Jurgis had breakfast with Ostrinski and his family, and then he
went home to Elzbieta. He was no longer shy about it--when he
went in, instead of saying all the things he had been planning to
say, he started to tell Elzbieta about the revolution! At first
she thought he was out of his mind, and it was hours before she
could really feel certain that he was himself. When, however,
she had satisfied herself that he was sane upon all subjects
except politics, she troubled herself no further about it.
Jurgis was destined to find that Elzbieta's armor was absolutely
impervious to Socialism. Her soul had been baked hard in the
fire of adversity, and there was no altering it now; life to her
was the hunt for daily bread, and ideas existed for her only as
they bore upon that. All that interested her in regard to this
new frenzy which had seized hold of her son-in-law was whether or
not it had a tendency to make him sober and industrious; and when
she found he intended to look for work and to contribute his
share to the family fund, she gave him full rein to convince her
of anything. A wonderfully wise little woman was Elzbieta;
she could think as quickly as a hunted rabbit, and in half an hour
she had chosen her life-attitude to the Socialist movement. She
agreed in everything with Jurgis, except the need of his paying
his dues; and she would even go to a meeting with him now and
then, and sit and plan her next day's dinner amid the storm.
For a week after he became a convert Jurgis continued to wander
about all day, looking for work; until at last he met with a
strange fortune. He was passing one of Chicago's innumerable
small hotels, and after some hesitation he concluded to go in.
A man he took for the proprietor was standing in the lobby, and he
went up to him and tackled him for a job.
"What can you do?" the man asked.
"Anything, sir," said Jurgis, and added quickly: "I've been out
of work for a long time, sir. I'm an honest man, and I'm strong
and willing--"
The other was eying him narrowly. "Do you drink?" he asked.
"No, sir," said Jurgis.
"Well, I've been employing a man as a porter, and he drinks.
I've discharged him seven times now, and I've about made up my
mind that's enough. Would you be a porter?"
"Yes, sir."
"It's hard work. You'll have to clean floors and wash spittoons
and fill lamps and handle trunks--"
"I'm willing, sir."
"All right. I'll pay you thirty a month and board, and you can
begin now, if you feel like it. You can put on the other
fellow's rig."
And so Jurgis fell to work, and toiled like a Trojan till night.
Then he went and told Elzbieta, and also, late as it was, he paid
a visit to Ostrinski to let him know of his good fortune. Here
he received a great surprise, for when he was describing the
location of the hotel Ostrinski interrupted suddenly, "Not
Hinds's!"
"Yes," said Jurgis, "that's the name."
To which the other replied, "Then you've got the best boss in
Chicago--he's a state organizer of our party, and one of our
best-known speakers!"
So the next morning Jurgis went to his employer and told him;
and the man seized him by the hand and shook it. "By Jove!" he
cried, "that lets me out. I didn't sleep all last night because
I had discharged a good Socialist!"
So, after that, Jurgis was known to his "boss" as "Comrade
Jurgis," and in return he was expected to call him "Comrade
Hinds." "Tommy" Hinds, as he was known to his intimates, was a
squat little man, with broad shoulders and a florid face,
decorated with gray side whiskers. He was the kindest-hearted
man that ever lived, and the liveliest--inexhaustible in his
enthusiasm, and talking Socialism all day and all night. He was
a great fellow to jolly along a crowd, and would keep a meeting
in an uproar; when once he got really waked up, the torrent of
his eloquence could be compared with nothing save Niagara.
Tommy Hinds had begun life as a blacksmith's helper, and had run
away to join the Union army, where he had made his first
acquaintance with "graft," in the shape of rotten muskets and
shoddy blankets. To a musket that broke in a crisis he always
attributed the death of his only brother, and upon worthless
blankets he blamed all the agonies of his own old age. Whenever
it rained, the rheumatism would get into his joints, and then he
would screw up his face and mutter: "Capitalism, my boy,
capitalism! 'Ecrasez l'infame!'" He had one unfailing remedy
for all the evils of this world, and he preached it to every one;
no matter whether the person's trouble was failure in business,
or dyspepsia, or a quarrelsome mother-in-law, a twinkle would
come into his eyes and he would say, "You know what to do about
it--vote the Socialist ticket!"
