The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906)
Chapter 1:
characters:
Marija Berczynskas - Ona Lukoszaite's cousin
Jurgis Rudkis - black-eyed w/thick, black hair, strong
Ona Lukoszaite - fair and slight
Teta Elzbieta
Kotrina
Grandmother Majauszkiene
Tamoszius Kuszleika - plays at Jurgis and Ona's wedding, taught himself to play violin at night, works in killing beds during day
Valentinavycia - cellist at wedding
Dede Antanas / Antanas Rudkus / Grandfather Anthony - Jurgis's father, 60 yrs, works in pickle room at Durham's, a scholar in the old days, give speech at wedding
Jokubas Szadvilas - had a delicatessen store on Halsted Street
Lucija Szadvilas - Jokubas' wife, both fat
Alena Jasaityte - beautiful girl, at wedding
Juozas Racizius - Alena's fiance
Jadvya Marcinkus - beautiful but humble
Mikolas - Jadvya's beau
Sebastijonas Szedvillas - Marija's child
Aniele Jukniene - a widow who gives several months' profit form her chickens for the veselija
setting:
"Back of the Yards" in Chicago
turn of the 20th Century
plot:
Narrative opens on the wedding feast of Ona Lukoszaite and Jurgus Rudkis. This is a veselija or traditional Lithuanian wedding feast, and anyone hungry is fed there, although the narrator observes that "a rule made in the forests of Lithuania is hard to apply in the stockyards district of Chicago, with its quarter of a million inhabitants." There is a feast orchestrated by Marija Berczynskas, and then Jurgis's father Antanas Rudkus gives a speech and the serving things are cleared away to make room for the dancing. The acziavima, a three or four hour ceremony in all move in a circle around the bride who dances with each man one by one and then is expected to drop some money in the hat of Teta Alzbieta. "The guests are expected to pay for this entertainment; if they be proper guests, they will see that there is a neat sum left over for the bride and bridegroom to start life upon." The veselija is a compact between the couple and the guests, but as the night wears on it is found that guests are breaking this compact - eating and drinking and then sneaking out without dancing with the bride or else marching out openly. Jurgis, hearing of the trouble, tells his family not to worry and that he will work harder. At the end of the night Ona is exhausted and Jurgis says, "You shall not go to Brown's today, little one" and when she insists that she must says, "Leave it to me; leave it to me. I will earn more money - I will work harder."
Chapter 2
Jurgis does not believe that he can ever be without work, and even though others warn him is unable to imagine what it would be like to be beaten. Jurgis had met Ona a year and a half ago at a horse fair hundreds of miles from home, and after offering two horses for her and being refused he had travelled a fortnight to ask again. Her father has died and her family's financial situation declined terrible in the interim, and Jurgis suggests that they all go to America. Their trip is difficult - a dishonest agent got them in trouble with officials and had cost them money, and then they had been tricked into staying at a hotel with high rates. They travel to Chicago from New York and when they are found cowering in a doorway, the police get an interpreter and then send them to the stockyards. The smell of the stockyards grows stronger as they approach on the train, until it is palpable. Teta Elzbieta recognizes the name "J. Szedvilas" on a delicatessen sign, and Jokubas Szedvilas shows the family a place where they can stay at the squalid boardinghouse of Widow Jukniene and helps them to find work. The family learns that the land in packingtown is "made" land created by using it as a dumping ground for city garbage and see other sources of contamination in the local environment and the stockyards' products, including a waste pit filled with water from which ice is sold to city residents in the winter.
