Dr. Schliemann paused a moment. “And then,” he continued, “place beside this fact of an unlimited food supply, the newest discovery of physiologists, that most of the ills of the human system are due to overfeeding! And then again, it has been proven that meat is unnecessary as a food; and meat is obviously more difficult to produce than vegetable food, less pleasant to prepare and handle, and more likely to be unclean. But what of that, so long as it tickles the palate more strongly?”
“How would Socialism change that?” asked the girl-student, quickly. It was the first time she had spoken.
“So long as we have wage-slavery,” answered Schliemann, “it matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to find people to perform it. But just as soon as labor is set free, then the price of such work will begin to rise. So one by one the old, dingy, and unsanitary factories will come down—it will be cheaper to build new; and so the steamships will be provided with stoking-machinery, and so the dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found for their products. In exactly the same way, as the citizens of our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year the cost of slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing—and how long do you think the custom would survive then?—To go on to another item—one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption; and one of the consequences of civic administration by ignorant and vicious politicians, is that preventable diseases kill off half our population. And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others. They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centres of contagion, poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish. For this reason I would seriously maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be of less importance than the application of the knowledge we already possess, when the disinherited of the earth have established their right to a human existence.”
And here the Herr Doctor relapsed into silence again. Jurgis had noticed that the beautiful young girl who sat by the centre-table was listening with something of the same look that he himself had worn, the time when he had first discovered Socialism. Jurgis would have liked to talk to her, he felt sure that she would have understood him. Later on in the evening, when the group broke up, he heard Mrs. Fisher say to her, in a low voice, “I wonder if Mr. Maynard will still write the same things about Socialism;” to which she answered, “I don’t know—but if he does we shall know that he is a knave!”
And only a few hours after this came election day—when the long campaign was over, and the whole country seemed to stand still and hold its breath, awaiting the issue. Jurgis and the rest of the staff of Hinds’s Hotel could hardly stop to finish their dinner, before they hurried off to the big hall which the party had hired for that evening.
But already there were people waiting, and already the telegraph instrument on the stage had begun clicking off the returns. When the final accounts were made up, the Socialist vote proved to be over four hundred thousand—an increase of something like three hundred and fifty per cent in four years. And that was doing well; but the party was dependent for its early returns upon messages from the locals, and naturally those locals which had been most successful were the ones which felt most like reporting; and so that night every one in the hall believed that the vote was going to be six, or seven, or even eight hundred thousand. Just such an incredible increase had actually been made in Chicago, and in the state; the vote of the city had been 6700 in 1900, and now it was 47,000; that of Illinois had been 9600, and now it was 69,000! So, as the evening waxed, and the crowd piled in, the meeting was a sight to be seen. Bulletins would be read, and the people would shout themselves hoarse; and then some one would make a speech, and there would be more shouting; and then a brief silence, and more bulletins. There would come messages from the secretaries of neighboring states, reporting their achievements; the vote of Indiana had gone from 2300 to 12,000; of Wisconsin from 7000 to 28,000; of Ohio from 4800 to 36,000! There were telegrams to the national office from enthusiastic individuals in little towns which had made amazing and unprecedented increases in a single year: Benedict, Kansas, from 26 to 260; Henderson, Kentucky, from 19 to 111; Holland, Michigan, from 14 to 208; Cleo, Oklahoma, from 0 to 104; Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, from 0 to 296—and many more of the same kind. There were literally hundreds of such towns; there would be reports from half a dozen of them in a single batch of telegrams. And the men who read the despatches off to the audience were old campaigners, who had been to the places and helped to make the vote, and could make appropriate comments: Quincy, Illinois, from 189 to 831—that was where the mayor had arrested a Socialist speaker! Crawford County, Kansas, from 285 to 1975; that was the home of the “Appeal to Reason”! Battle Creek, Michigan, from 4261 to 10,184; that was the answer of labor to the Citizens’ Alliance Movement!
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 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 Chicago now led the country; it had set a new standard for the party, it had shown the working-men the way!
—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 to-night 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 Chicago means a municipal-ownership Democracy in the spring! And then they will fool the voters once more, and all the powers of plunder and corruption will be swept into office again! But whatever they may do when they get in, there is one thing they will not do, and that will be the thing for which they were elected! They will not give the people of our city municipal ownership—they will not mean to do it, they will not try to do it; all that they will do is give our party in Chicago the greatest opportunity that has ever come to Socialism in America! We shall have the sham reformers self-stultified and self-convicted; we shall have the radical Democracy left without a lie with which to cover its nakedness! And then will begin the rush that will never be checked, the tide that will never turn till it has reached i
ts flood—that will be irresistible, overwhelming—the rallying of the outraged working-men of Chicago to our standard! And we shall organize them, we shall drill them, we shall marshal them for the victory! We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us—and Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!”33
THE END
ENDNOTES
1 (p.5) “Eik! Eik! Uzdaryk-duris!”: Much of Sinclair’s Lithuanian is slang, mixed with Polish, German, and Russian words and spellings.
2 (p. 7) quarter of a million inhabitants: Sinclair’s figure is higher than that cited by historians, who estimate the population of the stockyard district at approximately 60,000 in this period.
