Yet even by this deadly winter the germ of hope was not to be kept
from sprouting in their hearts. It was just at this time that the great
adventure befell Marija.

The victim was Tamoszius Kuszleika, who played the violin. Everybody
laughed at them, for Tamoszius was petite and frail, and Marija could
have picked him up and carried him off under one arm. But perhaps that
was why she fascinated him; the sheer volume of Marija's energy was
overwhelming. That first night at the wedding Tamoszius had hardly taken
his eyes off her; and later on, when he came to find that she had really
the heart of a baby, her voice and her violence ceased to terrify him,
and he got the habit of coming to pay her visits on Sunday afternoons.
There was no place to entertain company except in the kitchen, in the
midst of the family, and Tamoszius would sit there with his hat between
his knees, never saying more than half a dozen words at a time, and
turning red in the face before he managed to say those; until finally
Jurgis would clap him upon the back, in his hearty way, crying, "Come
now, brother, give us a tune." And then Tamoszius' face would light up
and he would get out his fiddle, tuck it under his chin, and play. And
forthwith the soul of him would flame up and become eloquent--it was
almost an impropriety, for all the while his gaze would be fixed upon
Marija's face, until she would begin to turn red and lower her eyes.
There was no resisting the music of Tamoszius, however; even the
children would sit awed and wondering, and the tears would run down Teta
Elzbieta's cheeks. A wonderful privilege it was to be thus admitted into
the soul of a man of genius, to be allowed to share the ecstasies and
the agonies of his inmost life.

Then there were other benefits accruing to Marija from this
friendship--benefits of a more substantial nature. People paid Tamoszius
big money to come and make music on state occasions; and also they
would invite him to parties and festivals, knowing well that he was too
good-natured to come without his fiddle, and that having brought it,
he could be made to play while others danced. Once he made bold to ask
Marija to accompany him to such a party, and Marija accepted, to his
great delight--after which he never went anywhere without her, while if
the celebration were given by friends of his, he would invite the rest
of the family also. In any case Marija would bring back a huge pocketful
of cakes and sandwiches for the children, and stories of all the good
things she herself had managed to consume. She was compelled, at these
parties, to spend most of her time at the refreshment table, for she
could not dance with anybody except other women and very old men;
Tamoszius was of an excitable temperament, and afflicted with a frantic
jealousy, and any unmarried man who ventured to put his arm about the
ample waist of Marija would be certain to throw the orchestra out of
tune.

It was a great help to a person who had to toil all the week to be able
to look forward to some such relaxation as this on Saturday nights. The
family was too poor and too hardworked to make many acquaintances;
in Packingtown, as a rule, people know only their near neighbors and
shopmates, and so the place is like a myriad of little country villages.
But now there was a member of the family who was permitted to travel and
widen her horizon; and so each week there would be new personalities to
talk about,--how so-and-so was dressed, and where she worked, and what
she got, and whom she was in love with; and how this man had jilted his
girl, and how she had quarreled with the other girl, and what had passed
between them; and how another man beat his wife, and spent all her
earnings upon drink, and pawned her very clothes. Some people would have
scorned this talk as gossip; but then one has to talk about what one
knows.

It was one Saturday night, as they were coming home from a wedding, that
Tamoszius found courage, and set down his violin case in the street and
spoke his heart; and then Marija clasped him in her arms. She told them
all about it the next day, and fairly cried with happiness, for she said
that Tamoszius was a lovely man. After that he no longer made love
to her with his fiddle, but they would sit for hours in the kitchen,
blissfully happy in each other's arms; it was the tacit convention of
the family to know nothing of what was going on in that corner.

They were planning to be married in the spring, and have the garret
of the house fixed up, and live there. Tamoszius made good wages; and
little by little the family were paying back their debt to Marija,
so she ought soon to have enough to start life upon--only, with her
preposterous softheartedness, she would insist upon spending a good part
of her money every week for things which she saw they needed. Marija
was really the capitalist of the party, for she had become an expert can
painter by this time--she was getting fourteen cents for every hundred
and ten cans, and she could paint more than two cans every minute.
Marija felt, so to speak, that she had her hand on the throttle, and the
neighborhood was vocal with her rejoicings.

Yet her friends would shake their heads and tell her to go slow; one
could not count upon such good fortune forever--there were accidents
that always happened. But Marija was not to be prevailed upon, and went
on planning and dreaming of all the treasures she was going to have for
her home; and so, when the crash did come, her grief was painful to see.

For her canning factory shut down! Marija would about as soon have
expected to see the sun shut down--the huge establishment had been to
her a thing akin to the planets and the seasons. But now it was shut!
And they had not given her any explanation, they had not even given her
a day's warning; they had simply posted a notice one Saturday that all
hands would be paid off that afternoon, and would not resume work for at
least a month! And that was all that there was to it--her job was gone!

It was the holiday rush that was over, the girls said in answer to
Marija's inquiries; after that there was always a slack. Sometimes the
factory would start up on half time after a while, but there was no
telling--it had been known to stay closed until way into the summer. The
prospects were bad at present, for truckmen who worked in the storerooms
said that these were piled up to the ceilings, so that the firm could
not have found room for another week's output of cans. And they had
turned off three-quarters of these men, which was a still worse sign,
since it meant that there were no orders to be filled. It was all a
swindle, can-painting, said the girls--you were crazy with delight
because you were making twelve or fourteen dollars a week, and saving
half of it; but you had to spend it all keeping alive while you were
out, and so your pay was really only half what you thought.

Marija came home, and because she was a person who could not rest
without danger of explosion, they first had a great house cleaning, and
then she set out to search Packingtown for a job to fill up the gap. As
nearly all the canning establishments were shut down, and all the girls
hunting work, it will be readily understood that Marija did not find
any. Then she took to trying the stores and saloons, and when this
failed she even traveled over into the far-distant regions near the lake
front, where lived the rich people in great palaces, and begged there
for some sort of work that could be done by a person who did not know
English.

