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Attack on the Meatpackers
1906 . . . 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! . . . And then there was "potted
game" and "potted grouse," "potted ham," and
"deviled ham"--devyled, 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's
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! . . . 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
of 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 There was never the least attention
paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from
Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy
and white--it would be dosed with borax and glycerine,
and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There
would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust,
where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption
germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from
leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it.
It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his
hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of
rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out
for them, they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the
hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shovelled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling
would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one--there were things
that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a
tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate
their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that
was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat,
and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the
plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there.
Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some
jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the
cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the
barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water--and cart load
after cart load of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with
fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would
make into "smoked" sausage--but as the smoking took time, and was
therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and
preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine
to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when
they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for
this they would charge two cents more a pound. . . . And then the editor wanted to know upon
what ground Dr. Schliemann asserted that it might be possible for a society
to exist upon an hour's toil by each of its members. "Just what,"
answered the other, "would be the productive capacity of society if the
present resources of science were utilized, we have no means of ascertaining;
but we may be sure it would exceed anything that would sound reasonable to
minds inured to the ferocious barbarities of Capitalism. After the triumph of
the international proletariat, war would of course be inconceivable; and who
can figure the cost of war to humanity--not merely the value of the lives and
the material that it destroys, not merely the cost of keeping millions of men
in idleness, of arming and equipping them for battle and parade, but the
drain upon the vital energies of society by the war-attitude and the
war-terror, the brutality and ignorance, the drunkenness, prostitution, and
crime it entails, the industrial impotence and the moral deadness? Do you
think that it would be too much to say that two hours of the working time of
every efficient member of a community goes to feed the red fiend of war?" And then Schliemann went on to outline
some of the wastes of competition: the losses of industrial warfare; the
ceaseless worry and friction; the vices--such as drink, for instance, the use
of which had nearly doubled in twenty years, as a consequence of the intensification
of the economic struggle; the idle and unproductive members of the community,
the frivolous rich and the pauperized poor; the law and the whole machinery
of repression; the wastes of social ostentation, the milliners and tailors,
the hairdressers, dancing masters, chefs and lackeys. "You
understand," he said, "that in a society dominated by the fact of
commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and
wastefulness the sole criterion of power. So we have, at the present moment,
a society with, say, thirty per cent of the population occupied in producing
useless articles, and one per cent occupied in destroying them. . . . And then there were official returns
from the various precincts and wards of the city itself! Whether it was a
factory district or one of the "silk-stocking" wards seemed to make
no particular difference in the increase; but one of the things which
surprised the [Socialist] party leaders most was the tremendous vote that
came rolling in from the stockyards. Packingtown
comprised three wards of the city, and the vote in the spring of 1903 had
been five hundred, and in the fall of the same year, sixteen hundred. Now,
only a year later, it was over sixty-three hundred--and the Democratic vote
only eighty-eight hundred! There were other wards in which the Democratic
vote had been actually surpassed, and in two districts, members of the state
legislature had been elected. Thus --So spoke an orator upon the platform;
and two thousand pairs of eyes were fixed upon him, and two thousand voices
were cheering his every sentence. The orator had been the head of the city's
relief bureau in the stockyards, until the sight of misery and corruption had
made him sick. He was young, hungry-looking, full of fire; and as he swung
his long arms and beat up the crowd, to Jurgis he
seemed the very spirit of the revolution. "Organize! Organize!
Organize!"--that was his cry. He was afraid of this tremendous vote,
which his party had not expected, and which it had not earned. "These
men are not Socialists!" he cried. "This election will pass, and
the excitement will die, and people will forget about it; and if you forget
about it, too, if you sink back and rest upon your oars, we shall lose this
vote that we have polled today, and our enemies will laugh us to scorn! It
rests with you to take your resolution--now, in the flush of victory, to find
these men who have voted for us, and bring them to our meetings, and organize
them and bind them to us! We shall not find all our campaigns as easy as this
one. Everywhere in the country tonight the old party politicians are studying
this vote, and setting their sails by it; and nowhere will they be quicker or
more cunning than here in our own city. Fifty thousand Socialist votes in The End Credits: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906 (New York: New
American Library, rep. 1960), pp. 98, 101-102, 136-137, 332, 340-341. |