Some of the foremen were union members, and many who were not had gone out with the men. It was in the killing department that the packers had been left most in the lurch, and precisely here that they could least afford it; the smoking and canning and salting of meat might wait, and all the by-products might be wasted—but fresh meats must be had, or the restaurants and hotels and brown-stone houses would feel the pinch, and then “public opinion” would take a startling turn.
An opportunity such as this would not come twice to a man; and Jurgis seized it. Yes, he knew the work, the whole of it, and he could teach it to others. But if he took the job and gave satisfaction he would expect to keep it—they would not turn him off at the end of the strike? To which the superintendent replied that he might safely trust Durham’s for that—they proposed to teach these unions a lesson, and most of all those foremen who had gone back on them. Jurgis would receive five dollars a day during the strike, and twenty-five a week after it was settled.
So our friend got a pair of “slaughter-pen” boots and “jeans,” and flung himself at his task. It was a weird sight, there on the killing-beds—a throng of stupid black negroes, and foreigners who could not understand a word that was said to them, mixed with pale-faced, hollow-chested bookkeepers and clerks, half-fainting for the tropical heat and the sickening stench of fresh blood—and all struggling to dress a dozen or two of cattle in the same place where, twenty-four hours ago, the old killing-gang had been speeding, with their marvellous precision, turning out four hundred carcasses every hour!
The negroes and the “toughs” from the Levee did not want to work, and every few minutes some of them would feel obliged to retire and recuperate. In a couple of days Durham and Company had electric fans up to cool off the rooms for them, and even couches for them to rest on; and meantime they could go out and find a shady corner and take a “snooze,” and as there was no place for any one in particular, and no system, it might be hours before their boss discovered them. As for the poor office employees, they did their best, moved to it by terror; thirty of them had been “fired” in a bunch that first morning for refusing to serve, besides a number of women clerks and typewriters who had declined to act as waitresses.
It was such a force as this that Jurgis had to organize. He did his best, flying here and there, placing them in rows and showing them the tricks; he had never given an order in his life before, but he had taken enough of them to know, and he soon fell into the spirit of it, and roared and stormed like any old stager. He had not the most tractable pupils, however. “See hyar, boss,” a big black “buck” would begin, “ef you doan’ like de way Ah does dis job, you kin git somebody else to do it.” Then a crowd would gather and listen, muttering threats. After the first meal nearly all the steel knives had been missing, and now every negro had one, ground to a fine point, hidden in his boots.
There was no bringing order out of such a chaos, Jurgis soon discovered; and he fell in with the spirit of the thing—there was no reason why he should wear himself out with shouting. If hides and guts were slashed and rendered useless there was no way of tracing it to any one; and if a man lay off and forgot to come back there was nothing to be gained by seeking him, for all the rest would quit in the meantime. Everything went, during the strike, and the packers paid. Before long Jurgis found that the custom of resting had suggested to some alert minds the possibility of registering at more than one place and earning more than one five dollars a day. When he caught a man at this he “fired” him, but it chanced to be in a quiet corner, and the man tendered him a ten-dollar bill and a wink, and he took them. Of course, before long this custom spread, and Jurgis was soon making quite a good income from it.
In the face of handicaps such as these the packers counted themselves lucky if they could kill off the cattle that had been crippled in transit and the hogs that had developed disease. Frequently, in the course of a two or three days’ trip, in hot weather and without water, some hog would develop cholera, and die; and the rest would attack him before he had ceased kicking, and when the car was opened there would be nothing of him left but the bones. If all the hogs in this car-load were not killed at once, they would soon be down with the dread disease, and there would be nothing to do but make them into lard. It was the same with cattle that were gored and dying, or were limping with broken bones stuck through their flesh—they must be killed, even if brokers and buyers and superintendents had to take off their coats and help drive and cut and skin them. And meantime, agents of the packers were gathering gangs of negroes in the country districts of the far South, promising them five dollars a day and board, and being careful not to mention there was a strike; already car-loads of them were on the way, with special rates from the railroads, and all traffic ordered out of the way. Many towns and cities were taking advantage of the chance to clear out their jails and work-houses-in Detroit the magistrates would release every man who agreed to leave town within twenty-four hours, and agents of the packers were in the court-rooms to ship them right. And meantime train-loads of supplies were coming in for their accommodation, including beer and whiskey, so that they might not be tempted to go outside. They hired thirty young girls in Cincinnati to “pack fruit,” and when they arrived put them at work canning corned-beef, and put cots for them to sleep in a public hallway, through which the men passed. As the gangs came in day and night, under the escort of squads of police, they stowed them away in unused work-rooms and store-rooms, and in the car-sheds, crowded so closely together that the cots touched. In some places they would use the same room for eating and sleeping, and at night the men would put their cots upon the tables, to keep away from the swarms of rats.
But with all their best efforts, the packers were demoralized. Ninety per cent of the men had walked out; and they faced the task of completely remaking their labor force—and with the price of meat up thirty per cent, and the public clamoring for a settlement. They made an offer to submit the whole question at issue to arbitration ; and at the end of ten days the unions accepted it, and the strike was called off. It was agreed that all the men were to be reemployed within forty-five days, and that there was to be “no discrimination against union men.”