The men upon the killing beds felt also the effects of the slump which
had turned Marija out; but they felt it in a different way, and a way
which made Jurgis understand at last all their bitterness. The big
packers did not turn their hands off and close down, like the canning
factories; but they began to run for shorter and shorter hours. They had
always required the men to be on the killing beds and ready for work at
seven o'clock, although there was almost never any work to be done till
the buyers out in the yards had gotten to work, and some cattle had come
over the chutes. That would often be ten or eleven o'clock, which was
bad enough, in all conscience; but now, in the slack season, they would
perhaps not have a thing for their men to do till late in the afternoon.
And so they would have to loaf around, in a place where the thermometer
might be twenty degrees below zero! At first one would see them running
about, or skylarking with each other, trying to keep warm; but before
the day was over they would become quite chilled through and exhausted,
and, when the cattle finally came, so near frozen that to move was an
agony. And then suddenly the place would spring into activity, and the
merciless "speeding-up" would begin!

There were weeks at a time when Jurgis went home after such a day as
this with not more than two hours' work to his credit--which meant about
thirty-five cents. There were many days when the total was less than
half an hour, and others when there was none at all. The general average
was six hours a day, which meant for Jurgis about six dollars a week;
and this six hours of work would be done after standing on the killing
bed till one o'clock, or perhaps even three or four o'clock, in the
afternoon. Like as not there would come a rush of cattle at the very
end of the day, which the men would have to dispose of before they went
home, often working by electric light till nine or ten, or even twelve
or one o'clock, and without a single instant for a bite of supper. The
men were at the mercy of the cattle. Perhaps the buyers would be holding
off for better prices--if they could scare the shippers into thinking
that they meant to buy nothing that day, they could get their own terms.
For some reason the cost of fodder for cattle in the yards was much
above the market price--and you were not allowed to bring your own
fodder! Then, too, a number of cars were apt to arrive late in the day,
now that the roads were blocked with snow, and the packers would buy
their cattle that night, to get them cheaper, and then would come into
play their ironclad rule, that all cattle must be killed the same day
they were bought. There was no use kicking about this--there had been
one delegation after another to see the packers about it, only to be
told that it was the rule, and that there was not the slightest chance
of its ever being altered. And so on Christmas Eve Jurgis worked till
nearly one o'clock in the morning, and on Christmas Day he was on the
killing bed at seven o'clock.

All this was bad; and yet it was not the worst. For after all the hard
work a man did, he was paid for only part of it. Jurgis had once been
among those who scoffed at the idea of these huge concerns cheating;
and so now he could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was
precisely their size which enabled them to do it with impunity. One of
the rules on the killing beds was that a man who was one minute late
was docked an hour; and this was economical, for he was made to work the
balance of the hour--he was not allowed to stand round and wait. And on
the other hand if he came ahead of time he got no pay for that--though
often the bosses would start up the gang ten or fifteen minutes before
the whistle. And this same custom they carried over to the end of the
day; they did not pay for any fraction of an hour--for "broken time." A
man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no work to fill out
the hour, there was no pay for him. Thus the end of every day was a
sort of lottery--a struggle, all but breaking into open war between
the bosses and the men, the former trying to rush a job through and
the latter trying to stretch it out. Jurgis blamed the bosses for this,
though the truth to be told it was not always their fault; for the
packers kept them frightened for their lives--and when one was in danger
of falling behind the standard, what was easier than to catch up
by making the gang work awhile "for the church"? This was a savage
witticism the men had, which Jurgis had to have explained to him. Old
man Jones was great on missions and such things, and so whenever they
were doing some particularly disreputable job, the men would wink at
each other and say, "Now we're working for the church!"

One of the consequences of all these things was that Jurgis was no
longer perplexed when he heard men talk of fighting for their rights.
He felt like fighting now himself; and when the Irish delegate of the
butcher-helpers' union came to him a second time, he received him in a
far different spirit. A wonderful idea it now seemed to Jurgis, this
of the men--that by combining they might be able to make a stand and
conquer the packers! Jurgis wondered who had first thought of it; and
when he was told that it was a common thing for men to do in America, he
got the first inkling of a meaning in the phrase "a free country." The
delegate explained to him how it depended upon their being able to get
every man to join and stand by the organization, and so Jurgis signified
that he was willing to do his share. Before another month was by, all
the working members of his family had union cards, and wore their union
buttons conspicuously and with pride. For fully a week they were quite
blissfully happy, thinking that belonging to a union meant an end to all
their troubles.

But only ten days after she had joined, Marija's canning factory closed
down, and that blow quite staggered them. They could not understand why
the union had not prevented it, and the very first time she attended
a meeting Marija got up and made a speech about it. It was a business
meeting, and was transacted in English, but that made no difference to
Marija; she said what was in her, and all the pounding of the chairman's
gavel and all the uproar and confusion in the room could not prevail.
Quite apart from her own troubles she was boiling over with a general
sense of the injustice of it, and she told what she thought of the
packers, and what she thought of a world where such things were allowed
to happen; and then, while the echoes of the hall rang with the shock
of her terrible voice, she sat down again and fanned herself, and the
meeting gathered itself together and proceeded to discuss the election
of a recording secretary.

