TWENTY-NINE
THE MAN had gone back to a seat upon the platform,
and Jurgis realized that his speech was over. The applause
continued for several minutes; and then some one started a song,
and the crowd took it up, and the place shook with it. Jurgis had
never heard it, and he could not make out the words, but the wild
and wonderful spirit of it seized upon him—it was the
Marseillaise!aa As
stanza after stanza of it thundered forth, he sat with his hands
clasped, trembling in every nerve. He had never been so stirred in
his life—it was a miracle that had been wrought in him. He could
not think at all, he was stunned; yet he knew that in the mighty
upheaval that had taken place in his soul, a new man had been born.
He had been torn out of the jaws of destruction, he had been
delivered from the thraldom of despair; the whole world had been
changed for him—he was free, he was free! Even if he were to suffer
as he had before, even if he were to beg and starve, nothing would
be the same to him; he would understand it, and bear it. He would
no longer be the sport of circumstances, he would be a man, with a
will and a purpose; he would have something to fight for, something
to die for, if need be! Here were men who would show him and help
him; and he would have friends and allies, he would dwell in the
sight of justice, and walk arm in arm with power.
The audience subsided again, and Jurgis sat back.
The chairman of the meeting came forward and began to speak. His
voice sounded thin and futile after the other‘s, and to Jurgis it
seemed a profanation. Why should any one else speak, after that
miraculous man—why should they not all sit in silence? The chairman
was explaining that a collection would now be taken up to defray
the expenses of the meeting, and for the benefit of the campaign
fund of the party. Jurgis heard; but he had not a penny to give,
and so his thoughts went elsewhere again.
He kept his eyes fixed on the orator, who sat in an
armchair, his head leaning on his hand and his attitude indicating
exhaustion. But suddenly he stood up again, and Jurgis heard the
chairman of the meeting saying that the speaker would now answer
any questions which the audience might care to put to him. The man
came forward, and some one—a woman—arose and asked about some
opinion the speaker had expressed concerning Tolstoi. Jurgis had
never heard of Tolstoi, and did not care anything about him. Why
should any one want to ask such questions, after an address like
that? The thing was not to talk, but to do; the thing was to get
hold of others and rouse them, to organize them and prepare for the
fight!
But still the discussion went on, in ordinary
conversational tones, and it brought Jurgis back to the everyday
world. A few minutes ago he had felt like seizing the hand of the
beautiful lady by his side, and kissing it; he had felt like
flinging his arms about the neck of the man on the other side of
him. And now he began to realize again that he was a “hobo,”—that
he was ragged and dirty, and smelt bad, and had no place to sleep
that night!
And so, at last, when the meeting broke up, and the
audience started to leave, poor Jurgis was in an agony of
uncertainty. He had not thought of leaving—he had thought that the
vision must last forever, that he had found comrades and brothers.
But now he would go out, and the thing would fade away, and he
would never be able to find it again! He sat in his seat,
frightened and wondering; but others in the same row wanted to get
out, and so he had to stand up and move along. As he was swept down
the aisle he looked from one person to another, wistfully; they
were all excitedly discussing the address—but there was nobody who
offered to discuss it with him. He was near enough to the door to
feel the night air, when desperation seized him. He knew nothing at
all about that speech he had heard, not even the name of the
orator; and he was to go away—no, no, it was preposterous, he must
speak to some one; he must find that man himself and tell him. He
would not despise him, tramp as he was!
So he stepped into an empty row of seats and
watched, and when the crowd had thinned out, he started toward the
platform. The speaker was gone; but there was a stage-door that
stood open, with people passing in and out, and no one on guard.
Jurgis summoned up his courage and went in, and down a hallway, and
to the door of a room where many people were crowded. No one paid
any attention to him, and he pushed in, and in a corner he saw the
man he sought. The orator sat in a chair, with his shoulders sunk
together and his eyes half closed; his face was ghastly pale,
almost greenish in hue, and one army lay limp at his side. A big
man with spectacles on stood near him, and kept pushing back the
crowd, saying, “Stand away a little, please; can’t you see the
comrade is worn out?”
So Jurgis stood watching, while five or ten minutes
passed. Now and then the man would look up, and address a word or
two to those who were near him; and, at last, on one of these
occasions, his glance rested on Jurgis. There seemed to be a slight
hint of inquiry about it, and a sudden impulse seized the other. He
stepped forward.
“I wanted to thank you, sir!” he began, in
breathless haste. “I could not go away without telling you how
much—how glad I am I heard you. I—I didn’t know anything about it
all—”
The big man with the spectacles, who had moved
away, came back at this moment. “The comrade is too tired to talk
to any one—” he began; but the other held up his hand.
“Wait,” he said. “He has something to say to me.”
