers from the frostbite, and Jurgis has to beat him every morning to make him go out to work during the winter. Jurgis has become so bad-tempered that he beats Stanislovas cruelly, at least until it makes Ona cry. Jurgis has lost his appetite and will not eat. He decides it's better anyway, because he knows they have practically no savings left. Jonas also disappears. One Saturday, he doesn't come home, and they never see him again. Jonas's supervisor says he collected his week's pay and left. The family can't be sure if that's true, because sometimes the meatpacking plants won't tell the families the truth if one of their workers falls into the rendering tanks and gets processed into lard and fertilizer . Still, they are pretty sure that Jonas just got fed up and left - how could he want to stay at his terrible job? It's not like he's enjoying a decent home life, with the cold and the crying children. So they have no choice but to borrow more money from Marija, who is once again putting off her dreams of marriage. They are even borrowing money from Tamoszius Kuszleika. So the family decides that two more of the children have to enter the work force. The next oldest of Teta Elzbieta's children is a thirteen-year-old girl, Kotrina, who helps around the house. But Teta Elzbieta also has two smart sons whom they decide to send into the working world: Vilimas and Nikalojus . Vilimas and Nikalojus both enter the working world as paper boys. It takes them a long time to figure out which papers they should sell and how they could make their money - though they aren't pulling in much of a profit. Ona is growing thinner and paler, and she is distressed that Jurgis isn't noticing how much she has changed. Jurgis has no idea why she is sometimes angry with him. In late April, Jurgis gets the doctor's go-ahead to return to work. Jurgis has to rejoin the unemployed men waiting outside the factory for a job. Now he is worried: he is no longer the muscular guy he was two years ago. He can't be confident that he will be given preference for a job. Jurgis is eager for a job, and refuses to fall into despair. He doesn't do what so many of his unemployed fellows do, which is to hit the bars everyday. Even so, there just isn't work anywhere. He tries to use his union connections, and even that gets Jurgis nowhere. What makes Jurgis bitter is that it is the system itself that has drained his energy and muscle - when he was fresh from Lithuania, he got hired right away, but now he's damaged goods, and the same factory that destroyed his health won't hire him back again. The only way that an unskilled laborer can make any money is if he refuses to support his family and just looks to feed himself.

Jurgis attempts to return to work, but the pain of a pulled tendon is unbearable. Jurgis is unable to work for two more months. During this time a major snowstorm strikes, preventing Ona and Stanislovas from getting to work. Attempting to do so, Stanislovas freezes his hands, permanently ruining the joints in several fingers. From this point on, Jurgis must beat the boy in order to get him to go to work. In the spring, Jonas suddenly disappears. The loss of his income convinces Jurgis that two more of Elzbieta's sons must quit school and go to work selling newspapers. Ona is deteriorating both physically and emotionally, but Jurgis is unable to recognize this or respond to her need for reassurance of his love for her. When Jurgis is finally strong enough to work again, he no longer has a position to return to so he joins the ranks of the unemployed. Now, however, he is no longer a strapping young man and isn't as employable.

Chapter 12 illustrates that cheating exists at all levels of business, from the owners and workers in the big companies to the young boys selling papers. Capitalism and cheating exist hand in hand. Jonas' disappearance can be accounted for in one of two ways. He may be a victim of an industrial accident and subsequent cover-up, or he may, in all likelihood, have just left. In Packingtown, having a family is a curse, not a blessing, and Jonas can find more success on his own, so it is more quite possible that Jonas abandoned his family. In addition to having been injured on the job, Jurgis is no longer the brawny young man he once was, and the industry that weakened and practically destroyed him no longer wants him. Jurgis searches in vain for any sort of employment, but he is no longer a viable candidate. Glossary penury lack of money, property, or necessities; extreme poverty.

Jurgis sprains his ankle and cannot return to work for almost three months. The frustration eats away at him and he often vents his bitterness upon his family. His infant son is often the only way for him to return to good humor. Stanislovas suffers frostbite in his hands, and the first joints on his fingers are permanently damaged. Jurgis often has to beat Stanislovas in order to make him go to work on snowy mornings. Jonas disappears, so the family sends Nikalojus and Vilimas, Teta Elzbieta's ten- and eleven-year-old sons, respectively, to work as newspaper sellers. After a few mishaps, the boys learn the tricks of the trade


During this time that Jurgis was looking for work occurred the death
of little Kristoforas, one of the children of Teta Elzbieta. Both
Kristoforas and his brother, Juozapas, were cripples, the latter having
lost one leg by having it run over, and Kristoforas having congenital
dislocation of the hip, which made it impossible for him ever to walk.
He was the last of Teta Elzbieta's children, and perhaps he had been
intended by nature to let her know that she had had enough. At any rate
he was wretchedly sick and undersized; he had the rickets, and though
he was over three years old, he was no bigger than an ordinary child
of one. All day long he would crawl around the floor in a filthy little
dress, whining and fretting; because the floor was full of drafts he was
always catching cold, and snuffling because his nose ran. This made
him a nuisance, and a source of endless trouble in the family. For his
mother, with unnatural perversity, loved him best of all her children,
and made a perpetual fuss over him--would let him do anything
undisturbed, and would burst into tears when his fretting drove Jurgis
wild.

And now he died. Perhaps it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that
morning--which may have been made out of some of the tubercular pork
that was condemned as unfit for export. At any rate, an hour after
eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in another hour he
was rolling about on the floor in convulsions. Little Kotrina, who was
all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after a while a
doctor came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl. No one
was really sorry about this except poor Elzbieta, who was inconsolable.
Jurgis announced that so far as he was concerned the child would have
to be buried by the city, since they had no money for a funeral; and at
this the poor woman almost went out of her senses, wringing her hands
and screaming with grief and despair. Her child to be buried in a
pauper's grave! And her stepdaughter to stand by and hear it said
without protesting! It was enough to make Ona's father rise up out of
his grave to rebuke her! If it had come to this, they might as well give
up at once, and be buried all of them together! . . . In the end Marija
said that she would help with ten dollars; and Jurgis being still
obdurate, Elzbieta went in tears and begged the money from the
neighbors, and so little Kristoforas had a mass and a hearse with white
plumes on it, and a tiny plot in a graveyard with a wooden cross to mark
the place. The poor mother was not the same for months after that; the
mere sight of the floor where little Kristoforas had crawled about would
make her weep. He had never had a fair chance, poor little fellow, she
would say. He had been handicapped from his birth. If only she had heard
about it in time, so that she might have had that great doctor to cure
him of his lameness! . . . Some time ago, Elzbieta was told, a Chicago
billionaire had paid a fortune to bring a great European surgeon over to
cure his little daughter of the same disease from which Kristoforas had
suffered. And because this surgeon had to have bodies to demonstrate
upon, he announced that he would treat the children of the poor, a piece
of magnanimity over which the papers became quite eloquent. Elzbieta,
alas, did not read the papers, and no one had told her; but perhaps it
was as well, for just then they would not have had the carfare to spare
to go every day to wait upon the surgeon, nor for that matter anybody
with the time to take the child.