Jurgis too had an adventure the first time he attended a union meeting,
but it was not of his own seeking. Jurgis had gone with the desire
to get into an inconspicuous corner and see what was done; but this
attitude of silent and open-eyed attention had marked him out for a
victim. Tommy Finnegan was a little Irishman, with big staring eyes and
a wild aspect, a "hoister" by trade, and badly cracked. Somewhere back
in the far-distant past Tommy Finnegan had had a strange experience,
and the burden of it rested upon him. All the balance of his life he had
done nothing but try to make it understood. When he talked he caught
his victim by the buttonhole, and his face kept coming closer and
closer--which was trying, because his teeth were so bad. Jurgis did not
mind that, only he was frightened. The method of operation of the higher
intelligences was Tom Finnegan's theme, and he desired to find out if
Jurgis had ever considered that the representation of things in their
present similarity might be altogether unintelligible upon a more
elevated plane. There were assuredly wonderful mysteries about the
developing of these things; and then, becoming confidential, Mr.
Finnegan proceeded to tell of some discoveries of his own. "If ye have
iver had onything to do wid shperrits," said he, and looked inquiringly
at Jurgis, who kept shaking his head. "Niver mind, niver mind,"
continued the other, "but their influences may be operatin' upon ye;
it's shure as I'm tellin' ye, it's them that has the reference to the
immejit surroundin's that has the most of power. It was vouchsafed to
me in me youthful days to be acquainted with shperrits" and so
Tommy Finnegan went on, expounding a system of philosophy, while the
perspiration came out on Jurgis' forehead, so great was his agitation
and embarrassment. In the end one of the men, seeing his plight, came
over and rescued him; but it was some time before he was able to find
any one to explain things to him, and meanwhile his fear lest the
strange little Irishman should get him cornered again was enough to keep
him dodging about the room the whole evening.

He never missed a meeting, however. He had picked up a few words of
English by this time, and friends would help him to understand. They
were often very turbulent meetings, with half a dozen men declaiming
at once, in as many dialects of English; but the speakers were all
desperately in earnest, and Jurgis was in earnest too, for he understood
that a fight was on, and that it was his fight. Since the time of his
disillusionment, Jurgis had sworn to trust no man, except in his own
family; but here he discovered that he had brothers in affliction, and
allies. Their one chance for life was in union, and so the struggle
became a kind of crusade. Jurgis had always been a member of the church,
because it was the right thing to be, but the church had never
touched him, he left all that for the women. Here, however, was a new
religion--one that did touch him, that took hold of every fiber of him;
and with all the zeal and fury of a convert he went out as a missionary.
There were many nonunion men among the Lithuanians, and with these
he would labor and wrestle in prayer, trying to show them the right.
Sometimes they would be obstinate and refuse to see it, and Jurgis,
alas, was not always patient! He forgot how he himself had been blind,
a short time ago--after the fashion of all crusaders since the original
ones, who set out to spread the gospel of Brotherhood by force of arms.

Marija and Tamoszius Kuszleika begin a love affair. Tamoszius is a "petite" man, while Marija is a burly woman. He finds, however, that she has the "heart of a baby," and he courts her by playing his violin on Sunday afternoons. Tamoszius earns "big money" by playing events in the community, so his presence adds some financial gain for the family. One Saturday evening, Marija and Tamoszius express their love to each other. Soon they hold each other for hours in a small corner of the kitchen, and the family has a "tacit convention. to know nothing of what was going on in that corner. Marija becomes an expert at her job. She can paint two cans a minute, and at fourteen cents for every one hundred and ten cans, she brings home large sums of money, which she saves and spends on items for the family. She is "really the capitalist of the party. Marija's fortune changes one day, however. One Saturday afternoon, the canning factory where Marija paints cans is closed down. She is told that it is because of the season; there is no demand for canned meat, so there is no need for workers to paint the cans. Marija is furious and becomes manic with energy. She attempts to find other work, even going to the rich parts of town, but there are no jobs because all the work in all the factories has slowed down and everyone is looking for a job. Jurgis's work on the killing beds has also moved to a grinding pace. Often, cattle do not start coming down the chutes until ten or eleven in the morning. Sometimes they do not come until one or two o'clock in the afternoon. Because it is the rule that all cattle bought must be slaughtered on the same day, it often means that the workers are forced to stay at the factory until midnight or one in the morning to finish the work. The worst part is that men are paid only for the work that they do. Therefore, if a man is standing around on the cold killing-floor, waiting for the cattle buyers to send cattle to be slaughtered, that man does not earn any money. Likewise, men do not get paid if they do not work a full hour. At the end of the day, the floor bosses often try and work the men for fifty minutes, just under an hour. This means the men do not get paid for that work. There is great tension between the workers and the floor bosses because of these tactics. Jurgis now understands the bitterness that the other workers have for the factories. When he is approached again by union representatives, he accepts their offer "in a far different spirit. In the unions, Jurgis now has "the first inkling of a meaning in the phrase 'a free country. Every member of his family soon has union cards. Marija is especially vocal. She makes an impassioned speech at a union meeting, though it is all in Lithuanian so no one understands her. Jurgis attends every union meeting. He meets several strange characters there, including Tommy Finnegan, a small Irishman with bad teeth who corners him with crazy stories of "higher intelligences" and spirits. Jurgis becomes a strong advocate of the unions. He makes it his mission to try to sign up all the Lithuanian community to the union cause. With the Lithuanians he will "labor and wrestle in prayer, trying to show them the right," though many are not willing to accept his message