Tommy Hinds had set out upon the trail of the Octopus as soon as
the war was over. He had gone into business, and found himself
in competition with the fortunes of those who had been stealing
while he had been fighting. The city government was in their
hands and the railroads were in league with them, and honest
business was driven to the wall; and so Hinds had put all his
savings into Chicago real estate, and set out singlehanded to dam
the river of graft. He had been a reform member of the city
council, he had been a Greenbacker, a Labor Unionist, a Populist,
a Bryanite--and after thirty years of fighting, the year 1896 had
served to convince him that the power of concentrated wealth
could never be controlled, but could only be destroyed. He had
published a pamphlet about it, and set out to organize a party of
his own, when a stray Socialist leaflet had revealed to him that
others had been ahead of him. Now for eight years he had been
fighting for the party, anywhere, everywhere--whether it was a
G.A.R. reunion, or a hotel-keepers' convention, or an
Afro-American businessmen's banquet, or a Bible society picnic,
Tommy Hinds would manage to get himself invited to explain the
relations of Socialism to the subject in hand. After that he
would start off upon a tour of his own, ending at some place
between New York and Oregon; and when he came back from there, he
would go out to organize new locals for the state committee; and
finally he would come home to rest--and talk Socialism in
Chicago. Hinds's hotel was a very hot-bed of the propaganda; all
the employees were party men, and if they were not when they
came, they were quite certain to be before they went away. The
proprietor would get into a discussion with some one in the
lobby, and as the conversation grew animated, others would gather
about to listen, until finally every one in the place would be
crowded into a group, and a regular debate would be under way.
This went on every night--when Tommy Hinds was not there to do
it, his clerk did it; and when his clerk was away campaigning,
the assistant attended to it, while Mrs. Hinds sat behind the
desk and did the work. The clerk was an old crony of the
proprietor's, an awkward, rawboned giant of a man, with a lean,
sallow face, a broad mouth, and whiskers under his chin, the very
type and body of a prairie farmer. He had been that all his
life--he had fought the railroads in Kansas for fifty years,
a Granger, a Farmers' Alliance man, a "middle-of-the-road"
Populist. Finally, Tommy Hinds had revealed to him the wonderful
idea of using the trusts instead of destroying them, and he had
sold his farm and come to Chicago.
That was Amos Struver; and then there was Harry Adams, the
assistant clerk, a pale, scholarly-looking man, who came from
Massachusetts, of Pilgrim stock. Adams had been a cotton
operative in Fall River, and the continued depression in the
industry had worn him and his family out, and he had emigrated to
South Carolina. In Massachusetts the percentage of white
illiteracy is eight-tenths of one per cent, while in South
Carolina it is thirteen and six-tenths per cent; also in South
Carolina there is a property qualification for voters--and for
these and other reasons child labor is the rule, and so the
cotton mills were driving those of Massachusetts out of the
business. Adams did not know this, he only knew that the
Southern mills were running; but when he got there he found that
if he was to live, all his family would have to work, and from
six o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. So he had
set to work to organize the mill hands, after the fashion in
Massachusetts, and had been discharged; but he had gotten other
work, and stuck at it, and at last there had been a strike for
shorter hours, and Harry Adams had attempted to address a street
meeting, which was the end of him. In the states of the far
South the labor of convicts is leased to contractors, and when
there are not convicts enough they have to be supplied. Harry
Adams was sent up by a judge who was a cousin of the mill owner
with whose business he had interfered; and though the life had
nearly killed him, he had been wise enough not to murmur, and at
the end of his term he and his family had left the state of South
Carolina--hell's back yard, as he called it. He had no money for
carfare, but it was harvesttime, and they walked one day and
worked the next; and so Adams got at last to Chicago, and joined
the Socialist party. He was a studious man, reserved, and
nothing of an orator; but he always had a pile of books under his
desk in the hotel, and articles from his pen were beginning to
attract attention in the party press.