All this while that he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow
hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage beast were lurking somewhere in the
pathway of his life, and he knew it, and yet could not help approaching
the place. There are all stages of being out of work in Packingtown, and
he faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest. There is a place
that waits for the lowest man--the fertilizer plant!

The men would talk about it in awe-stricken whispers. Not more than one
in ten had ever really tried it; the other nine had contented themselves
with hearsay evidence and a peep through the door. There were some
things worse than even starving to death. They would ask Jurgis if he
had worked there yet, and if he meant to; and Jurgis would debate the
matter with himself. As poor as they were, and making all the sacrifices
that they were, would he dare to refuse any sort of work that was
offered to him, be it as horrible as ever it could? Would he dare to go
home and eat bread that had been earned by Ona, weak and complaining as
she was, knowing that he had been given a chance, and had not had the
nerve to take it?--And yet he might argue that way with himself all
day, and one glimpse into the fertilizer works would send him away again
shuddering. He was a man, and he would do his duty; he went and made
application--but surely he was not also required to hope for success!

The fertilizer works of Durham's lay away from the rest of the plant.
Few visitors ever saw them, and the few who did would come out looking
like Dante, of whom the peasants declared that he had been into hell. To
this part of the yards came all the "tankage" and the waste products of
all sorts; here they dried out the bones,--and in suffocating cellars
where the daylight never came you might see men and women and children
bending over whirling machines and sawing bits of bone into all sorts of
shapes, breathing their lungs full of the fine dust, and doomed to die,
every one of them, within a certain definite time. Here they made the
blood into albumen, and made other foul-smelling things into things
still more foul-smelling. In the corridors and caverns where it was done
you might lose yourself as in the great caves of Kentucky. In the dust
and the steam the electric lights would shine like far-off twinkling
stars--red and blue-green and purple stars, according to the color of
the mist and the brew from which it came. For the odors of these ghastly
charnel houses there may be words in Lithuanian, but there are none in
English. The person entering would have to summon his courage as for a
cold-water plunge. He would go in like a man swimming under water; he
would put his handkerchief over his face, and begin to cough and choke;
and then, if he were still obstinate, he would find his head beginning
to ring, and the veins in his forehead to throb, until finally he would
be assailed by an overpowering blast of ammonia fumes, and would turn
and run for his life, and come out half-dazed.

On top of this were the rooms where they dried the "tankage," the mass
of brown stringy stuff that was left after the waste portions of the
carcasses had had the lard and tallow dried out of them. This dried
material they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had
mixed it up well with a mysterious but inoffensive brown rock which they
brought in and ground up by the hundreds of carloads for that purpose,
the substance was ready to be put into bags and sent out to the world
as any one of a hundred different brands of standard bone phosphate. And
then the farmer in Maine or California or Texas would buy this, at say
twenty-five dollars a ton, and plant it with his corn; and for several
days after the operation the fields would have a strong odor, and the
farmer and his wagon and the very horses that had hauled it would all
have it too. In Packingtown the fertilizer is pure, instead of being a
flavoring, and instead of a ton or so spread out on several acres under
the open sky, there are hundreds and thousands of tons of it in one
building, heaped here and there in haystack piles, covering the floor
several inches deep, and filling the air with a choking dust that
becomes a blinding sandstorm when the wind stirs.

It was to this building that Jurgis came daily, as if dragged by an
unseen hand. The month of May was an exceptionally cool one, and
his secret prayers were granted; but early in June there came a
record-breaking hot spell, and after that there were men wanted in the
fertilizer mill.

The boss of the grinding room had come to know Jurgis by this time, and
had marked him for a likely man; and so when he came to the door about
two o'clock this breathless hot day, he felt a sudden spasm of pain
shoot through him--the boss beckoned to him! In ten minutes more Jurgis
had pulled off his coat and overshirt, and set his teeth together and
gone to work. Here was one more difficulty for him to meet and conquer!

His labor took him about one minute to learn. Before him was one of
the vents of the mill in which the fertilizer was being ground--rushing
forth in a great brown river, with a spray of the finest dust flung
forth in clouds. Jurgis was given a shovel, and along with half a dozen
others it was his task to shovel this fertilizer into carts. That others
were at work he knew by the sound, and by the fact that he sometimes
collided with them; otherwise they might as well not have been there,
for in the blinding dust storm a man could not see six feet in front of
his face. When he had filled one cart he had to grope around him until
another came, and if there was none on hand he continued to grope till
one arrived. In five minutes he was, of course, a mass of fertilizer
from head to feet; they gave him a sponge to tie over his mouth, so that
he could breathe, but the sponge did not prevent his lips and eyelids
from caking up with it and his ears from filling solid. He looked like
a brown ghost at twilight--from hair to shoes he became the color of the
building and of everything in it, and for that matter a hundred yards
outside it. The building had to be left open, and when the wind blew
Durham and Company lost a great deal of fertilizer.

Working in his shirt sleeves, and with the thermometer at over a
hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every pore of Jurgis' skin,
and in five minutes he had a headache, and in fifteen was almost dazed.
The blood was pounding in his brain like an engine's throbbing; there
was a frightful pain in the top of his skull, and he could hardly
control his hands. Still, with the memory of his four months' siege
behind him, he fought on, in a frenzy of determination; and half an hour
later he began to vomit--he vomited until it seemed as if his inwards
must be torn into shreds. A man could get used to the fertilizer mill,
the boss had said, if he would make up his mind to it; but Jurgis now
began to see that it was a question of making up his stomach.

At the end of that day of horror, he could scarcely stand. He had to
catch himself now and then, and lean against a building and get his
bearings. Most of the men, when they came out, made straight for a
saloon--they seemed to place fertilizer and rattlesnake poison in one
class. But Jurgis was too ill to think of drinking--he could only make
his way to the street and stagger on to a car. He had a sense of humor,
and later on, when he became an old hand, he used to think it fun to
board a streetcar and see what happened. Now, however, he was too ill to
notice it--how the people in the car began to gasp and sputter, to
put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and transfix him with furious
glances. Jurgis only knew that a man in front of him immediately got up
and gave him a seat; and that half a minute later the two people on each
side of him got up; and that in a full minute the crowded car was nearly
empty--those passengers who could not get room on the platform having
gotten out to walk.

Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer mill a minute
after entering. The stuff was half an inch deep in his skin--his whole
system was full of it, and it would have taken a week not merely of
scrubbing, but of vigorous exercise, to get it out of him. As it was, he
could be compared with nothing known to men, save that newest discovery
of the savants, a substance which emits energy for an unlimited time,
without being itself in the least diminished in power. He smelled so
that he made all the food at the table taste, and set the whole family
to vomiting; for himself it was three days before he could keep anything
upon his stomach--he might wash his hands, and use a knife and fork, but
were not his mouth and throat filled with the poison?

And still Jurgis stuck it out! In spite of splitting headaches he would
stagger down to the plant and take up his stand once more, and begin to
shovel in the blinding clouds of dust. And so at the end of the week he
was a fertilizer man for life--he was able to eat again, and though
his head never stopped aching, it ceased to be so bad that he could not
work.

So there passed another summer. It was a summer of prosperity, all over
the country, and the country ate generously of packing house products,
and there was plenty of work for all the family, in spite of the
packers' efforts to keep a superfluity of labor. They were again able to
pay their debts and to begin to save a little sum; but there were one or
two sacrifices they considered too heavy to be made for long--it was
too bad that the boys should have to sell papers at their age. It was
utterly useless to caution them and plead with them; quite without
knowing it, they were taking on the tone of their new environment. They
were learning to swear in voluble English; they were learning to pick up
cigar stumps and smoke them, to pass hours of their time gambling with
pennies and dice and cigarette cards; they were learning the location
of all the houses of prostitution on the "Levee," and the names of
the "madames" who kept them, and the days when they gave their state
banquets, which the police captains and the big politicians all
attended. If a visiting "country customer" were to ask them, they could
show him which was "Hinkydink's" famous saloon, and could even point out
to him by name the different gamblers and thugs and "hold-up men" who
made the place their headquarters. And worse yet, the boys were getting
out of the habit of coming home at night. What was the use, they would
ask, of wasting time and energy and a possible carfare riding out to
the stockyards every night when the weather was pleasant and they could
crawl under a truck or into an empty doorway and sleep exactly as well?
So long as they brought home a half dollar for each day, what mattered
it when they brought it? But Jurgis declared that from this to ceasing
to come at all would not be a very long step, and so it was decided
that Vilimas and Nikalojus should return to school in the fall, and
that instead Elzbieta should go out and get some work, her place at home
being taken by her younger daughter.

Little Kotrina was like most children of the poor, prematurely made old;
she had to take care of her little brother, who was a cripple, and also
of the baby; she had to cook the meals and wash the dishes and clean
house, and have supper ready when the workers came home in the evening.
She was only thirteen, and small for her age, but she did all this
without a murmur; and her mother went out, and after trudging a couple
of days about the yards, settled down as a servant of a "sausage
machine."

Elzbieta was used to working, but she found this change a hard one, for
the reason that she had to stand motionless upon her feet from seven
o'clock in the morning till half-past twelve, and again from one till
half-past five. For the first few days it seemed to her that she
could not stand it--she suffered almost as much as Jurgis had from the
fertilizer, and would come out at sundown with her head fairly reeling.
Besides this, she was working in one of the dark holes, by electric
light, and the dampness, too, was deadly--there were always puddles of
water on the floor, and a sickening odor of moist flesh in the room. The
people who worked here followed the ancient custom of nature, whereby
the ptarmigan is the color of dead leaves in the fall and of snow in the
winter, and the chameleon, who is black when he lies upon a stump and
turns green when he moves to a leaf. The men and women who worked in
this department were precisely the color of the "fresh country sausage"
they made.

The sausage-room was an interesting place to visit, for two or three
minutes, and provided that you did not look at the people; the machines
were perhaps the most wonderful things in the entire plant. Presumably
sausages were once chopped and stuffed by hand, and if so it would
be interesting to know how many workers had been displaced by these
inventions. On one side of the room were the hoppers, into which men
shoveled loads of meat and wheelbarrows full of spices; in these great
bowls were whirling knives that made two thousand revolutions a minute,
and when the meat was ground fine and adulterated with potato flour,
and well mixed with water, it was forced to the stuffing machines on
the other side of the room. The latter were tended by women; there was
a sort of spout, like the nozzle of a hose, and one of the women would
take a long string of "casing" and put the end over the nozzle and then
work the whole thing on, as one works on the finger of a tight glove.
This string would be twenty or thirty feet long, but the woman would
have it all on in a jiffy; and when she had several on, she would press
a lever, and a stream of sausage meat would be shot out, taking
the casing with it as it came. Thus one might stand and see appear,
miraculously born from the machine, a wriggling snake of sausage of
incredible length. In front was a big pan which caught these creatures,
and two more women who seized them as fast as they appeared and twisted
them into links. This was for the uninitiated the most perplexing work
of all; for all that the woman had to give was a single turn of the
wrist; and in some way she contrived to give it so that instead of an
endless chain of sausages, one after another, there grew under her hands
a bunch of strings, all dangling from a single center. It was quite like
the feat of a prestidigitator--for the woman worked so fast that the eye
could literally not follow her, and there was only a mist of motion,
and tangle after tangle of sausages appearing. In the midst of the mist,
however, the visitor would suddenly notice the tense set face, with
the two wrinkles graven in the forehead, and the ghastly pallor of the
cheeks; and then he would suddenly recollect that it was time he was
going on. The woman did not go on; she stayed right there--hour after
hour, day after day, year after year, twisting sausage links and racing
with death. It was piecework, and she was apt to have a family to keep
alive; and stern and ruthless economic laws had arranged it that she
could only do this by working just as she did, with all her soul upon
her work, and with never an instant for a glance at the well-dressed
ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as at some wild beast in
a menagerie.