In Chapter Eight, Sinclair makes distinctions between the theoretical promise of capitalism and the reality of capitalism. In the theoretical world of capitalist economies, each person's private interests, as well as the interests of the industries they create, all work together to bring about a maximum good for individuals and for society. This theory is best exemplified in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. This theoretical good of capitalist systems is exemplified in this chapter by Marija's slow advancement in society. With a good job and an improving social life, it seems as though Marija's own self-interest as "the capitalist of the party" is improving her life. This improvement, however, is short lived. When demand for canned meat falls, as it does every spring and summer, Marija loses her job and is forced to live on her savings. This means that she will never be able to advance in an economic sense. This, Sinclair proposes, is the reality of capitalism. In this reality, certain individuals and their industries profit from their self-interests while others in the system do not. In fact, those individuals that do not profit suffer hardships. Capitalism, thus, is a hindrance to social good, not a benefit. It is important to note how Sinclair's narrative and the way in which he describes the hardships of the Rudkus family moves from a general notion of oppressive systems to exact descriptions of social and economic systems that cause hardship. In early chapter, the family understands their hardships as simply the "way" that things function in America. As the narrative progresses, however, each member of the family begins to gain a consciousness of the particular systems and events that create their suffering.  They see the ways in which the food industry fixes the wage system against workers; unsanitary food processing that sucks nutrition from meat and causes disease for workers and consumers; and the industries unwillingness to support its workers in low demand seasons. These examples are one way in which Jurgis and his family move from a state of unconscious acceptance to a state of consciousness about corrupted morals. At the end of Chapter Eight, Sinclair uses religious language to describe the work of the unions, a theme that he returns to in later chapters to describe the work of the Socialist Party in Packingtown politics. Jurgis is described here as a church-going man, yet a person for which religion "never touched him" in the way that it affected women. Socialist politics, however, is "a new religion...and with all the zeal and fury of a convert he went out as a missionary." Some critics of the novel have noted that Sinclair's interpretation of socialism is naive and this is one example. In portraying socialism as a truer religion than anything that has come before, Sinclair is overlooking many of the negative aspects of the economic theory. Chapter Ten marks a turning point for Ona Rudkus. Although her work in the factories is difficult, her hardships are compounded by giving birth and then being forced to return to manual labor so quickly. She develops an addiction to alcoholic elixirs, the only way she can cope with her work. Ona is the first character for whom the mental and financial hardships of her life are manifested in a physical way. Almost all of the main characters of the novel progress in this way. The hardships pressed upon the family by an unjust society become true physical hardships. Sinclair shows how poverty and powerlessness is not simply a mental or social hardship. It is a physical hardship as well.

Tamoszius Kuszleika begins to fall in love with Marija Berczynskas. It seems to be a case of opposites attracting: Tamoszius is a tiny guy and Marija is hail and hearty. Tamoszius's fiddle can make Marija blush and bring Teta Elzbieta to tears. But Tamoszius's skill also has material benefits for Marija, because he brings her to all of the parties he's hired to play at. She has a wonderful time going out like this, and she brings back stories for the family to enjoy. One Saturday night, coming back from one of these parties, Tamoszius gets down on one knee and proposes to Marija. She is absolutely thrilled, and the two spend as much time in each other's company as they can. They plan to get married in the spring, and to fix up the attic into an apartment for them to share. Marija is so excited, right up until the minute when disaster strikes: her canning factory is shut down and won't reopen again for at least a month. Marija goes back out on the job market, but since all of the canning factories seem to have shut down for the post-holiday slump, she doesn't find anything. So, she tries shops, bars, and, finally, she looks for work as a servant to rich families on the lake front. The meatpacking factories don't close, but they offer shorter and shorter working hours during the winter. This means Jurgis is bringing in less and less money, even though he's still working hard. There is usually a rush at the end of the day when they have to work double-time to process all of the cattle that have come in during the day. Jurgis sometimes has to stay on as late as midnight or 1:00 AM. The worst thing of all is that the companies do not pay all of Jurgis's working hours. If a worker is even a minute late, he will not be paid for that hour he works. Still, a worker also gets no extra pay if he comes in early. And, even worse, he gets no pay for "broken time": if he works any part of an hour, but not a whole hour, at the end of the day, he gets nothing for it. Even if he puts in nine hours and fifty-nine minutes, he only gets paid for nine hours. This means that there is a constant struggle between the bosses, who try to finish everything quickly, and the workers, who try to stretch it out so they get paid for all of their time. Jurgis has gotten frustrated enough with these poor labor practices that he is now interested in joining a union. Everyone in the family soon becomes card-carrying members of a union. They all think that belonging to a union will save them from their troubles. Yet belonging to a union doesn't stop Marija's canning factory from closing down. So, she stands up at the next union meeting and complains. Since she gives her speech in Lithuanian, though, no one understands her. The first day that Jurgis goes to a union meeting, he also has a weird experience. He's sitting in a corner trying to go unnoticed when suddenly, a crazy guy named Tommy Finnegan approaches him and starts talking quickly in thickly accented English. One of his fellow union members eventually rescues Jurgis, but not before he decides never to let Tommy Finnegan corner him again. Despite this embarrassing beginning, Jurgis decides never to miss a union meeting. Jurgis becomes a complete union convert, and resolves to spend his time recruiting other Lithuanians to the cause.

Once again, Jurgis is approached about joining the union, and now that he recognizes and understands many of the abuses inherent in the system, he agrees to join. He also convinces the other members of his family to join, and their faith in their well being is now restored. Jurgis begins to attend union meetings and encourages others to join. The union becomes his religion, and the new convert zealously attempts to show others the light.

A recurring motif in The Jungle -- that in the real world love places second to economics -- dominates this chapter. In addition to the difficulties that Jurgis and Ona experience, come the problems with Marija and Tamoszius' relationship. During the months following the wedding, Marija and Tamoszius Kuszleika develop a close relationship, and they plan to marry in the springtime. Then, without notice, the canning factory Marija work in shuts down. The relationship again illustrates Marija's strength, but strength of character, as seen with Jurgis, is not always enough. This seasonal shortage of work also affects Jurgis, who receives fewer hours and subsequently less pay. Although he must still report to work at 7:00 a.m., sometimes work does not start until the late afternoon, and men receive wages only for actual hours worked. Jurgis now sides with organized labor against the establishment. His passion for the union foreshadows the zeal he develops for socialism. Jurgis now begins his long fight against the unfair practices of management; his life is that of a war -- the worker versus the industry. Glossary eloquent vividly expressive. impropriety improper action or behavior. tacit not expressed or declared openly, but implied or understood. skylarking playing about boisterously. impunity freedom or exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm.