Contrary to what one would have expected, all this radicalism did
not hurt the hotel business; the radicals flocked to it, and the
commercial travelers all found it diverting. Of late, also, the
hotel had become a favorite stopping place for Western cattlemen.
Now that the Beef Trust had adopted the trick of raising prices
to induce enormous shipments of cattle, and then dropping them
again and scooping in all they needed, a stock raiser was very
apt to find himself in Chicago without money enough to pay his
freight bill; and so he had to go to a cheap hotel, and it was no
drawback to him if there was an agitator talking in the lobby.
These Western fellows were just "meat" for Tommy Hinds--he would
get a dozen of them around him and paint little pictures of "the
System." Of course, it was not a week before he had heard
Jurgis's story, and after that he would not have let his new
porter go for the world. "See here," he would say, in the middle
of an argument, "I've got a fellow right here in my place who's
worked there and seen every bit of it!" And then Jurgis would
drop his work, whatever it was, and come, and the other would
say, "Comrade Jurgis, just tell these gentlemen what you saw on
the killing-beds." At first this request caused poor Jurgis the
most acute agony, and it was like pulling teeth to get him to
talk; but gradually he found out what was wanted, and in the end
he learned to stand up and speak his piece with enthusiasm. His
employer would sit by and encourage him with exclamations and
shakes of the head; when Jurgis would give the formula for
"potted ham," or tell about the condemned hogs that were dropped
into the "destructors" at the top and immediately taken out again
at the bottom, to be shipped into another state and made into
lard, Tommy Hinds would bang his knee and cry, "Do you think a
man could make up a thing like that out of his head?"
And then the hotel-keeper would go on to show how the Socialists
had the only real remedy for such evils, how they alone "meant
business" with the Beef Trust. And when, in answer to this, the
victim would say that the whole country was getting stirred up,
that the newspapers were full of denunciations of it, and the
government taking action against it, Tommy Hinds had a knock-out
blow all ready. "Yes," he would say, "all that is true--but what
do you suppose is the reason for it? Are you foolish enough to
believe that it's done for the public? There are other trusts in
the country just as illegal and extortionate as the Beef Trust:
there is the Coal Trust, that freezes the poor in winter--there
is the Steel Trust, that doubles the price of every nail in your
shoes--there is the Oil Trust, that keeps you from reading at
night--and why do you suppose it is that all the fury of the
press and the government is directed against the Beef Trust?" And
when to this the victim would reply that there was clamor enough
over the Oil Trust, the other would continue: "Ten years ago
Henry D. Lloyd told all the truth about the Standard Oil Company
in his Wealth versus Commonwealth; and the book was allowed to
die, and you hardly ever hear of it. And now, at last, two
magazines have the courage to tackle 'Standard Oil' again, and
what happens? The newspapers ridicule the authors, the churches
defend the criminals, and the government--does nothing. And now,
why is it all so different with the Beef Trust?"
Here the other would generally admit that he was "stuck"; and
Tommy Hinds would explain to him, and it was fun to see his eyes
open. "If you were a Socialist," the hotelkeeper would say, "you
would understand that the power which really governs the United
States today is the Railroad Trust. It is the Railroad Trust
that runs your state government, wherever you live, and that runs
the United States Senate. And all of the trusts that I have
named are railroad trusts--save only the Beef Trust! The Beef
Trust has defied the railroads--it is plundering them day by day
through the Private Car; and so the public is roused to fury, and
the papers clamor for action, and the government goes on the war-
path! And you poor common people watch and applaud the job, and
think it's all done for you, and never dream that it is really
the grand climax of the century-long battle of commercial
competition--the final death grapple between the chiefs of the
Beef Trust and 'Standard Oil,' for the prize of the mastery and
ownership of the United States of America!"