This was an anxious time for Jurgis. If the men were taken back “without discrimination,” he would lose his present place. He sought out the superintendent, who smiled grimly and bade him “wait and see.” Durham’s strike-breakers were few of them leaving.
Whether or not the “settlement” was simply a trick of the packers to gain time, or whether they really expected to break the strike and cripple the unions by the plan, cannot be said; but that night there went out from the office of Durham and Company a telegram to all the big packing-centers, “Employ no union leaders.” And in the morning, when the twenty thousand men thronged into the yards, with their dinner-pails and working-clothes, Jurgis stood near the door of the hog-trimming room, where he had worked before the strike, and saw a throng of eager men, with a score or two of policemen watching them; and he saw a superintendent come out and walk down the line, and pick out man after man that pleased him; and one and after another came, and there were some men up near the head of the line who were never picked—they being the union stewards and delegates, and the men Jurgis had heard making speeches at the meetings. Each time, of course, there were louder murmurings and angrier looks. Over where the cattle-butchers were waiting, Jurgis heard shouts and saw a crowd, and he hurried there. One big butcher, who was president of the Packing Trades Council, had been passed over five times, and the men were wild with rage; they had appointed a committee of three to go in and see the superintendent, and the committee had made three attempts, and each time the police had clubbed them back from the door. Then there were yells and hoots, continuing until at last the superintendent came to the door. “We all go back or none of us do!” cried a hundred voices. And the other shook his fist at them, and shouted, “You went out of here like cattle, and like cattle you’ll come back!”
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sp; Then suddenly the big butcher president leaped upon a pile of stones and yelled: “It’s off, boys. We’ll all of us quit again!” And so the cattle-butchers declared a new strike on the spot; and gathering their members from the other plants, where the same trick had been played, they marched down Packers’ Avenue, which was thronged with a dense mass of workers, cheering wildly. Men who had already got to work on the killing-beds dropped their tools and joined them; some galloped here and there on horseback, shouting the tidings, and within half an hour the whole of Packingtown was on strike again, and beside itself with fury.
There was quite a different tone in Packingtown after this—the place was a seething caldron of passion, and the “scab” who ventured into it fared badly. There were one or two of these incidents each day, the newspapers detailing them, and always blaming them upon the unions. Yet ten years before, when there were no unions in Packingtown, there was a strike, and national troops had to be called, and there were pitched battles fought at night, by the light of blazing freight-trains. Packingtown was always a centre of violence; in “Whiskey Point,” where there were a hundred saloons and one glue-factory, there was always fighting, and always more of it in hot weather. Any one who had taken the trouble to consult the station-house blotter would have found that there was less violence that summer than ever before—and this while twenty thousand men were out of work, and with nothing to do all day but brood upon bitter wrongs. There was no one to picture the battle the union leaders were fighting—to hold this huge army in rank, to keep it from straggling and pillaging, to cheer and encourage and guide a hundred thousand people, of a dozen different tongues, through six long weeks of hunger and disappointment and despair.
Meantime the packers had set themselves definitely to the task of making a new labor force. A thousand or two of strike-breakers were brought in every night, and distributed among the various plants. Some of them were experienced workers,—butchers, salesmen, and managers from the packers’ branch stores, and a few union men who had deserted from other cities; but the vast majority were “green” negroes from the cotton districts of the far South, and they were herded into the packing-plants like sheep.24 There was a law forbidding the use of buildings as lodging-houses unless they were licensed for the purpose, and provided with proper windows, stairways, and fire-escapes; but here, in a “paint-room,” reached only by an enclosed “chute,” a room without a single window and only one door, a hundred men were crowded upon mattresses on the floor. Up on the third story of the “hog-house” of Jones’s was a storeroom, without a window, into which they crowded seven hundred men, sleeping upon the bare springs of cots, and with a second shift to use them by day. And when the clamor of the public led to an investigation into these conditions, and the mayor of the city was forced to order the enforcement of the law, the packers got a judge to issue an injunction forbidding him to do it!
Just at this time the mayor was boasting that he had put an end to gambling and prize-fighting in the city; but here a swarm of professional gamblers had leagued themselves with the police to fleece the strike-breakers; and any night, in the big open space in front of Brown‘s, one might see brawny negroes stripped to the waist and pounding each other for money, while a howling throng of three or four thousand surged about, men and women, young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with big buck negroes with daggers in their boots, while rows of woolly heads peered down from every window of the surrounding factories. The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa; and since then they had been chattel slaves, or had been held down by a community ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time they were free,—free to gratify every passion, free to wreck themselves. They were wanted to break a strike, and when it was broken they would be shipped away, and their present masters would never see them again; and so whiskey and women were brought in by the car-load and sold to them, and hell was let loose in the yards. Every night there were stabbings and shootings; it was said that the packers had blank permits, which enabled them to ship dead bodies from the city without troubling the authorities. They lodged men and women on the same floor; and with the night there began a saturnalia of debauchery—scenes such as never before had been witnessed in America. And as the women were the dregs from the brothels of Chicago, and the men were for the most part ignorant country negroes, the nameless diseases of vice were soon rife; and this where food was being handled which was sent out to every corner of the civilized world.