That spring, little Kristoforas dies. He had been a crippled child since birth, suffering from congenital dislocation of the hip. Teta Elzbieta is devastated as Kristoforas was her favorite child even though he had been "a nuisance, and a source of endless trouble in the family. He is killed by a tubercular sausage. An hour after eating the sausage, he begins crying in pain and dies before a doctor can reach him. Jurgis declares that he must be buried by the city in a pauper's grave, but Teta Elzbieta rebels and borrows money from Marija and the neighbors until she can afford to give her child a proper mass and burial. Jurgis cannot find work and faces the prospect of working in the fertilizer plant. The fertilizer plant is the worst factory in all of Packingtown. Some men would rather starve than work there, but Jurgis is ashamed that his wife makes all of their income. One summer day, after an intense heat spell, the foreman of the fertilizer plant comes out and gives Jurgis a job. He goes to work shoveling fertilizer into carts. The dust in the place is so thick that Jurgis cannot see anything around him. He is given a sponge to cover his mouth so that he does not breathe in the fertilizer dust, but it cakes in his ears and eyes and nose. His skin is soon covered with it and he gets a headache. After a half-an-hour, Jurgis vomits "until it seems as if his inwards must be torn into shreds. The boss tells him that a man will get used to the fertilizer shed if he puts his mind to it. After his day's work, Jurgis boards a train car to go home. All the passengers move away from him and soon they leave the car because of the stench. Jurgis smells so bad that, "it would have taken a week not merely of scrubbing, but of vigorous exercise, to get it out of him. He smells so bad that, when at dinner that night, he causes the entire family to vomit. Jurgis sticks it out, however, and soon the physical pains become bearable and he becomes "a fertilizer-man for life. The children, while selling newspaper, begin to become accustomed to life on the Chicago streets. Soon, they learn all the swear words. They smoke the butts of cigars, and they know where all the brothels are. Sometimes they do not come home at night and prefer to sleep under a truck or in a doorway. It is decided then that the boys should return to school and Teta Elzbieta should find a job, leaving the housework to Kotrina, the thirteen-year-old girl. Teta Elzbieta gets a job in the sausage-making factory. All the women who work there are the color of sausage. They stand all day over a machine that mixes up the meat with spices and potato-flour. It is pushed into a casing and a group of women then twists the meat into links. They work so fast that it seems to all be a blur, but these women have a hard life, standing all day and twisting sausages. They stay there "hour after hour, day after day, year after year, twisting sausage-links and racing with death. The sausage woman never has an instant to "glance at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who come to stare at her, as at some wild beast in a menagerie

In Chapter Eleven, Sinclair wages his criticism upon another institutional mechanism of capitalism, the banks. In describing "the run" on Marija's bank, Sinclair is noting the way in which laissez-faire monetary policies create difficult situations in which even poor people are at risk in losing all of their money through no fault of their own. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American banks were subject to great volatility. There were several notable "runs" on banks, or panics in which all the bank's depositors attempted to withdraw their money. If there is not enough money on hand , some depositors are at risk of losing their money if the bank fails. This kind of panic was responsible for causing the Great Depression in the 1930s. By telling this story, and by noting how the panic is falsely caused by a bar fight, Sinclair is critiquing the way in which lax regulation works against common people even in institutions that should be safe havens for people's money. This part of the novel also follows Jurgis as he is first broken down by the weather, once again a metaphor for the larger social and economic systems of oppression, and then broken physically by an accident on the killing floor. These two events, which cause him to sprain his ankle and which keep him from work for over two months, are the first real hardships that Jurgis had ever gone through in his life. While it is not explained as to whether such hardships in America are actually worse than hardships in Eastern Europe, the physicality of the hardships describes a further descent into the hell of Packingtown. Thus, the demise of the body becomes a place of descent into suffering. The destruction of the family is first described here as well. Jurgis and his family came to America with hopes of education and a better life for their children. This dream is shattered when the children must go to work. This is an example of the way in which forces of Social Darwinism deconstruct the meaning of family during this period of industrialization. The historical belief in the patriarchal family structure is destroyed as the children must enter the social "jungle" that bears the name of the novel. These children are subjected to the same hardships that their parents are subjected to and must map out their own methods to cope with such systems of oppression. These methods include not paying their fares on the trolley, a crime they justify. Those children, such as little Kristoforas, that cannot find ways to manipulate the system do not survive. In this "jungle" of society, only the fittest survive. As an employee at the fertilizer plant, Jurgis reaches his lowest point as a character. By becoming covered in animal waste and feces, his body becomes the center of suffering in the novel. Jurgis and his family had been social outcasts, as are the other residents of Packingtown, but Jurgis's job in the fertilizer plant now makes him a physical outcast in Packingtown. It can be argued that, in this way, Jurgis represents a Christ-figure in the novel. This figure undergoes intense persecution and physical harm, even to the point of death, in order to attain some kind of redemption or resurrection at the novel's conclusion. The scene in which Teta Elzbieta goes to work in the sausage factory is another example of how the meatpacking plants force a dehumanization of the novel's characters. In this scene, Sinclair uses a literary technique in showing how the women who make sausage links are dehumanized and described as if they themselves are the meat. They take on the color of the sausage. Their lives have no more meaning or significance than do the sausage links they make and tie. In this way, Sinclair poses the nameless women as pieces of meat themselves; they are nothing but a product that the meat industry consumes and disregards.

Teta Elzbieta's youngest child, a three-year-old boy named Kristoforas, suddenly dies. He was born with a congenital hip problem that made it impossible for him to walk. None of the family is really sorry about Kristoforas's death except for his mother. She has to beg her neighbors for the money to give him the kind of burial he would have gotten back in Lithuania. Jurgis has been looking for work all of this time. Finally, he realizes that he has no other choice: he has to go to look for work at Durham's fertilizer plant. The reason that this is a last resort is that the fertilizer plant is unbelievably unhealthy for its workers: they labor underground processing the bones of cattle and inhaling the fine dust this stuff sends into the air. The problem with inhaling this dust is that it is loaded with phosphates. Phosphorus is necessary for bone development , but as with any mineral, too much is a bad idea. For one thing, phosphates often carry traces of heavy metals that build up in the body and become toxic. Excessive phosphates by themselves can cause kidney failure in people. So, this is not stuff that you want to be inhaling all day, every day. This dust causes certain sickness and death, but Jurgis has no choice. He is, eventually, hired at the fertilizer plant. His job is to shovel fertilizer into carts. He spends much of his working day totally covered in animal byproducts. Jurgis can barely stand by the end of the day. He can only stagger home. He is so sick that he doesn't even notice how much the smell of his body is freaking out the people around him. Jurgis has so much fertilizer in him that he can't just wash it off - he is sweating it out, as well. At the dinner table, the smell of him makes his family vomit. Still, Jurgis keeps going back to the fertilizer plant, and soon he doesn't notice the smell anymore. The constant headaches don't stop, though. They manage to put aside some more money in the summer. Vilimas and Nikalojus have picked up bad habits in their paperboy jobs - they speak tons of English slang, and they're starting to get to know Chicago's criminal underworld. So the family decides that the two boys will go back to school in fall and Teta Elzbieta will go out to work. Kotrina, the only girl , will stay behind and look after the house. Kotrina is only thirteen, but she now has full care of the house, Antanas, and Juozapas. She has to do all the cooking and cleaning for everyone. Teta Elzbieta finds a job making sausage. She has a lot of trouble at first with headaches because she has to stand basically motionless the entire day running these sausage machines. It's another assembly line system, in which several people prepare the casing and then wait for the ground meat to come through a spout to fill the casing. Then, a woman ties off these long snakes of sausage into smaller links. It's endlessly repetitive, tedious work, but they have to do it to support their families.