Tamoszius, a musician, begins to court Marija. His fiddle-playing brings a note of cheer into the family's life. He is also a popular guest at various celebrations because he is a musician. He invites Marija to most of them; if the hosts are his friends, he invites the entire family. These celebrations aid the family in surviving the relentless monotony of toil and poverty. Tamoszius proposes to Marija and she accepts. They plan to finish the attic in the house and use it for their room. Marija's canning factory shuts down and she loses her job. During the winter, after the rush season, many factories close down and many workers lose their jobs. Even Jurgis suffers from a cut-back on the hours at his job. Workers receive no pay for partial hours. The wage earners in the family all join unions. Jurgis begins to recruit other Lithuanians for the union with a zealous fervor, often frustrated by their ignorance and indifference. Their optimism and naive commitment to the American Dream remind him of the misguided views he held when he first arrived in America


One of the first consequences of the discovery of the union was that
Jurgis became desirous of learning English. He wanted to know what was
going on at the meetings, and to be able to take part in them, and so he
began to look about him, and to try to pick up words. The children, who
were at school, and learning fast, would teach him a few; and a friend
loaned him a little book that had some in it, and Ona would read them to
him. Then Jurgis became sorry that he could not read himself; and later
on in the winter, when some one told him that there was a night school
that was free, he went and enrolled. After that, every evening that he
got home from the yards in time, he would go to the school; he would go
even if he were in time for only half an hour. They were teaching him
both to read and to speak English--and they would have taught him other
things, if only he had had a little time.

Also the union made another great difference with him--it made him begin
to pay attention to the country. It was the beginning of democracy with
him. It was a little state, the union, a miniature republic; its affairs
were every man's affairs, and every man had a real say about them. In
other words, in the union Jurgis learned to talk politics. In the place
where he had come from there had not been any politics--in Russia one
thought of the government as an affliction like the lightning and the
hail. "Duck, little brother, duck," the wise old peasants would whisper;
"everything passes away." And when Jurgis had first come to America he
had supposed that it was the same. He had heard people say that it was
a free country--but what did that mean? He found that here, precisely
as in Russia, there were rich men who owned everything; and if one could
not find any work, was not the hunger he began to feel the same sort of
hunger?

When Jurgis had been working about three weeks at Brown's, there had
come to him one noontime a man who was employed as a night watchman, and
who asked him if he would not like to take out naturalization papers
and become a citizen. Jurgis did not know what that meant, but the man
explained the advantages. In the first place, it would not cost him
anything, and it would get him half a day off, with his pay just the
same; and then when election time came he would be able to vote--and
there was something in that. Jurgis was naturally glad to accept, and so
the night watchman said a few words to the boss, and he was excused for
the rest of the day. When, later on, he wanted a holiday to get married
he could not get it; and as for a holiday with pay just the same--what
power had wrought that miracle heaven only knew! However, he went with
the man, who picked up several other newly landed immigrants, Poles,
Lithuanians, and Slovaks, and took them all outside, where stood a great
four-horse tallyho coach, with fifteen or twenty men already in it. It
was a fine chance to see the sights of the city, and the party had a
merry time, with plenty of beer handed up from inside. So they drove
downtown and stopped before an imposing granite building, in which they
interviewed an official, who had the papers all ready, with only the
names to be filled in. So each man in turn took an oath of which he did
not understand a word, and then was presented with a handsome ornamented
document with a big red seal and the shield of the United States upon
it, and was told that he had become a citizen of the Republic and the
equal of the President himself.

A month or two later Jurgis had another interview with this same man,
who told him where to go to "register." And then finally, when election
day came, the packing houses posted a notice that men who desired to
vote might remain away until nine that morning, and the same night
watchman took Jurgis and the rest of his flock into the back room of a
saloon, and showed each of them where and how to mark a ballot, and then
gave each two dollars, and took them to the polling place, where there
was a policeman on duty especially to see that they got through all
right. Jurgis felt quite proud of this good luck till he got home and
met Jonas, who had taken the leader aside and whispered to him, offering
to vote three times for four dollars, which offer had been accepted.

And now in the union Jurgis met men who explained all this mystery
to him; and he learned that America differed from Russia in that its
government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who
ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there
were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one
got the office which bought the most votes. Now and then, the election
was very close, and that was the time the poor man came in. In the
stockyards this was only in national and state elections, for in local
elections the Democratic Party always carried everything. The ruler of
the district was therefore the Democratic boss, a little Irishman named
Mike Scully. Scully held an important party office in the state, and
bossed even the mayor of the city, it was said; it was his boast that he
carried the stockyards in his pocket. He was an enormously rich man--he
had a hand in all the big graft in the neighborhood. It was Scully, for
instance, who owned that dump which Jurgis and Ona had seen the first
day of their arrival. Not only did he own the dump, but he owned the
brick factory as well, and first he took out the clay and made it into
bricks, and then he had the city bring garbage to fill up the hole, so
that he could build houses to sell to the people. Then, too, he sold the
bricks to the city, at his own price, and the city came and got them
in its own wagons. And also he owned the other hole near by, where the
stagnant water was; and it was he who cut the ice and sold it; and what
was more, if the men told truth, he had not had to pay any taxes for the
water, and he had built the ice-house out of city lumber, and had not had
to pay anything for that. The newspapers had got hold of that story, and
there had been a scandal; but Scully had hired somebody to confess and
take all the blame, and then skip the country. It was said, too, that he
had built his brick-kiln in the same way, and that the workmen were on
the city payroll while they did it; however, one had to press closely to
get these things out of the men, for it was not their business, and Mike
Scully was a good man to stand in with. A note signed by him was equal
to a job any time at the packing houses; and also he employed a good
many men himself, and worked them only eight hours a day, and paid them
the highest wages. This gave him many friends--all of whom he had gotten
together into the "War Whoop League," whose clubhouse you might see
just outside of the yards. It was the biggest clubhouse, and the biggest
club, in all Chicago; and they had prizefights every now and then,
and cockfights and even dogfights. The policemen in the district all
belonged to the league, and instead of suppressing the fights, they sold
tickets for them. The man that had taken Jurgis to be naturalized was
one of these "Indians," as they were called; and on election day there
would be hundreds of them out, and all with big wads of money in their
pockets and free drinks at every saloon in the district. That was
another thing, the men said--all the saloon-keepers had to be "Indians,"
and to put up on demand, otherwise they could not do business on
Sundays, nor have any gambling at all. In the same way Scully had all
the jobs in the fire department at his disposal, and all the rest of the
city graft in the stockyards district; he was building a block of flats
somewhere up on Ashland Avenue, and the man who was overseeing it for
him was drawing pay as a city inspector of sewers. The city inspector of
water pipes had been dead and buried for over a year, but somebody was
still drawing his pay. The city inspector of sidewalks was a barkeeper
at the War Whoop Cafe--and maybe he could make it uncomfortable for any
tradesman who did not stand in with Scully!