The “Union Stockyards” were never a pleasant place; but now they were not only a collection of slaughterhouses, but also the camping-place of an army of fifteen or twenty thousand human beasts. All day long the blazing midsummer sun beat down upon that square mile of abominations: upon tens of thousands of cattle crowded into pens whose wooden floors stank and steamed contagion ; upon bare, blistering, cinder-strewn railroad-tracks, and huge blocks of dingy meat-factories, whose labyrinthine passages defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate them; and there were not merely rivers of hot blood, and carloads of moist flesh, and rendering-vats and soap-caldrons, glue-factories and fertilizer tanks, that smelt like the craters of hell—there were also tons of garbage festering in the sun, and the greasy laundry of the workers hung out to dry, and dining-rooms littered with food and black with flies, and toilet-rooms that were open sewers.
And then at night, when this throng poured out into the streets to play—fighting, gambling, drinking and carousing, cursing and screaming, laughing and singing, playing banjoes and dancing! They were worked in the yards all the seven days of the week, and they had their prize-fights and crap-games on Sunday nights as well; but then around the corner one might see a bonfire blazing, and an old, gray-headed negress, lean and witchlike, her hair flying wild and her eyes blazing, yelling and chanting of the fires of perdition and the blood of the “Lamb,” while men and women lay down upon the ground and moaned and screamed in convulsions of terror and remorse.
Such were the stockyards during the strike; while the unions watched in sullen despair, and the country clamored like a greedy child for its food, and the packers went grimly on their way. Each day they added new workers, and could be more stern with the old ones—could put them on piece-work, and dismiss them if they did not keep up the pace. Jurgis was now one of their agents in this process; and he could feel the change day by day, like the slow starting up of a huge machine. He had gotten used to being a master of men; and because of the stifling heat and the stench, and the fact that he was a “scab” and knew it and despised himself, he was drinking, and developing a villainous temper, and he stormed and cursed and raged at his men, and drove them until they were ready to drop with exhaustion.
Then one day late in August, a superintendent ran into the place and shouted to Jurgis and his gang to drop their work and come. They followed him outside, to where, in the midst of a dense throng, they saw several two-horse trucks waiting, and three patrol-wagon loads of police. Jurgis and his men sprang upon one of the trucks, and the driver yelled to the crowd, and they went thundering away at a gallop. Some steers had just escaped from the yards, and the strikers had got hold of them, and there would be the chance of a scrap!
They went out at the Ashland Avenue gate, and over in the direction of the “dump.” There was a yell as soon as they were sighted, men and women rushing out of houses and saloons as they galloped by. There were eight or ten policemen on the truck, however, and there was no disturbance until they came to a place where the street was blocked with a dense throng. Those on the flying truck yelled a warning and the crowd scattered pell-mell, disclosing one of the steers lying in its blood. There were a good many cattle-butchers about just then, with nothing much to do, and hungry children at home; and so some one had knocked out the steer—and as a first-class man can kill and dress one in a couple of minutes, there were a good many steaks and roasts already missing. This called for punishment, of course; and the police proceeded to administer it by leaping from the truck and
cracking at every head they saw. There were yells of rage and pain, and the terrified people fled into houses and stores, or scattered helter-skelter down the street. Jurgis and his gang joined in the sport, every man singling out his victim, and striving to bring him to bay and punch him. If he fled into a house his pursuer would smash in the flimsy door and follow him up the stairs, hitting every one who came within reach, and finally dragging his squealing quarry from under a bed or a pile of old clothes in a closet.
Jurgis and two policemen chased some men into a barroom. One of them took shelter behind the bar, where a policeman cornered him and proceeded to whack him over the back and shoulders, until he lay down and gave a chance at his head. The others leaped a fence in the rear, balking the second policeman, who was fat; and as he came back, furious and cursing, a big Polish woman, the owner of the saloon, rushed in screaming, and received a poke in the stomach that doubled her up on the floor. Meantime Jurgis, who was of a practical temper, was helping himself at the bar; and the first policeman, who had laid out his man, joined him, handing out several more bottles, and filling his pockets besides, and then, as he started to leave, cleaning off all the balance with a sweep of his club. The din of the glass crashing to the floor brought the fat Polish woman to her feet again, but another policeman came up behind her and put his knee into her back and his hands over her eyes—and then called to his companion, who went back and broke open the cash-drawer and filled his pockets with the contents. Then the three went outside, and the man who was holding the woman gave her a shove and dashed out himself. The gang having already got the carcass on to the truck, the party set out at a trot, followed by screams and curses, and a shower of bricks and stones from unseen enemies. These bricks and stones would figure in the accounts of the “riot” which would be sent out to a few thousand newspapers within an hour or two; but the episode of the cash-drawer would never be mentioned again, save only in the heart-breaking legends of Packingtown.