While Jurgis searches for work, another tragedy strikes the family: Kristoforas, Elzbieta's youngest child, dies. She begs from the neighbors in order to have enough money for a funeral. Unable to find work anywhere else, Jurgis applies for and accepts a job at the fertilizer factory. From the moment he begins shoveling fertilizer into carts, Jurgis is covered with dust and begins suffering from headaches and dizziness. And now he smells horribly. But at least he has a job. During the summer, Elzbieta's sons take up disturbing habits -- swearing, smoking, gambling, and not coming home -- and in order to break them of these habits, Elzbieta herself goes to work, enabling her sons to return to school. If they attend school, then they will not be out on the streets. She ends up finding work in a sausage house, twisting sausage links.

Continuing his elaboration of survival of the fittest, Sinclair emphasizes survival techniques throughout Chapter 13. After weeks of frustration, Jurgis finally agrees to seek employment at the worst possible site -- the fertilizer plant. Jurgis is out of options and accepts the job, and even though it makes him physically ill, he keeps the job. He is determined to earn a living and support his family, no matter the cost to him as an individual. Fertilizer invades his clothes as the stench invades his person, and Jurgis is forced to live with his choice every moment of every day. Like Jurgis, Elzbieta does something she does not want to do: She gets a job. She does this in order to allow her children to attend school. Jurgis and Elzbieta represent the old-world work ethic, where parents endure all sorts of hardships for the sake of their children, working hard and sacrificing with the hope that their children will have a better life. Elzbieta and the other workers at the sausage plant are compared to animals in cages: When visitors tour the plant, they're encouraged to focus on the machines and not the people, which is what the tourists do. This not-too-subtle comment emphasizes the value of technology while simultaneously devaluing humans, another complaint directed towards capitalism. When Kristoforas dies, Marija loans Elzbieta some money for funeral expenses. This foreshadows the fact that one day the entire family will depend on Marija's income for survival, especially at a time when Jurgis is either unwilling or unable to provide for their basic wants and needs. Glossary obdurate not easily moved to pity or sympathy; hardhearted. charnel a building or place where corpses or bones are deposited. savant a learned person; eminent scholar. ptarmigan a brownish bird with feathered legs and feet, usually having white plumage in the winter. prestidigitator an expert at sleight of hand.

Teta Elzbieta's youngest child, Kristoforas, dies after eating bad meat. While the old woman is stricken with grief, the rest of the family is relieved, as Kristoforas was congenitally crippled and fussed continually, wearing the nerves of everyone but Teta Elzbieta. Marija loans Teta Elzbieta the money to pay for a real funeral because Jurgis refuses to help. In the spring, Jurgis looks unsuccessfully for work. He is worn out and unable to attract the boss's eye. He settles for the least desirable job around, a position in a fertilizer mill. The chemicals seep into his skin, making him smell as foul as the muck itself. The summer brings greater prosperity to the family. Vilimas and Nikalojus, however, begin to acquire bad habits on the streets, so the family sends them back to school. Teta Elzbieta takes a job in a sausage factory. Her thirteen-year-old daughter, Kotrina, takes care of Antanas and her other crippled brother, Juozapas. The bad working conditions wear on Teta Elzbieta's health--she must stand and perform the same repetitive motion for hours on end

In Packingtown, not even the arrival of spring brings cheer to the worker's life. Every season brings with it cause for suffering, which is as relentless as time itself in the wage laborer's world. These chapters illustrate the precarious existence of wage laborers--they are always on the verge of a financial crisis. The injury that incapacitates Jurgis is enough to upset the entire household's stability, forcing others to assume the burden of earning income. The world that Sinclair portrays is remarkably Darwinian, as Jurgis and his family are running a losing race for survival. The conditions of life for them are so harsh that mere survival is considered a success. The weak, the crippled, and the old are weeded out with brutal efficiency. Capitalists such as those who ran the Chicago stockyards in the early twentieth century often justified brutal labor practices with a philosophy known as Social Darwinism. This philosophy adapts Darwin's theory of evolution to economic struggle, implying that, as in nature, only the fittest and the strongest are meant to survive. According to Social Darwinism, wealthy capitalists were considered the fittest of the human race because they were so successful. The wage laboring class was considered an inferior form of humanity. The widespread racism and prejudice against immigrants helped this belief gain power and influence in turn-of-the-century American culture. By attributing Jurgis with a strong physique and an initially enthusiastic attitude, Sinclair tries to demonstrate the fiction of Social Darwinism. Capitalism ruins strong, healthy individuals as well as the crippled, the weak, and the old. Only those who are morally corrupt, it seems, survive. Marija's fear about being weighed down into the mud by her money is a metaphor for the evils of capitalism. Sinclair argues that this system of greed oppresses individuals; here, Marija's coins are a concretized form of money that physically oppresses her. The unassailable primacy of money has conditioned her to guard her money with her life. Marija's quasi-religious devotion to her coins seems to recall Jesus' admonition, according to the New Testament that "t is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God" . Though she clutches the money not because she is greedy but because she needs it to survive, Marija has been distorted by capitalism into an un-Christian figure, descending into the mud of base desire. Throughout these chapters, Sinclair accuses capitalism of undermining the family. Ona has to return to work a mere week after giving birth. She doesn't have the opportunity to be a mother to her child. Almost everyone is happy when the crippled Kristoforas dies because, from a reasoning, mathematical point of view--which is indeed the lens through which these immigrants must examine their lives--the child is a drain on the family's resources, a consumer without being a producer. Jurgis's long work hours prevent the development of a strong bond with his son. The desperate need for sustenance takes priority over sympathy and love, as evidenced by Jurgis's beating of the frostbitten Stanislovas. Jurgis and his family's poverty, a result of capitalist economics, prevent them from being together as a family. Jonas even disappears without warning; it is possible that he dies while at work, but it is more likely that he simply abandons the family, which has deteriorated into a collection of individuals struggling to eke out an existence. Within the capitalist system, families are a burden best avoided if a single individual wishes to survive.


With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a
sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great
majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom, as they found,
whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything
else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what had
been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they could
now study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read
a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest--that they use
everything of the pig except the squeal.

Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would
often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away
the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all
the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of
meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and
any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious
apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the
plant--a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by
plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man
could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of
this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so
bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump
into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which
destroyed the odor--a process known to the workers as "giving them
thirty per cent." Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be
found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as
"Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon
a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad
part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this
invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade--there
was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such
schemes--they had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the
odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and "California hams," which
were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut
out; and fancy "skinned hams," which were made of the oldest hogs, whose
skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them--that is,
until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled "head cheese!"

It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the
department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute
flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was
in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention
paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back
from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and
white--it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the
hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat
that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the
workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs.
There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from
leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about
on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man
could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of
the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would
put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread,
and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and
no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did
the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw
one--there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with
which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men
to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a
practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the
sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of
corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that
would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the
system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs
that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the
cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in
the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water--and
cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the
hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of
it they would make into "smoked" sausage--but as the smoking took
time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry
department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to
make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when
they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this
they would charge two cents more a pound.

Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta was placed, and such
was the work she was compelled to do. It was stupefying, brutalizing
work; it left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She was
part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed
for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence. There was
only one mercy about the cruel grind--that it gave her the gift of
insensibility. Little by little she sank into a torpor--she fell silent.
She would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening, and the three would walk
home together, often without saying a word. Ona, too, was falling into a
habit of silence--Ona, who had once gone about singing like a bird. She
was sick and miserable, and often she would barely have strength enough
to drag herself home. And there they would eat what they had to eat, and
afterward, because there was only their misery to talk of, they would
crawl into bed and fall into a stupor and never stir until it was time
to get up again, and dress by candlelight, and go back to the machines.
They were so numbed that they did not even suffer much from hunger, now;
only the children continued to fret when the food ran short.

Yet the soul of Ona was not dead--the souls of none of them were dead,
but only sleeping; and now and then they would waken, and these were
cruel times. The gates of memory would roll open--old joys would stretch
out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them, and
they would stir beneath the burden that lay upon them, and feel its
forever immeasurable weight. They could not even cry out beneath it; but
anguish would seize them, more dreadful than the agony of death. It was
a thing scarcely to be spoken--a thing never spoken by all the world,
that will not know its own defeat.

They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside. It
was not less tragic because it was so sordid, because it had to do with
wages and grocery bills and rents. They had dreamed of freedom; of a
chance to look about them and learn something; to be decent and clean,
to see their child grow up to be strong. And now it was all gone--it
would never be! They had played the game and they had lost. Six years
more of toil they had to face before they could expect the least
respite, the cessation of the payments upon the house; and how cruelly
certain it was that they could never stand six years of such a life as
they were living! They were lost, they were going down--and there was
no deliverance for them, no hope; for all the help it gave them the vast
city in which they lived might have been an ocean waste, a wilderness, a
desert, a tomb. So often this mood would come to Ona, in the nighttime,
when something wakened her; she would lie, afraid of the beating of her
own heart, fronting the blood-red eyes of the old primeval terror of
life. Once she cried aloud, and woke Jurgis, who was tired and cross.
After that she learned to weep silently--their moods so seldom came
together now! It was as if their hopes were buried in separate graves.

Jurgis, being a man, had troubles of his own. There was another specter
following him. He had never spoken of it, nor would he allow any one
else to speak of it--he had never acknowledged its existence to himself.
Yet the battle with it took all the manhood that he had--and once or
twice, alas, a little more. Jurgis had discovered drink.

He was working in the steaming pit of hell; day after day, week after
week--until now, there was not an organ of his body that did its work
without pain, until the sound of ocean breakers echoed in his head day
and night, and the buildings swayed and danced before him as he went
down the street. And from all the unending horror of this there was a
respite, a deliverance--he could drink! He could forget the pain, he
could slip off the burden; he would see clearly again, he would be
master of his brain, of his thoughts, of his will. His dead self would
stir in him, and he would find himself laughing and cracking jokes with
his companions--he would be a man again, and master of his life.

It was not an easy thing for Jurgis to take more than two or three
drinks. With the first drink he could eat a meal, and he could persuade
himself that that was economy; with the second he could eat another
meal--but there would come a time when he could eat no more, and then
to pay for a drink was an unthinkable extravagance, a defiance of the
age-long instincts of his hunger-haunted class. One day, however, he took
the plunge, and drank up all that he had in his pockets, and went home
half "piped," as the men phrase it. He was happier than he had been in a
year; and yet, because he knew that the happiness would not last, he was
savage, too with those who would wreck it, and with the world, and with
his life; and then again, beneath this, he was sick with the shame of
himself. Afterward, when he saw the despair of his family, and reckoned
up the money he had spent, the tears came into his eyes, and he began
the long battle with the specter.

It was a battle that had no end, that never could have one. But Jurgis
did not realize that very clearly; he was not given much time for
reflection. He simply knew that he was always fighting. Steeped in
misery and despair as he was, merely to walk down the street was to be
put upon the rack. There was surely a saloon on the corner--perhaps on
all four corners, and some in the middle of the block as well; and each
one stretched out a hand to him each one had a personality of its own,
allurements unlike any other. Going and coming--before sunrise and
after dark--there was warmth and a glow of light, and the steam of hot
food, and perhaps music, or a friendly face, and a word of good cheer.
Jurgis developed a fondness for having Ona on his arm whenever he went
out on the street, and he would hold her tightly, and walk fast. It was
pitiful to have Ona know of this--it drove him wild to think of it; the
thing was not fair, for Ona had never tasted drink, and so could not
understand. Sometimes, in desperate hours, he would find himself wishing
that she might learn what it was, so that he need not be ashamed in her
presence. They might drink together, and escape from the horror--escape
for a while, come what would.

So there came a time when nearly all the conscious life of Jurgis
consisted of a struggle with the craving for liquor. He would have ugly
moods, when he hated Ona and the whole family, because they stood in his
way. He was a fool to have married; he had tied himself down, had made
himself a slave. It was all because he was a married man that he was
compelled to stay in the yards; if it had not been for that he might
have gone off like Jonas, and to hell with the packers. There were few
single men in the fertilizer mill--and those few were working only for a
chance to escape. Meantime, too, they had something to think about while
they worked,--they had the memory of the last time they had been drunk,
and the hope of the time when they would be drunk again. As for Jurgis,
he was expected to bring home every penny; he could not even go with
the men at noontime--he was supposed to sit down and eat his dinner on a
pile of fertilizer dust.

This was not always his mood, of course; he still loved his family. But
just now was a time of trial. Poor little Antanas, for instance--who
had never failed to win him with a smile--little Antanas was not smiling
just now, being a mass of fiery red pimples. He had had all the diseases
that babies are heir to, in quick succession, scarlet fever, mumps, and
whooping cough in the first year, and now he was down with the measles.
There was no one to attend him but Kotrina; there was no doctor to
help him, because they were too poor, and children did not die of the
measles--at least not often. Now and then Kotrina would find time to sob
over his woes, but for the greater part of the time he had to be left
alone, barricaded upon the bed. The floor was full of drafts, and if he
caught cold he would die. At night he was tied down, lest he should kick
the covers off him, while the family lay in their stupor of exhaustion.
He would lie and scream for hours, almost in convulsions; and then, when
he was worn out, he would lie whimpering and wailing in his torment.
He was burning up with fever, and his eyes were running sores; in
the daytime he was a thing uncanny and impish to behold, a plaster of
pimples and sweat, a great purple lump of misery.