Even the packers were in awe of him, so the men said. It gave them
pleasure to believe this, for Scully stood as the people's man, and
boasted of it boldly when election day came. The packers had wanted a
bridge at Ashland Avenue, but they had not been able to get it till they
had seen Scully; and it was the same with "Bubbly Creek," which the city
had threatened to make the packers cover over, till Scully had come to
their aid. "Bubbly Creek" is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms the
southern boundary of the yards: all the drainage of the square mile of
packing houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open sewer
a hundred or two feet wide. One long arm of it is blind, and the filth
stays there forever and a day. The grease and chemicals that are poured
into it undergo all sorts of strange transformations, which are the
cause of its name; it is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were
feeding in it, or great leviathans disporting themselves in its depths.
Bubbles of carbonic acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and
make rings two or three feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth
have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk
about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to
stroll across, and vanished temporarily. The packers used to leave the
creek that way, till every now and then the surface would catch on fire
and burn furiously, and the fire department would have to come and put
it out. Once, however, an ingenious stranger came and started to gather
this filth in scows, to make lard out of; then the packers took the
cue, and got out an injunction to stop him, and afterward gathered it
themselves. The banks of "Bubbly Creek" are plastered thick with hairs,
and this also the packers gather and clean.

And there were things even stranger than this, according to the gossip
of the men. The packers had secret mains, through which they stole
billions of gallons of the city's water. The newspapers had been full of
this scandal--once there had even been an investigation, and an actual
uncovering of the pipes; but nobody had been punished, and the thing
went right on. And then there was the condemned meat industry, with its
endless horrors. The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors
in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected
from diseased meat; they did not understand that these hundred and
sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of the packers,
and that they were paid by the United States government to certify
that all the diseased meat was kept in the state. They had no authority
beyond that; for the inspection of meat to be sold in the city and state
the whole force in Packingtown consisted of three henchmen of the local
political machine!*

     (*Rules and Regulations for the Inspection of Livestock and
     Their Products. United States Department of Agriculture,
     Bureau of Animal Industries, Order No. 125:--

     Section 1. Proprietors of slaughterhouses, canning, salting,
     packing, or rendering establishments engaged in the
     slaughtering of cattle, sheep, or swine, or the packing of
     any of their products, the carcasses or products of which
     are to become subjects of interstate or foreign commerce,
     shall make application to the Secretary of Agriculture for
     inspection of said animals and their products....

     Section 15. Such rejected or condemned animals shall at once
     be removed by the owners from the pens containing animals
     which have been inspected and found to be free from disease
     and fit for human food, and shall be disposed of in
     accordance with the laws, ordinances, and regulations of the
     state and municipality in which said rejected or condemned
     animals are located....

     Section 25. A microscopic examination for trichinae shall be
     made of all swine products exported to countries requiring
     such examination. No microscopic examination will be made of
     hogs slaughtered for interstate trade, but this examination
     shall be confined to those intended for the export trade.)

And shortly afterward one of these, a physician, made the discovery that
the carcasses of steers which had been condemned as tubercular by the
government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomaines, which
are deadly poisons, were left upon an open platform and carted away to
be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be treated
with an injection of kerosene--and was ordered to resign the same week!
So indignant were the packers that they went farther, and compelled
the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection; so that since then
there has not been even a pretense of any interference with the graft.
There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush money from the
tubercular steers alone; and as much again from the hogs which had died
of cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded
into boxcars and hauled away to a place called Globe, in Indiana, where
they made a fancy grade of lard.

Jurgis heard of these things little by little, in the gossip of those
who were obliged to perpetrate them. It seemed as if every time you
met a person from a new department, you heard of new swindles and new
crimes. There was, for instance, a Lithuanian who was a cattle butcher
for the plant where Marija had worked, which killed meat for canning
only; and to hear this man describe the animals which came to his place
would have been worthwhile for a Dante or a Zola. It seemed that they
must have agencies all over the country, to hunt out old and crippled
and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed
on "whisky-malt," the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the
men called "steerly"--which means covered with boils. It was a nasty
job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would
burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man's
sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he
ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could see? It was
stuff such as this that made the "embalmed beef" that had killed
several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the
Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was old
stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars.