Such was the new home in which Jurgis lived and worked, and in
which his education was completed. Perhaps you would imagine
that he did not do much work there, but that would be a great
mistake. He would have cut off one hand for Tommy Hinds; and to
keep Hinds's hotel a thing of beauty was his joy in life. That
he had a score of Socialist arguments chasing through his brain
in the meantime did not interfere with this; on the contrary,
Jurgis scrubbed the spittoons and polished the banisters all the
more vehemently because at the same time he was wrestling
inwardly with an imaginary recalcitrant. It would be pleasant to
record that he swore off drinking immediately, and all the rest
of his bad habits with it; but that would hardly be exact. These
revolutionists were not angels; they were men, and men who had
come up from the social pit, and with the mire of it smeared over
them. Some of them drank, and some of them swore, and some of
them ate pie with their knives; there was only one difference
between them and all the rest of the populace--that they were men
with a hope, with a cause to fight for and suffer for. There
came times to Jurgis when the vision seemed far-off and pale, and
a glass of beer loomed large in comparison; but if the glass led
to another glass, and to too many glasses, he had something to
spur him to remorse and resolution on the morrow. It was so
evidently a wicked thing to spend one's pennies for drink, when
the working class was wandering in darkness, and waiting to be
delivered; the price of a glass of beer would buy fifty copies of
a leaflet, and one could hand these out to the unregenerate,
and then get drunk upon the thought of the good that was being
accomplished. That was the way the movement had been made, and
it was the only way it would progress; it availed nothing to know
of it, without fighting for it--it was a thing for all, not for a
few! A corollary of this proposition of course was, that any one
who refused to receive the new gospel was personally responsible
for keeping Jurgis from his heart's desire; and this, alas, made
him uncomfortable as an acquaintance. He met some neighbors with
whom Elzbieta had made friends in her neighborhood, and he set
out to make Socialists of them by wholesale, and several times he
all but got into a fight.
It was all so painfully obvious to Jurgis! It was so
incomprehensible how a man could fail to see it! Here were all
the opportunities of the country, the land, and the buildings
upon the land, the railroads, the mines, the factories, and the
stores, all in the hands of a few private individuals, called
capitalists, for whom the people were obliged to work for wages.
The whole balance of what the people produced went to heap up the
fortunes of these capitalists, to heap, and heap again, and yet
again--and that in spite of the fact that they, and every one
about them, lived in unthinkable luxury! And was it not plain
that if the people cut off the share of those who merely "owned,"
the share of those who worked would be much greater? That was as
plain as two and two makes four; and it was the whole of it,
absolutely the whole of it; and yet there were people who could
not see it, who would argue about everything else in the world.
They would tell you that governments could not manage things as
economically as private individuals; they would repeat and repeat
that, and think they were saying something! They could not see
that "economical" management by masters meant simply that they,
the people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid less!
They were wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters
whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible;
and they were taking an interest in the process, were anxious lest
it should not be done thoroughly enough! Was it not honestly a
trial to listen to an argument such as that?
And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to
some poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty
years, and had never been able to save a penny; who left home
every morning at six o'clock, to go and tend a machine, and come
back at night too tired to take his clothes off; who had never
had a week's vacation in his life, had never traveled, never had
an adventure, never learned anything, never hoped anything--and
when you started to tell him about Socialism he would sniff and
say, "I'm not interested in that--I'm an individualist!" And then
he would go on to tell you that Socialism was "paternalism," and
that if it ever had its way the world would stop progressing. It
was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like that; and
yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out--for how many
millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives
had been so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what
freedom was! And they really thought that it was "individualism"
for tens of thousands of them to herd together and obey the
orders of a steel magnate, and produce hundreds of millions of
dollars of wealth for him, and then let him give them libraries;
while for them to take the industry, and run it to suit
themselves, and build their own libraries--that would have been
"Paternalism"!