Chapter 3
Jokubas Szedvilas knows some of the special policemen employed by Durham and promises to inquire whether a job could be found for old Antanas and for Jonas. Jurgis goes to Brown's and is selected within half an hour for a job shoveling guts. That day Jokubas takes the newcomers on a tour of packingtown, including the stockyards and a guided tour of the Durham plant where they see the assembly-line style slaughtering of pigs. When they see the animals walking up to the top floor of the building where their body weight will then provide much of the force that moves them though the various stages of processing, Szedvilas jokes that the slaughter houses use every part of the hog but its squeal. They also see where the hogs are supposed to be scrutinized by a government inspector who feels the glands for tuberculosis, and where several hogs get by without inspection while the inspector explains to them the dangers of tubercular meat. After seeing the pig slaughter house, they move across the street to the cattle processing plant where instead of several floors there is one and where instead of the animals moving through the various stages of slaughter, lines of men moved from one to another carcass. At the end of their tour, Jokubas informs them that Durham combined with the other plants of packingtown formed the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place, that it employs thirty thousand men and directly supports two hundred and fifty thousand, and indirectly half a million, and furnished the food for thirty thousand people. "All that a mere man could do, it seemed to Jurgis, was to take a thing like this as he found it, and do as he was told; to be given a place in it and a share in its wonderful activities was a blessing to be grateful for, as one was grateful for the sunshine and the rain."
Chapter 4
Jurgis has his first day of work and finds that his job consists of sweeping guts into traps in the killing floor. There is celebration in the rented bedroom that night - Jurgis has made a dollar and a half in a single day, Jonas has the promise of a job pushing a truck in Durham's, and Marija has found skilled piece work painting cans. Jurgis is determined that Teta Elzbieta should keep house with Ona's help and that Elzbeta's children should not work but go to school. Ony Jurgis's father Antanas has not had luck, and is unwilling to accept that he is too old to find work where even men who have worked at the packinghouses their whole lives are let go at his age. Jurgis has a circular advertising a house for sale in Polish, Lithuanian and German. It is a four room house and can be bought for fifteen hundred. Marija, Ona and Elzbieta go the next day to speak to the agent about the house, which is a mile and a half south of the yards and, he assures them, a wonderful bargain. The whole family goes to see the house on Sunday morning, and the agent meets them there. It isn't the one in the photo, but it is freshly painted and the agent assures them that it is new. The houses round it are older looking and do not appeared occupied, but the agent says that the owners will move in shortly and they feel it would be rude to press him. The basement of the house is also unfinished and its second story an attic with no floor, but the agent distracts them with his volubility and finally a demonstration of the house's running water. The family ignores the agent's hints about promptness and they debate the matter thoroughly that night. Szedvilas comes when they have about agreed to take the house and tells them stories of people who have been swindled buying shoddy houses or signing contracts they could not understand, but after he leaves Jonas points our that Szedvilas' shop is failing and the man's pessimism may be attributed to that. Jurgis cannot get off work to sign the contract, and so Teta Elzbieta goes with Ona and Szedvilas carrying with them Jurgis's many warnings. The agent does nothing to ease their uneasiness as they review the contract, and when Szedvilas appears to find a clause that says the arrangement is a rental and not a sale, they go to get a lawyer but are dismayed to find the lawyer is friendly acquaintance of the agent. After much agony Elzbieta signs the contract and they leave terrified that they have been swindled. That night Jurgis goes with Szedvilas to another lawyer, who assures them that the agreement is OK - it describes a rental until the full amount has been paid, and then ownership is transfered to the buyer. This is to make it easier to eject buyers who fail to pay, and the property will be theirs as long as they make all the payments.
