The Jungle, Upton Sinclair [good e books to read .TXT] 📗

workingman, and a good union man as well. It was not until some months afterward that Jurgis understood that the quarrel with the superintendent had been prearranged, and that Harper was in reality drawing a salary of twenty dollars a week from the packers for an inside report of his union’s secret proceedings. The yards were seething with agitation just then, said the man, speaking as a unionist. The people of Packingtown had borne about all that they would bear, and it looked as if a strike might begin any week.

After this talk the man made inquiries concerning Jurgis, and a couple of days later he came to him with an interesting proposition. He was not absolutely certain, he said, but he thought that he could get him a regular salary if he would come to Packingtown and do as he was told, and keep his mouth shut. Harper⁠—“Bush” Harper, he was called⁠—was a right-hand man of Mike Scully, the Democratic boss of the stockyards; and in the coming election there was a peculiar situation. There had come to Scully a proposition to nominate a certain rich brewer who lived upon a swell boulevard that skirted the district, and who coveted the big badge and the “honorable” of an alderman. The brewer was a Jew, and had no brains, but he was harmless, and would put up a rare campaign fund. Scully had accepted the offer, and then gone to the Republicans with a proposition. He was not sure that he could manage the “sheeny,” and he did not mean to take any chances with his district; let the Republicans nominate a certain obscure but amiable friend of Scully’s, who was now setting tenpins in the cellar of an Ashland Avenue saloon, and he, Scully, would elect him with the “sheeny’ ” money, and the Republicans might have the glory, which was more than they would get otherwise. In return for this the Republicans would agree to put up no candidate the following year, when Scully himself came up for reelection as the other alderman from the ward. To this the Republicans had assented at once: but the hell of it was⁠—so Harper explained⁠—that the Republicans were all of them fools⁠—a man had to be a fool to be a Republican in the stockyards, where Scully was king. And they didn’t know how to work, and of course it would not do for the Democratic workers, the noble redskins of the War-Whoop League, to support the Republican openly. The difficulty would not have been so great except for another fact⁠—there had been a curious development in stockyards politics in the last year or two, a new party having leaped into being. They were the Socialists; and it was a devil of a mess, said “Bush” Harper. The one image which the word “Socialist” brought to Jurgis was of poor little Tamoszius Kuszleika, who had called himself one, and would go out with a couple of other men and a soapbox, and shout himself hoarse on a street corner Saturday nights. Tamoszius had tried to explain to Jurgis what it was all about, but Jurgis, who was not of an imaginative turn, had never quite got it straight; at present he was content with his companion’s explanation that the Socialists were the enemies of American institutions⁠—could not be bought, and would not combine or make any sort of a “dicker.” Mike Scully was very much worried over the opportunity which his last deal gave to them⁠—the stockyards Democrats were furious at the idea of a rich capitalist for their candidate, and while they were changing they might possibly conclude that a Socialist firebrand was preferable to a Republican bum. And so right here was a chance for Jurgis to make himself a place in the world, explained “Bush” Harper; he had been a union man, and he was known in the yards as a workingman; he must have hundreds of acquaintances, and as he had never talked politics with them he might come out as a Republican now without exciting the least suspicion. There were barrels of money for the use of those who could deliver the goods; and Jurgis might count upon Mike Scully, who had never yet gone back on a friend. Just what could he do? Jurgis asked, in some perplexity, and the other explained in detail. To begin with, he would have to go to the yards and work, and he mightn’t relish that; but he would have what he earned, as well as the rest that came to him. He would get active in the union again, and perhaps try to get an office, as he, Harper, had; he would tell all his friends the good points of Doyle, the Republican nominee, and the bad ones of the “sheeny”; and then Scully would furnish a meeting-place, and he would start the “Young Men’s Republican Association,” or something of that sort, and have the rich brewer’s best beer by the hogshead, and fireworks and speeches, just like the War-Whoop League. Surely Jurgis must know hundreds of men who would like that sort of fun; and there would be the regular Republican leaders and workers to help him out, and they would deliver a big enough majority on election day.

When he had heard all this explanation to the end, Jurgis demanded: “But how can I get a job in Packingtown? I’m blacklisted.”

At which “Bush” Harper laughed. “I’ll attend to that all right,” he said.

And the other replied, “It’s a go, then; I’m your man.”

So Jurgis went out to the stockyards again, and was introduced to the political lord of the district, the boss of Chicago’s mayor. It was Scully who owned the brickyards and the dump and the ice pond⁠—though Jurgis did not know it. It was Scully who was to blame for the unpaved street in which Jurgis’s child had been drowned; it was Scully who had put into office the magistrate who had first sent Jurgis to