Sometimes the agony of such things as this was almost more than
Jurgis could bear; yet there was no way of escape from it, there
was nothing to do but to dig away at the base of this mountain of
ignorance and prejudice. You must keep at the poor fellow; you
must hold your temper, and argue with him, and watch for your
chance to stick an idea or two into his head. And the rest of
the time you must sharpen up your weapons--you must think out new
replies to his objections, and provide yourself with new facts to
prove to him the folly of his ways.
So Jurgis acquired the reading habit. He would carry in his
pocket a tract or a pamphlet which some one had loaned him, and
whenever he had an idle moment during the day he would plod
through a paragraph, and then think about it while he worked.
Also he read the newspapers, and asked questions about them. One
of the other porters at Hinds's was a sharp little Irishman, who
knew everything that Jurgis wanted to know; and while they were
busy he would explain to him the geography of America, and its
history, its constitution and its laws; also he gave him an idea
of the business system of the country, the great railroads and
corporations, and who owned them, and the labor unions, and the
big strikes, and the men who had led them. Then at night, when
he could get off, Jurgis would attend the Socialist meetings.
During the campaign one was not dependent upon the street corner
affairs, where the weather and the quality of the orator were
equally uncertain; there were hall meetings every night, and one
could hear speakers of national prominence. These discussed the
political situation from every point of view, and all that
troubled Jurgis was the impossibility of carrying off but a small
part of the treasures they offered him.
There was a man who was known in the party as the "Little Giant."
The Lord had used up so much material in the making of his head
that there had not been enough to complete his legs; but he got
about on the platform, and when he shook his raven whiskers the
pillars of capitalism rocked. He had written a veritable
encyclopedia upon the subject, a book that was nearly as big as
himself--And then there was a young author, who came from
California, and had been a salmon fisher, an oyster-pirate, a
longshoreman, a sailor; who had tramped the country and been sent
to jail, had lived in the Whitechapel slums, and been to the
Klondike in search of gold. All these things he pictured in his
books, and because he was a man of genius he forced the world to
hear him. Now he was famous, but wherever he went he still
preached the gospel of the poor. And then there was one who was
known at the "millionaire Socialist." He had made a fortune in
business, and spent nearly all of it in building up a magazine,
which the post office department had tried to suppress, and had
driven to Canada. He was a quiet-mannered man, whom you would
have taken for anything in the world but a Socialist agitator.
His speech was simple and informal--he could not understand why
any one should get excited about these things. It was a process
of economic evolution, he said, and he exhibited its laws and
methods. Life was a struggle for existence, and the strong
overcame the weak, and in turn were overcome by the strongest.
Those who lost in the struggle were generally exterminated; but
now and then they had been known to save themselves by
combination--which was a new and higher kind of strength. It was
so that the gregarious animals had overcome the predaceous; it
was so, in human history, that the people had mastered the kings.
The workers were simply the citizens of industry, and the
Socialist movement was the expression of their will to survive.
The inevitability of the revolution depended upon this fact, that
they had no choice but to unite or be exterminated; this fact,
grim and inexorable, depended upon no human will, it was the law
of the economic process, of which the editor showed the details
with the most marvelous precision.
And later on came the evening of the great meeting of the
campaign, when Jurgis heard the two standard-bearers of his
party. Ten years before there had been in Chicago a strike of a
hundred and fifty thousand railroad employees, and thugs had been
hired by the railroads to commit violence, and the President of
the United States had sent in troops to break the strike, by
flinging the officers of the union into jail without trial. The
president of the union came out of his cell a ruined man; but
also he came out a Socialist; and now for just ten years he had
been traveling up and down the country, standing face to face
with the people, and pleading with them for justice. He was a
man of electric presence, tall and gaunt, with a face worn thin
by struggle and suffering. The fury of outraged manhood gleamed
in it--and the tears of suffering little children pleaded in his
voice. When he spoke he paced the stage, lithe and eager, like a
panther. He leaned over, reaching out for his audience; he
pointed into their souls with an insistent finger. His voice was
husky from much speaking, but the great auditorium was as still
as death, and every one heard him.