Yet all this was not really as cruel as it sounds, for, sick as he was,
little Antanas was the least unfortunate member of that family. He
was quite able to bear his sufferings--it was as if he had all these
complaints to show what a prodigy of health he was. He was the child of
his parents' youth and joy; he grew up like the conjurer's rosebush, and
all the world was his oyster. In general, he toddled around the kitchen
all day with a lean and hungry look--the portion of the family's
allowance that fell to him was not enough, and he was unrestrainable in
his demand for more. Antanas was but little over a year old, and already
no one but his father could manage him.

It seemed as if he had taken all of his mother's strength--had left
nothing for those that might come after him. Ona was with child again
now, and it was a dreadful thing to contemplate; even Jurgis, dumb and
despairing as he was, could not but understand that yet other agonies
were on the way, and shudder at the thought of them.

For Ona was visibly going to pieces. In the first place she was
developing a cough, like the one that had killed old Dede Antanas. She
had had a trace of it ever since that fatal morning when the greedy
streetcar corporation had turned her out into the rain; but now it was
beginning to grow serious, and to wake her up at night. Even worse than
that was the fearful nervousness from which she suffered; she would have
frightful headaches and fits of aimless weeping; and sometimes she would
come home at night shuddering and moaning, and would fling herself down
upon the bed and burst into tears. Several times she was quite beside
herself and hysterical; and then Jurgis would go half-mad with fright.
Elzbieta would explain to him that it could not be helped, that a woman
was subject to such things when she was pregnant; but he was hardly to
be persuaded, and would beg and plead to know what had happened. She
had never been like this before, he would argue--it was monstrous and
unthinkable. It was the life she had to live, the accursed work she had
to do, that was killing her by inches. She was not fitted for it--no
woman was fitted for it, no woman ought to be allowed to do such work;
if the world could not keep them alive any other way it ought to kill
them at once and be done with it. They ought not to marry, to have
children; no workingman ought to marry--if he, Jurgis, had known what a
woman was like, he would have had his eyes torn out first. So he would
carry on, becoming half hysterical himself, which was an unbearable
thing to see in a big man; Ona would pull herself together and fling
herself into his arms, begging him to stop, to be still, that she would
be better, it would be all right. So she would lie and sob out her
grief upon his shoulder, while he gazed at her, as helpless as a wounded
animal, the target of unseen enemies.

With two family members working in the cannery and the sausage making plant, the family sees all of the tricks that the packing industry uses to sell meat. The industry is especially good at manipulating spoiled meat so that it does not smell or look spoiled so that it can be sold. They pump meat full of pickling chemicals to rid it of its smells. They remove the bone from a ham, along with its rotted meat, and replace it with a hot piece of iron. They stop labeling meat as One, Two, or Three Grade and instead label it all as One Grade. They use "everything of the pig except the squeal," and they find new ways to market and sell each part. Teta Elzbieta's factory is especially bad. Rats are a problem in the storage sheds, and the men that work there put out poison bread. When the rats die, they often end up in the piles of meat. There are other things that go into the sausage as well, too horrible to name. Every few months, men are hired to clean out the waste barrels of spoiled meat, trash, rusty nails, and other things. It is "taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Soon, Elzbieta sinks into torpor. She and Ona become silent most of the time, too tired to speak. They are both sick and miserable from their work. They are "so numbed that they not even suffer much from hunger. Often, they remember what life had been like before, and their souls cry out in agony. They had dreamed of freedom in America, but now they cannot even see their child grow up to be strong. Ona sometimes cries about it at night, but Jurgis is tired and cross. She learns to weep silently. Jurgis becomes addicted to alcohol. He struggles with wanting to drink although he knows that he must bring every penny he can home with him. He has a drink with his meals, sometimes, and it makes him happy and allows him to loosen some of his burden. When he drinks, "his dead self would stir in him, and he would find himself laughing and cracking jokes with his companions - he would be a man again, and master of his life. He grows to resent his married life and his family, for they keep him from being able to drink more. He wishes that Ona would drink so that they could "escape from the horror. Soon, "nearly all the conscious life of Jurgis consisted of a struggle with the craving for liquor. Little Antanas is the least unfortunate member of the family. He is able to bear his sufferings and is healthy. He has so much strength and energy that his mother cannot handle him and cannot give him enough food. Only Jurgis can calm the child. Antanas soon gets sick with the measles and his crying and wailing are terrible. The family, however, is too tired to care for him, and since children do not often die of the measles, they simply let him cry until his disease passes. Ona's work is slowly killing her, and Jurgis thinks to himself that workingmen should not marry and have families because their women become too hysterical to manage

Although The Jungle was one of the most popular books of the early twentieth century, it did not necessarily bring about the kind of change that Sinclair hoped to persuade people was needed in American politics. Sinclair wrote the novel as a diatribe on the evils of capitalism. He argues through the story of Jurgis and his family that socialist economic policies will help cure the ills of American society. It was such scenes as is found in Chapter Fourteen, however, that actually captured the American public's imagination. The horrifying descriptions of the meat packing process created a public outrage and President Theodore Roosevelt, as well as Congress and other elected officials, were forced into passing sweeping reforms of the American food industry. These reforms, however, did not specifically address the themes that Sinclair brings to light in the novel, that of unjust working and social conditions. Jurgis's drinking problem becomes a commentary on the breaking apart of traditional family roles. While saloon life and alcohol consumption are secondary topics of criticism in The Jungle, they do offer a brief glimpse at what Sinclair saw as a motivating factor in destabilizing family life and human relations. Saloons of this period played important roles of political and economic function. They were masculine spaces and, as is exemplified by Jurgis's experience, often became second homes for men. In this way, traditional patriarchal family life loses its sense of purpose and is another victim to mechanisms of Social Darwinism. Family life becomes a burden; men seek to become lost in their own individual suffering. In Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen, Sinclair uses language that exemplifies the meaning of the book's title. In the novel, the idea of "jungle" means several different things. In this chapter, the reader begins to see that one meaning is the issue of the devolving of characters. In several instances, Sinclair gives Ona and Jurgis animalistic traits. Ona is like a hunted animal. Jurgis, when going to attack the foreman that has raped Ona, acts like a tiger, and when he is imprisoned, he acts like an animal in a cage. The social atmosphere of Packingtown has created characters that now know they must kill or be killed. In this way, the "jungle" is society framed in the terms of natural selection. The Christmas Eve scene that takes place while Jurgis is in prison is one of several "awakening" scenes in the novel. This first awakening is a kind of spiritual awakening. Christmas Eve is symbolic of Jurgis's transformation. Just as the birth of the Christ child is a symbol in Christianity of the promise of mankind's salvation, this scene in prison acts a kind of promise for Jurgis's future salvation. Jurgis does not yet have the intellectual tools to address his situation -- that will be a future awakening -- but this scene allows him to gain an understanding of the way the particular injustices of society work to repress him and his fellow workingmen.