3 (p.29) Now, sitting in the trolley car: Packingtown was 3 or 4 miles from downtown Chicago.
4 (p. 34) thoughts about “germs”: Louis Pasteur had developed his germ theory of disease in the mid-1800s, but it was still an unfamiliar concept for many people, which is perhaps why Sinclair places the word in quotation marks.
5 (p. 38) Brown’s ... Durham’s: Competitors Brown’s and Durham’s are fictional names for the two meat industry giants Armour and Swift. Both companies produced a wide array of meat and ancillary products.
6 (p. 41) government inspector: The first Meat Inspection Act was passed in 1891, but as Sinclair suggests in the text that follows, it was not rigorously enforced.
7 (p. 62) “laissez-faire”: This French term means “Let people do as they please.” It refers to a system of economics whereby owners of industry and business set rules of competition and conditions of labor without government regulation or regard for the public interest.
8 . (p.62) Malthus: Political economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) blamed the decline in living conditions in nineteenth-century England on overpopulation and the irresponsibility of the lower classes, and urged that the family size of the poor be regulated. Sinclair suggests that even those who are tough-minded in theory are less so in practice.
9 (p. 72) “War Whoop League”: Sinclair perhaps names this political organization to make reference to other political “machines,” such as the Republican Party’s Wigwam, in Chicago, and the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall, in New York; both names have Native American associations.
10 (p. 72) no law about the age of children: In fact, child labor laws were already on the books, but the industry found ways to circumvent them. In this period, 27 percent of stockyard families depended on earnings by children under sixteen.
11 (p. 77) children who are now engaged in earning their livings: Census figures for 1900 show 186,358 children between ten and thirteen years of age, and 501,849 fourteen and fifteen years old employed in nonagricultural occupations. These figures exclude children who worked less than half-time.
12 (p.80) doctored... colored: In 1899 and 1900 the Pure Food Investigating Committee found many of the adulterations described here, and recommended a ban on such additives. However, there was a lack of scientific evidence to prove that preservatives, coloring agents, and other additives were harmful.
13 (p. 98) an oath of which he did not understand a word: Naturalization procedures were reformed in 1906, and knowledge of English became a basic requirement.
14 (p. 102) a Dante or a Zola: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Emile Zola (1840-1902) were authors known for their vivid descriptions of the extremes of human misery, from the Inferno section of Dante’s Divine Comedy to Zola’s lurid representations of poverty and degradation in nineteenth-century France.
15 (p. 117) one great firm, the Beef Trust: As early as May 1888, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution providing for an investigation of the “beef trust.” The findings were credited with influencing Congress to pass the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. However, no direct action was taken against the monopolized meatpackers until 1917.
16 (p. 122) the old story of Prometheus bound: In Greek mythology, Zeus commanded that Prometheus be chained and girded to the summit of a mountain, as punishment for bringing fire down from heaven and teaching mortals how to use it.
17 (p. 137) on the “Lêvée”: More than 200 brothels and scores of saloons, gambling houses, and peep shows operated within Chicago’s southside Levee district. Reformers ultimately had this vice district closed down.
18 (p. 175) the “Bridewell”: The original Bridewell Prison took its name from the London area in which it was located until 1863. “Bridewell” later came to be used as a general term for a prison.
19 (p. 211) She was a “settlement-worker”: The “settlement idea” originated in the mid-nineteenth century in England, where university students “settled” in working-class neighborhoods to help relieve poverty and despair. In the United States, settlement-workers, many of whom were women, helped immigrants adjust, providing classes and recreation, and acting as advocates.
20 (p. 232) system of railway freight-subways: Chicago’s freight-subways, which ran on 60 miles of track, became operational in 1904 and functioned until 1959.
21 (p. 239) the harlot’s progress: William Hogarth’s famous series of engravings The Harlot’s Progress (1732) portrays a young woman’s arrival in London, her seduction, and her subsequent decline from virtue to prostitution, ending with her death from venereal disease.
22 (p. 250) the head of an Antinous: Antinous was a beautiful young man beloved by the Roman emperor Hadrian. After the early death of Antinous, Hadrian deified him and built temples and statues to honor him.
23 (p. 265) kept prisoners for weeks: The coercive practices Sinclair describes here were known as “white slavery.” A vast literature describing and protesting the traffic in women proliferated in this period. In 1910 Congress passed the Mann Act, which prohibited the interstate traffic in women for purposes of prostitution.
24 (p. 283) “green” negroes from... the far South: The practice of bringing black workers up from the South to break strikes was not limited to Packingtown; in 1905 black workers were brought to Chicago to break a Teamsters’ strike. During these strikes, blacks frequently became targets of white violence.
25 (p. 295) the Republic’s future in the Pacific and in South America: The phrase refers to U.S. hegemony in the Philippines and Cuba around the turn of the century, and to the growing presence of U.S. business interests in South America.
26 (p. 313) ‘the insolence of office and the spurns’: Sinclair quotes from a section of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy (Hamlet, by William Shakespeare; act 3, scene 1):For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?