And then, as Jurgis came out from this meeting, some one handed
him a paper which he carried home with him and read; and so he
became acquainted with the "Appeal to Reason." About twelve years
previously a Colorado real-estate speculator had made up his mind
that it was wrong to gamble in the necessities of life of human
beings: and so he had retired and begun the publication of a
Socialist weekly. There had come a time when he had to set his
own type, but he had held on and won out, and now his publication
was an institution. It used a carload of paper every week, and
the mail trains would be hours loading up at the depot of the
little Kansas town. It was a four-page weekly, which sold for
less than half a cent a copy; its regular subscription list was a
quarter of a million, and it went to every crossroads post office
in America.
The "Appeal" was a "propaganda" paper. It had a manner all its
own--it was full of ginger and spice, of Western slang and
hustle: It collected news of the doings of the "plutes," and
served it up for the benefit of the "American working-mule."
It would have columns of the deadly parallel--the million dollars'
worth of diamonds, or the fancy pet-poodle establishment of a
society dame, beside the fate of Mrs. Murphy of San Francisco,
who had starved to death on the streets, or of John Robinson,
just out of the hospital, who had hanged himself in New York
because he could not find work. It collected the stories of
graft and misery from the daily press, and made a little pungent
paragraphs out of them. "Three banks of Bungtown, South Dakota,
failed, and more savings of the workers swallowed up!" "The mayor
of Sandy Creek, Oklahoma, has skipped with a hundred thousand
dollars. That's the kind of rulers the old partyites give you!"
"The president of the Florida Flying Machine Company is in jail
for bigamy. He was a prominent opponent of Socialism, which he
said would break up the home!" The "Appeal" had what it called
its "Army," about thirty thousand of the faithful, who did things
for it; and it was always exhorting the "Army" to keep its dander
up, and occasionally encouraging it with a prize competition,
for anything from a gold watch to a private yacht or an eighty-acre
farm. Its office helpers were all known to the "Army" by quaint
titles--"Inky Ike," "the Bald-headed Man," "the Redheaded Girl,"
"the Bulldog," "the Office Goat," and "the One Hoss."
But sometimes, again, the "Appeal" would be desperately serious.
It sent a correspondent to Colorado, and printed pages describing
the overthrow of American institutions in that state. In a
certain city of the country it had over forty of its "Army" in
the headquarters of the Telegraph Trust, and no message of
importance to Socialists ever went through that a copy of it did
not go to the "Appeal." It would print great broadsides during
the campaign; one copy that came to Jurgis was a manifesto
addressed to striking workingmen, of which nearly a million
copies had been distributed in the industrial centers, wherever
the employers' associations had been carrying out their "open
shop" program. "You have lost the strike!" it was headed. "And
now what are you going to do about it?" It was what is called an
"incendiary" appeal--it was written by a man into whose soul the
iron had entered. When this edition appeared, twenty thousand
copies were sent to the stockyards district; and they were taken
out and stowed away in the rear of a little cigar store, and
every evening, and on Sundays, the members of the Packingtown
locals would get armfuls and distribute them on the streets and
in the houses. The people of Packingtown had lost their strike,
if ever a people had, and so they read these papers gladly, and
twenty thousand were hardly enough to go round. Jurgis had
resolved not to go near his old home again, but when he heard of
this it was too much for him, and every night for a week he would
get on the car and ride out to the stockyards, and help to undo
his work of the previous year, when he had sent Mike Scully's
ten-pin setter to the city Board of Aldermen.
The Jungle Chapter 30 - part 2