Now they have family members with experience in pretty much all aspects of the meatpacking industry . So they know all of the underhanded tricks that the packing plants use to repackage waste material to sell to the public. Spoiled meat that has been pickled or smoked will have the bad part cut out. Then it will be sold as lunchmeat or boneless ham. When the whole ham is bad, that's when it gets sent to the sausage makers. It will get chopped up with other meat and then treated with chemicals to cut down the smell. Meat that falls on the floor will be picked up, dusted off, and put back into the grinder. Sausage meat also gets stored in huge piles that are kept under leaky ceilings and are overrun with rats, so it's filled with rodent feces and horrifying germs. Basically, the sausage production process is absolutely, completely revolting. The only way that Teta Elzbieta can stand this work is by letting her mind go dead. She stops feeling anything. In fact, the whole family has largely fallen silent from misery. They realize that it's another full six years before they will pay off the house, and they do not see how they can survive this misery. Jurgis begins to drink every now and again to forget the pain. So now Jurgis has something else to fight against all the time. He is ashamed of himself when he drinks, and when he realizes how much he spends on drinking, but he has so much trouble stopping. Jurgis also starts to resent Ona for keeping him tied down to this awful life in Packingtown. Without a family to support, he could leave like Jonas did. Jurgis still loves his family, but it's not a good time at home. For one thing, Antanas keeps getting sick - he has the measles right now, and he has also had scarlet fever, mumps, and whooping cough. Kotrina does her best to look after him, but they have no money for doctors and he pretty much just has to ride out his illnesses. Indeed, the fact that Antanas keeps getting sick and then recovering is proof of how hearty he really is: he's strong enough to keep bouncing back. In contrast, Ona is growing weaker and weaker. She has a persistent cough . She also has horrible headaches and depression. Jurgis feels that, by having dragged her into married life with him, he is killing her slowly. Sometimes, Ona falls into these fits of crying that will not be soothed.

The variety of jobs that the various members of Jurgis' family work in Packingtown enables them to experience firsthand the various "Packingtown swindles." Jurgis turns to alcohol to deal with his frustrations and sense of defeat. He does not succumb to the temptation all at once, but rather he gradually submits to its false promises of escape. While Jurgis starts to drink, Ona's deterioration accelerates. She has fits of hysteria and nervousness that Jurgis cannot understand and Elzbieta cannot explain. Though she blames it on another pregnancy, Jurgis thinks it is something more than that.

In Sinclair's most graphic example of business abuse -- the sweeping of poison, rats, and rat dung into the food vat -- he is most likely employing a form of hyperbole, an extended exaggeration to make a point. Admittedly, abuses within the system existed, many conditions were unsanitary, and workers were apathetic; but Sinclair once again employs literary license to gain support for his characters and his political ideology. As is the standard of naturalistic fiction, the stock characters in The Jungle are driven to drink or prostitution. In an industrialized society, no other options exist. Curiously, Jurgis blames marriage and sex for his woes and not the owners as he gradually begins to drink, succumbing to the temptations of alcohol. Alcohol becomes the solution for many of his problems for some time to come. Ona's prostitution is only foreshadowed, but its effects are evident. She becomes hysterical and breaks down often and is compared to a wounded animal. And the way of life in the jungle is that the wounded are destroyed and devoured. Glossary torpor dullness; apathy. specter any object of fear or dread. prodigy a person, thing, or act so extraordinary as to inspire wonder. conjurer magician.

Chapter 14 here were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. Jurgis and his family know all of the dirty secrets of the meat-packing industry. The most spoiled of meats becomes sausage. All manner of dishonesty exists in the industry's willingness to sell diseased, rotten, and adulterated meat to American households. The working members of the family fall into a silent stupor due to the grinding poverty and misery of their lives. Ona and Jurgis grow apart, and Jurgis begins to drink heavily. He delivers himself from full-blown alcoholism through force of will, but the desire to drink always torments him. Antanas suffers various childhood illnesses, and the measles attack him with fury. His strong constitution allows him to reach his first birthday, but he is as malnourished as the rest of the Packingtown poor. Ona, pregnant again, develops a bad cough and suffers increasingly frequent bouts of hysterical crying

Packingtown is full of predators and, as they have done throughout The Jungle, these hostile forces continue to attack the family bond that unites the immigrants. Phil Connor, empowered by his criminal connections, violates the sacred marriage bond between Jurgis and Ona, one of the few things of meaning that the two still possess. The idea of powerlessness pervades this grim section; no poor person has the power to fight for him- or herself. Marija tries to fight for her full wages, only to be fired; Ona cannot afford to reject Connor's advances because he has the power to ruin her family. The wage laborer is systematically crippled and silenced by the power structure of capitalism. In his attack on Connor, in Chapter 15, Jurgis exhibits an animalistic fury. Sinclair compares him to a "wounded bull" and a "tiger," and the image of Jurgis hovering over Connor with his mouth full of Connor's blood and skin evokes the primal, bestial quality of his rage. Ironically, the factories seek this sort of unrefined animal energy in their workers, which they can channel into efficient labor. Everywhere in Packingtown, there are wage laborers who suffer from some form of permanent disfigurement directly or indirectly related to their work. In a sense, the prevalence of these disfiguring injuries is a metaphor for the butchery of human bodies--which, like animals, are slaughtered in the service of profit. With Jurgis's sentencing, Sinclair argues that capitalism has perverted the American justice system. Judges are bought and sold by men with power and money, giving impunity to men like Connor. Furthermore, in Jurgis's case, the judge does not care that his ruling means the difference between starvation and survival for an entire family. Sinclair also charges capitalism with being anti-Christian. Immigrants  from eastern-European countries held fast to their religious beliefs and traditions upon coming to America as a source of strength and a sense of heritage. Here, however, Jurgis is forced to spend the Christmas holidays separated from his family, and his inability to work leads to them being evicted from their home at a time of year that is traditionally festive. Jurgis's recollection of practically drooling over food and toys in store windows on the previous Christmas pits the harsh and cruel reality of capitalism at odds with the immigrants' fantasies. Jurgis cannot afford the store window contents; his inability to be a consumer marks his failure as a producer, according to the capitalist system. The family's slew of misfortunes following Jurgis's imprisonment clearly marks the beginning of the family's inevitable descent into ruin. Sinclair foreshadows this fall throughout the early sections of the novel; his commitment to exemplifying the evils of capitalism necessitates that these exploited immigrants fail in their naive pursuit of the American Dream. Throughout the novel, Sinclair relentlessly insists that hard work, family values, self-reliance, and self-motivated action--the underpinnings of the American Dream--do absolutely nothing to provide the means for social advancement. The wage laborers that populate The Jungle are moved inevitably toward ruin and abuse by forces beyond their control. Capitalism becomes a force as inevitable and careless as nature. It picks off unfortunate individuals as carelessly as cold weather, disease, and heat exhaustion.