Chapter 5
The family attacks the question of how to furnish their home. The narrator comments ironically on the abundance of advertising in Packingtown that, "A person who had such a task before him would not need to look very far in Packingtown - he had only to walk up the avenue and read the signs, or get into a streetcar, to obtain full information as to pretty much everything a human creature could need. It was quite touching, the zeal of people to see that his health and happiness were provided for." The family finds a shop that will sell them furniture for the whole house with a small down payment, and they take delight in arranging the details of the house. Jurgis's job at the plant is the first one he has had that takes all he has, and he enjoys feeling fully employed. He is surprised by others' hatred for their work, and balks when he is approached by union members who want to stop the practice of speeding up. Jurgis's philosophy would have been something like laisez-faire, although even as he consigned unfit men to destruction, he felt sympathy for his old father who had always worked and now could not. One night Antanas comes home telling how a man has offered him a job pickling for 1/3 of fhis wages, and an interview with Tamoszius Kuszleika reveals to Jurgis that this kind of graft is common practice. Jurgis doe not yet know that in Pacingtown it is impossible to rise just by minding your business and doing your own work. Antanas's position as squeegie in the pickling room gives the family some insight into the unsanitary practices that go into the nothing-wasted-but-the-squeal approach at Durham. Marija also hears from her friend Jadvyga that the woman whom Marija replaced had been discharged after fifteen years and after coming down with consumption. Jonas's predecessor had been killed in a workplace accident. Meanwhile, Jurgis notices that cows about to calve, which are not fit for consumption, are slaughtered without hesitation along with the rest of the meat, only that the boss makes a point of distracting the government inspector as the cow goes through. When another man hurts his leg and Jurgis takes over some of his duties, he finds that "downers" that have died en route to the slaughterhouse are slaughtered and packed along with the rest of the meat after hours.
Chapter 6
Teta Elzbieta had rejected any suggestion that Jurgis and Ona be married without the traditional feast. They are already looking at a five month delay in their wedding when the family learns from a Lithuanian family of an enderly woman and her grown son that their house will cost more than they think. Grandmother Majauszkiene tells the family that the houses are not new at all and that they have been preceeded in theirs by poverty, sickness and death. When she and her son had come to America, the laborers had all been skilled German butchers. These had been replaced successively and in accordance with old man Durham's careful advertising abroad by the Irish, the Bohemians, the Poles, the Luthuanians and now the Slovaks with each successive immigration driving down the cost of labor. Grandmother Majauszkiene is describing the plight of one of many families driven from the house by poverty when the family tries to show her that the family in question should have been making enough to keep up the payments. It is only then that Jurgis's family learns that they have to pay interest on their house in the amount of seven dollars per month above the twelve they had planned. When Ona tells Jurgis in the yards at noontime, he replies that he will work harder and that perhaps Ona would have to work for a while afterall. For a present to the forelady, Marija finds Ona a job in a wrapping room. Teta Elzbieta takes Stanislovas to a priest for a certificate that he is two years older than his actual age, and he is put to a job setting lard cans.
Chapter 7
The family works all summer, and in the fall they have saved enough to throw a feast for all their new acquaintances, who come and, skipping out on their responsibility to help pay, leave the family a hundred dollars in debt. The family is under tremendous stress but Jurgis controls himself for Ona. He feels that she is too god for him to deserve, "But he was resolved that she should never find this out, and so was always on the watch to see that he did not betray any of his ugly self" and pays careful attention to his manners. "He had learned the ways of things about him now. It was a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost . . . So Jurgis said that he understood it; and yet it was really pitiful, for the struggle was so unfair - some had so much the advantage!" Ona receives a blow from an unexpected enemy when a car company policy requiring advance request for all transfers leaves her stranded rain-soaked all day at work, and then sick after that. The children are not well, and the family does not know that it is because they are living over a cespool in a house with no sewer or that ther milk is watered down and their food adulterated. At home Teta Elzbieta could gather herbs to cure them, but here she has to buy extracts not knowing that they are all also adulterated. The family also has to deal with vermin in the house and are powerless to fix the problem with the fake treatments they can afford. Antanas develops a bad cough and, the chemicals in the pickle eating through his boots, begins to suffer from sores on his feet. He finally collapses and, as he lays dying at home, is comforted only by the assurance from a coworker, who Jurgis bribed to come and lie to his father, that the foreman would keep Antanas's place for him. Antanas dies. "Now the dreadful winter was come upon them. In the forests, all summer long, the branches of trees do battle for light, and some of them lose and die; and then come the raging blasts, and the storms of snow and hail, and strew the ground with these weaker branches. Just so it was in Packingtown; the whole district braced itself for the struggle that was an agony, and those whose time was come died off in hordes. All the year round they had been serving as cogs in the great packing machine; and now was the time for the renovting of it, and the replacing of damaged parts. There came pneumonia and grippe, stalking among them, seeking for weakened consitutions; there was the annual harvest of those whom tuberculosis had been dragging down . . . . Sooner or later came the day when the unfit one did not report for work; and then, with no time lost in waiting, and no inquiries or regrets, there was a chance for a new hand." The cold was a problem for getting to and from work, and Stanislovas becomes terrified of the cold after seeing his coworker's ears rubbed off in an attempt to warm him after a bad exposure. Many of the men got in the habit of drinking becasue taverns offered a hot meal with the drink and then men got carried away, but thoughts of Ona kept Jurgis to one drink with a meal at noontime and gave him a reputation as a surley fellow not entirely welcome in the saloons. At night the children fought to be in the warm center of the pile as they slept.