Then one Sunday evening, Jurgis sat puffing his pipe by the kitchen
stove, and talking with an old fellow whom Jonas had introduced, and
who worked in the canning rooms at Durham's; and so Jurgis learned a few
things about the great and only Durham canned goods, which had become
a national institution. They were regular alchemists at Durham's; they
advertised a mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it did not know what
a mushroom looked like. They advertised "potted chicken,"--and it was
like the boardinghouse soup of the comic papers, through which a chicken
had walked with rubbers on. Perhaps they had a secret process for making
chickens chemically--who knows? said Jurgis' friend; the things that
went into the mixture were tripe, and the fat of pork, and beef suet,
and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal, when they had
any. They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several
prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper.
And then there was "potted game" and "potted grouse," "potted ham," and
"deviled ham"--de-vyled, as the men called it. "De-vyled" ham was made
out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be sliced by
the machines; and also tripe, dyed with chemicals so that it would not
show white; and trimmings of hams and corned beef; and potatoes, skins
and all; and finally the hard cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the
tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and
flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Anybody who could
invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said
Jurgis' informant; but it was hard to think of anything new in a
place where so many sharp wits had been at work for so long; where men
welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because it made
them fatten more quickly; and where they bought up all the old rancid
butter left over in the grocery stores of a continent, and "oxidized" it
by a forced-air process, to take away the odor, rechurned it with skim
milk, and sold it in bricks in the cities! Up to a year or two ago
it had been the custom to kill horses in the yards--ostensibly for
fertilizer; but after long agitation the newspapers had been able to
make the public realize that the horses were being canned. Now it was
against the law to kill horses in Packingtown, and the law was really
complied with--for the present, at any rate. Any day, however, one might
see sharp-horned and shaggy-haired creatures running with the sheep and
yet what a job you would have to get the public to believe that a good
part of what it buys for lamb and mutton is really goat's flesh!

There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might
have gathered in Packingtown--those of the various afflictions of
the workers. When Jurgis had first inspected the packing plants with
Szedvilas, he had marveled while he listened to the tale of all the
things that were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the
lesser industries that were maintained there; now he found that each one
of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as
horrible as the killing beds, the source and fountain of them all.
The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases. And the
wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he
could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence
of them about on his own person--generally he had only to hold out his
hand.

There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas
had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of
horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a
truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him
out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the
acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and
trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a
person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it
had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the
man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be
criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count
them or to trace them. They would have no nails,--they had worn them off
pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread
out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the
midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms
the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply
was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried
two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of
work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the
most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the
chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit
that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years.
There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner
than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be
painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to
pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their
fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and
their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance
for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was
very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and
not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off.
There were the "hoisters," as they were called, whose task it was to
press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran
along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and
as old Durham's architects had not built the killing room for the
convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop
under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them
into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking
like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and
those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown
to the visitor,--for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any
ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who
worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open
vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they
fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never
enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be
overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the
world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

Jurgis's involvement with the unions makes him want to learn English so that he can understand the meetings he attends. He enrolls in a school, takes night classes, and learns to read and speak. He also begins to pay attention to politics. He finds it hard to believe that the United States is any different from Russia, where there are "rich men who everything" and where it is difficult for common men to make a living. One day a man comes to Jurgis and asks him if he wants to be a citizen. The man tells Jurgis that this will allow him a half day off with pay and that he will be allowed to vote. Though Jurgis does not understand the process, he goes to a courthouse, takes an oath, and is told that he has "become a citizen of the Republic and the equal of the President himself. A few months later, Jurgis has the morning off to go vote in an election. The police usher all the workers into the back rooms of the saloons and they are each given two dollars and told to cast a vote for a particular candidate. The union men explain the process to him: the government exists under a democracy where there are political parties. The party that "bought the most votes" was the party that will be allowed to govern. Jurgis learns about Mike Scully, the most powerful man in Packingtown. Scully owns the trash dumps and the lake of fetid water that is used for ice in the winter. There have been numerous scandals associated with Scully, but he always pays someone else to take the blame and then that person leaves the country. Scully is the leader of the "War-Whoop League," a political club. This club also holds entertainment events, such as cockfights and dogfights, for the workers. Scully's "Indians," as they are called, are responsible for rounding up the immigrant men and making them citizens so that they can vote. Scully is so powerful that "even the packers in awe of him. There are other scandals in the packinghouses as well. The government inspectors, which all the people believe are protecting them from diseased meat, are actually appointed at the request of the packinghouses themselves. The only authority these men have is to make sure all diseased meat stays in the state. It does not mean that it cannot be used for food. The packers also pay the local government "two thousand dollars a week hush-money" so that there are no inspections on tubercular steers. The packers like to butcher tubercular steers because they fatten more quickly. There are multiple horrors of the meatpacking trade. The diseased parts of the steers and hogs are injected with chemicals and spices and canned to be sold to the public. They have different labels, some costing more than others are, but it is all the same product. The packers buy rancid butter, which they oxidize to get rid of the odor. They re-churn it and then sell it. The lamb meat that people often think they are buying is really goat meat. The men that work in the packing plants are also inflicted with disease. The butchers often cut their hands and have to work with bleeding fingers. They contract disease and sores. Men who work with chemicals often have their skin eaten away. Those that work in the chilling rooms can generally only last five years before severe rheumatism sets in. Anyone who works with cans has their own cuts and blood poisoning is common. A man who works at the stamping machines is always at risk for losing a limb. There are men who work around tanks of chemicals and they sometimes fall in the chemical vats. When they are pulled out, there is "never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting," and "sometimes they overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard

