8-4 The Jungle

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Oct 30, 2023

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Name : U.S. History Period : Date : THE JUNGLE BY UPTON SINCLAIR Directions : Upton Sinclair's shocking portrayal of Chicago slaughterhouses in the early 1900s , as seen through the eyes of Lithuanian immigrants , raised the public's awareness and prompted Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act . Entering one of the Durham buildings , [ Jurgis and Jokubas ] found a number of other visitors waiting ; and before long there came a guide , the escort them through the place . They make a great future of showing strangers through the packing plants . But Jokubas whispered maliciously that the visitors did not see any more than the packers wanted them to . They climbed a long series of stairways outside of the building , to the top of its five or six stories . Here was the chute , with its river of hogs , all patiently toiling upward ; there was a place for them to rest to cool off , then through another passageway they went into a room from which there is no returning for hogs . It was a long , narrow room , with a gallery along it for visitors . At the head there was a great iron wheel , about twenty feet in circumference , with rings here and there along its edge . Upon both sides of this wheel there was a narrow space , in which came the hogs at the end of their journey ; in the midst of them stood a great burly Negro , bare - armed and bare - chested . He was resting for the moment , for the wheel had stopped while men were cleaning up . In a minute or two , however , it began slowly to revolve , and then the men upon each side of it sprang to work . They had chains , which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog , and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel . So , as the wheel turned , a hog was

suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft . - At the same instant the ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek ; the visitors started in alarm , the women turned pale and shrank back . The shriek was followed by another , louder and yet more agonizing for once started upon that journey , the hog never came back ; at the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley , and went sailing down the room . And meantime , another was swung up , and then another , and another , until there was a double line of them , each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy - and squealing . The uproar was appalling , perilous to the eardrums ; one feared there was too much sound for the room to hold - that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack . There were high squeals and low squeals , grunts , and the wails of agony ; there would come a momentary lull , and then a fresh outburst , louder that ever , surging up to a deafening climax . It was too much for some of the visitors - the men would look at each other , laughing nervously , and the women would stand with hands clenched , and the blood rushing to their faces , and the tears started in their eyes . Meantime , heedless of all these things , the men upon the floor were going about their work . Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors made any difference to them ; one by one they hooked up the hogs , and one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats . There was a long line of hogs , with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away together ; until at last each started again , and vanished into a huge vat of boiling water .... The carcass of the hog was scooped out of the vat by machinery , and then it fell to the second floor , passing on the way through a wonderful machine with numerous scrapers , which adjusted themselves to the size and shape of the animal , and sent it out at the other end with nearly all of its bristles removed . It was then again strung up by machinery , and sent upon another trolley ride ; this time passing between two lines of men , who sat upon a raised platform , each doing a certain thing to

the carcass as it came to him . One scraped the outside of a leg ; another scraped the inside of the same leg . One with a swift stroke cut the throat ; another with two swift strokes severed the head , which fell to the floor and vanished through a hole . Another made a slit down the body ; a second opened the body wider ; a third with a saw cut the breastbone ; a fourth loosened the entrails ; a fifth pulled them out - and they also slid through a hole in the floor . There were men to scrape each side and men to scrape the back ; there were men to clean the carcass inside , to trim it and wash it . Looking down this room , one saw , creeping slowly , a line of dangling hogs a hundred yards in length ; and for every yard there was a man , working as if a demon were after him . At the end of the hog's progress every inch of the carcass had been gone over several times ; and then it was rolled into the chilling room , where is stayed for twenty - four hours and where a stranger might lose himself in a forest of freezing hogs . Before the carcass was admitted here , however , it had to pass a government inspector, who sat in the doorway and felt the glands in the neck for tuberculosis . This government inspector did not have the manner of a man who was worked to death ; he was apparently not haunted by a fear that the hog might get to him before he had finished his testing . If you were a sociable person , he was quite willing to enter into a conversation with you , and to explain to you the deadly nature of the ptomaines which are found in tubercular pork ; and while he was talking with you , you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched . This inspector wore a blue uniform , with brass buttons , and he gave an atmosphere of authority to the scene , and , as is were , put the stamp of official approval upon the things which were done at Durham's factory . Jurgis went down the line with the rest of the visitors , staring openmouthed , lost in wonder . He had dressed hogs himself in the forest of Lithuania ;

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but he had never expected to live to see one hog It was like a dressed by several hundred men , wonderful poem to him , and he took it all in innocently even to the conspicuous signs demanding immaculate cleanliness of the employees . Jurgis was vexed when the cynical Jokubas translated these signs with sarcastic comments , offering to take them to the secret rooms where to spoiled meats went to be doctored .... With one member trimming beef in a cannery , and another working in the sausage factory , the family had a first - hand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles . For it was the custom , as they found , whenever meat was so spoiled that is could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage . With what had been told them by Jonas , who had worked in the pickle rooms , they could now study the whole of the spoiled - meat industry on the inside , and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest - that they could use everything of the pig except the squeal . - Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour , and how they would rub it with soda to take away the smell , and sell it to be eaten on free - lunch counters ; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed , giving to any sort of meat , fresh or salted , whole or chopped , any color and any flavor and any odor they chose . In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus , by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant - a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump ; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot , a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds . And yet , in spite of this , there would be hams found spoiled , some of them with an odor so bad that a man could

hardly bear to be in the room with them . To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor - a process known to the workers as " giving them thirty per cent . " Also , after the hams had been smoked , there would be found that some had gone to the bad . Formerly , these had been sold as " Number Three Grade , " but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device , and now they would extract the bone , about which the bad part generally lay , and insert into the hole a white - hot iron . After this invention there were no longer Number One , Two , and Three Grade - there was only Number One Grade . The packers were always originating such schemes they had what they called " boneless hams , " which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casing ; and “ California hams , " which were the shoulders , with big knuckle joints , and nearly all the meat cut out and fancy " skinned hams , " which were made of the oldest hogs , whose skins were so heavy and coarse no one would buy them - that is , until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled " head cheese ! " - It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta . Cut up by the two - thousand - revolutions - a - minute flyers , and mixed with half a ton of other meat , no odor that ever was ham could make any difference . 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 moldy 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 shoveled 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 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 cartload after cartload 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 would be made 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 gelatin 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 . Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta was placed , and such was the work she was compelled to do . It was stupefying , brutalizing work ; it left her no time to think , no strength for anything . She was part of the machine she attended , and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence . There

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was only one mercy about the cruel grind that is gave her the gift of insensibility . Little by little she sank into a torpor - she fell silent. She - would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening , and the three would walk home together , often without saying a word . Ona , too , was falling into a habit of silence - Ona , who had once gone about singing like a bird . She was sick and miserable , and often she would barely have enough strength enough to drag herself home . And there they would eat what they had to eat , and afterward , because there was only their misery to talk of , they would crawl into bed and fall into a stupor and never stir until it was time to get up again , and dress by candlelight , and go back to the machines . They were so numbed that they did not even suffer much from hunger , now ; only the children continued to fret when the food ran short . Yet the soul of Ona was not dead - the souls of none of them were dead , but only sleeping ; and now and then they would waken , and these were cruel times . 1. What is one conclusion you can make about the meat - packing industry in the early 1900s ? 2. What are some changes that need to be made to the meat packing industry ? 3. In your opinion , what surprised you the most ? 4. What impact did working in the meat packing plant have on its workers ?