Chapter 8
Marija falls in love with Tamoszius Kiszleika, the little violin player. Being with him gives her a chance to get to know people and to eat good food at the parties where he plays. Marija hopes to be able to marry soon even though she frequently gives her money to the family for what they need, but then her canning factory shuts down. The same slump that causes Marija to lose her job often leaves the men on the killing bed freezing with nothing to do for hours, and then a short and frenzied workday that might pay only two hours. "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" - even on these slow days, a man who arrives one minute late is docked an hour's pay, but no postion of an hour at the end of the day is counted. Jurgis is nolonger perplexed by men's talk of fighting for their rights, and when a deligate from the butcher-helpers' union comes to Jurgis, his whole family has union cards before another month goes by. Jurgis, who is now learning some English, becomes a devoted union member and attends all the meetings.
Chapter 9
Being in the union makes Jurgis want to learn English, and that project inspires him to learn to read. Jurgis also starts to take an interest in the way the country works. When he had been at Brown's three weeks, a man had approached him and asked if he'd like to fill out naturalization papers to become a citizen. The same man later helped him register to vote and organized his trip to a polling place to cast his vote for two dollars. In the union, a man explains to Jurgis that America is a democracy and that the officials who rued it and got all the graft had to be elected first - the Democratic boss of Jurgis's district is an Irishman named Mike Sculley. The narrator describes the many miracles of chemistry that come out of Packingtown - the same hopper prodicing potted goose, potted ham and deviled ham. Ironically, the fanciest most expensive products were also frequently the most contaminated, and Durham's Pure Leaf Lard sometimes contained all but the bones of men who had fallen into the vats.
Chapter 10
By spring, the family is living hand to mouth and Marija has to give up the idea of marrying at all. Their poverty is a constant strain on the family's minds, and there is no end to the unforseen expenses, as when their water pipes had frozen and burst. The house agent terrifies them again when, as they pay the January rent with interest, he inquires whether they have taken care of the insurance yet. Jurgis demands that the insurance tell him all the costs at once now that they have signed the contract, and the man says that they must pay ten dollars a year in taxes and a six dollar water tax, plus more shoudl the city decide to install a sewer or sidewalks. Spring brings a respite from the cold weather but there is rain and a plague of flies. In late Spring the canning factory opens up again to Marija's delight, but she soon loses her job because of her union activity and because she complains about being underpaid because of a low count of her cans. Ona is about to enter her confinement when Marija loses her job, and it is harder for Marija to find another now until she finally takes the place (at a lower wage) of a male beef-trimmer. Marija's lesson comes just in time to prevent Ona from complaining about her own forelady Miss Henderson, who is a kept woman and the former mistress of a superintendent of a department in her building, and who also employs some of the girls in Ona's department at a brother downtown. One morning Ona stays home and delivers a baby boy they name little Antanas. She returns to work the next Monday. "And so Ona went back to Brown's and saved her place and a week's wages; and so she gave herself some one of the thousand ailments that women group under the title of 'womb trouble' and was never again a well person as long as she lived."