The union inspires Jurgis to learn English. He's also starting to feel embarrassed that he has to rely on Ona to read things to him. So, Jurgis enrolls in a free night school to learn both English and how to read. The union also teaches Jurgis to be interested in politics. When Jurgis first arrived at Brown's, he was approached by one of the night watchmen. This man told him to show up at a certain time to take an oath of citizenship; this would get Jurgis half a day's pay with no hard labor, and he would be a citizen of the United States. So, Jurgis turns up alongside a bunch of other new immigrants, takes an oath he doesn't understand, and becomes a citizen. About a month later, this man tells Jurgis to register to vote. And then, when election day comes, this night watchman leads Jurgis and a bunch of other guys to a polling station to vote exactly as he tells them to vote. Jurgis tells this story to Jonas, who privately approaches this night watchman to offer to vote three times for $4. At the union, Jurgis's friends explain what has happened. They tell him that the United States is a democracy, with political parties. The two main political parties are so committed to beating each other that they cheat in elections all the time. One way that they do this is by buying votes for their candidates; all unknowing, Jurgis became one of those votes. The person who manages the politics of Packingtown is a man called Mike Scully, a rich Irishman with lots of friends who runs what he calls the "War Whoop League." Apparently, even the packers are afraid of Mike Scully. When the city tried to make the packers cover over the part of the Chicago River where all the meatpacking plants dump their waste, the packers had to ask Mike Scully to intervene with the city council to keep it from happening. Speaking of things that are horrible in the meatpacking industry, everyone thinks meat has been certified safe by the government because there are inspectors onsite at all the factories. Yet these inspectors have been appointed at the request of the meatpacking management, and they also have very little authority. What's more, of course the politicians who appoint these inspectors are in the pay of the rich men of Chicago. Inspectors who object to bad meat immediately get replaced at the meatpackers' request. Things are even worse for meat used only for canning. A lot of the beef used in canneries is from old, crippled, or diseased cattle. Beef from these cattle, the narrator suggests, has killed more American soldiers than the Spaniards of the Spanish-American War . The canneries use lots of tricks to pass off spoiled or scrap meat as prime product to the American consumer. But it's not just the cattle that are diseased in Packingtown; it's the laborers themselves. The chemicals they use to brine meat or treat wool or leather eat away at their hands and knives slip and leave open wounds prone to infection. But worst of all are the men who process animal bones for fertilizer. These men work in the most appalling smell with vats full of chemicals. When they fall into these chemicals, they are lost. Often, there is nothing more than bone to retrieve. Sometimes, if no one notices they have fallen in for long enough, their bodies are processed along with cattle flesh for lard and fertilizer.

His union involvement leads Jurgis to learn English and to discover politics. Mike Scully is the democratic boss of Packingtown. Scully and his men encourage immigrants like Jurgis to become naturalized citizens and to vote in the local elections. Jurgis and others are shown how to vote and are paid to vote the democratic ticket. Through Scully and the elected politicians, Jurgis learns of the graft and corruption running rampant in Packingtown, which is far greater than the scams he has encountered at the factory. From his co-workers Jurgis hears about some of the most outlandish practices, and with his own eyes he observes the variety of afflictions particular to specific tradesmen. The worst scenario takes place at the fertilizer plant -- a place no visitor ever sees because of the stench of the place and its workers -- where occasionally a worker falls in and it is impossible to fish him out, so he becomes part of the finished product.

Chapter 9 serves primarily as Sinclair's muckraker chapter. A muckraker searches for and publicizes corruption by public officials and businesses. The problem with muckrakers, though, is that they publicize both real and alleged corruption. The abuses described in this chapter are what gives The Jungle its notoriety; however, the accuracy of Sinclair's reporting is definitely in question. Sinclair was not writing an expose of the meatpacking industry. Rather, he was describing the plight of the immigrants. He has taken some incidents of abuses and problems, added a bit of poetic license, and fictionalized the accounts of what he knew was going on. As noted, Sinclair admitted that "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Sinclair's bias is best illustrated when he refers to factories in Packingtown as the "spoiled meat industry." Citing the U.S. Rules and Regulations is a journalistic technique Sinclair uses that detracts from the novel. The citation, in the form of a footnote, adds nothing to the development of the plot, characters, or themes; rather, it exists as a means for something to rail against. Sinclair uses this chapter to find fault with regulations and procedures. His famous controversial example of the man falling into the vat and becoming fertilizer is presented as realistic when in all probability it is very far-fetched. Many people reading The Jungle, however, may accept this anecdote as a common occurrence and may remember the novel as a meatpacking industry expose rather than as a novel about the plight of immigrants. An important thematic element resonates throughout Chapter 9: The rich own everything and that's just the way of the world. This situation existed in Lithuania and is demonstrated very clearly in Chicago. Another reality of America is the political system, depicted as two parties of elected grafters; politics is as corrupt as the meatpacking industry. Glossary leviathan something huge or very powerful. scow large flat-bottomed boat with square ends, used for carrying coal, sand, etc., and often towed by a tug. injunction writ or order from a court prohibiting a person or group from carrying out a given action. trichinae very small nematode worms found in insufficiently cooked pork that cause trichinosis, which is a disease characterized by fever, nausea, diarrhea, and muscular pains. Dante born Durante Alighieri , Italian poet famous for The Divine Comedy where he describes the stages of hell. Zola Emile Zola ; French novelist who founded the writing style of naturalism  emphasizing the harsh realities of the world. alchemist person who practices alchemy, a seemingly miraculous power or process of changing a thing into something better. rancid having the bad smell or taste of stale fats or oils; spoiled.

Jurgis attends union meetings religiously and resolves to learn English by attending night school and having the children help him. Jurgis becomes a U. S. citizen at the urging of a man at his plant. He does everything that the man says and follows him to the voting booths and marks the ballot how the man tells him to. For his trouble, Jurgis receives two dollars. Only later does he learn what the entire process means when his fellow union members explain to him that he has been exploited in one of the many vote-buying schemes in the country. Jurgis learns the folklore of Packingtown. He learns of the graft, corruption, and greed spread by the likes of Mike Scully, a local Irish politician. He hears of the physical injuries and disease that ravage the labor force. He comes to realize that the dishonest meat companies sell diseased meat and label cans as "deviled ham" or "potted ham" although the contents are a mixture of leftover bits and entrails from any number of slaughtered animals

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