And then he looked into Jurgis’s face. “You want to know more about
Socialism?” he asked.
Jurgis started. “I—I—” he stammered. “Is it
Socialism? I didn’t know. I want to know about what you spoke of—I
want to help. I have been through all that.”
“Where do you live?” asked the other.
“I have no home,” said Jurgis, “I am out of
work.”
“You are a foreigner, are you not?”
“Lithuanian, sir.”
The man thought for a moment, and then turned to
his friend. “Who is there, Walters?” he asked. “There is
Ostrinsld—but he is a Pole—”
“Ostrinski speaks Lithuanian,” said the
other.
“All right, then; would you mind seeing if he has
gone yet?”
The other started away, and the speaker looked at
Jurgis again. He had deep, black eyes, and a face full of
gentleness and pain. “You must excuse me, comrade,” he said. “I am
just tired out—I have spoken every day for the last month. I will
introduce you to some one who will be able to help you as well as I
could—”
The messenger had had to go no further than the
door; he came back, followed by a man whom he introduced to Jurgis
as “Comrade Ostrinski.” Comrade Ostrinski was a little man,
scarcely up to Jurgis’s shoulder, wizened and wrinkled, very ugly,
and slightly lame. He had on a long-tailed black coat, worn green
at the seams and the buttonholes; his eyes must have been weak, for
he wore green spectacles, that gave him a grotesque appearance. But
his hand clasp was hearty, and he spoke in Lithuanian, which warmed
Jurgis to him.
“You want to know about Socialism?” he said.
“Surely. Let us go out and take a stroll, where we can be quiet and
talk some.”
And so Jurgis bade farewell to the master wizard,
and went out. Ostrinski asked where he lived, offering to walk in
that direction; and so he had to explain once more that he was
without a home. At the other’s request he told his story; how he
had come to America, and what had happened to him in the
stockyards, and how his family had been broken up, and how he had
become a wanderer. So much the little man heard, and then he
pressed Jurgis’s arm tightly. “You have been through the mill,
comrade!” he said. “We will make a fighter out of you!”
Then Ostrinski in turn explained his circumstances.
He would have asked Jurgis to his home—but he had only two rooms,
and had no bed to offer. He would have given up his own bed, but
his wife was ill. Later on, when he understood that otherwise
Jurgis would have to sleep in a hallway, he offered him his
kitchen-floor, a chance which the other was only too glad to
accept. “Perhaps to-morrow we can do better,” said Ostrinski. “We
try not to let a comrade starve.”
Ostrinski’s home was in the Ghetto district, where
he had two rooms in the basement of a tenement. There was a baby
crying as they entered, and he closed the door leading into the
bedroom. He had three young children, he explained, and a baby had
just come. He drew up two chairs near the kitchen stove, adding
that Jurgis must excuse the disorder of the place, since at such a
time one’s domestic arrangements were upset. Half of the kitchen
was given up to a work-bench, which was piled with clothing, and
Ostrinski explained that he was a “pants-finisher.” He brought
great bundles of clothing here to his home, where he and his wife
worked on them. He made a living at it, but it was getting harder
all the time, because his eyes were failing. What would come when
they gave out he could not tell; there had been no saving
anything—a man could barely keep alive by twelve or fourteen hours’
work a day. The finishing of pants did not take much skill, and
anybody could learn it, and so the pay was forever getting less.
That was the competitive wage system; and if Jurgis wanted to
understand what Socialism was, it was there he had best begin. The
workers were dependent upon a job to exist from day to day, and so
they bid against each other, and no man could get more than the
lowest man would consent to work for. And thus the mass of the
people were always in a life-and-death struggle with poverty. That
was “competition,” so far as it concerned the wage-earner, the man
who had only his labor to sell; to those on top, the exploiters, it
appeared very differently, of course—there were few of them, and
they could combine and dominate, and their power would be
unbreakable. And so all over the world two classes were forming,
with an unbridged chasm between them,—the capitalist class, with
its enormous fortunes, and the proletariat, bound into slavery by
unseen chains. The latter were a thousand to one in numbers, but
they were ignorant and helpless, and they would remain at the mercy
of their exploiters until they were organized—until they had become
“class-conscious.” It was a slow and weary process, but it would go
on—it was like the movement of a glacier, once it was started it
could never be stopped. Every Socialist did his share, and lived
upon the vision of the “good time coming,”—when the working-class
should go to the polls and seize the powers of government, and put
an end to private property in the means of production. No matter
how poor a man was, or how much he suffered, he could never be
really unhappy while he knew of that future; even if he did not
live to see it himself, his children would, and, to a Socialist,
the victory of his class was his victory. Also he had always the
progress to encourage him; here in Chicago, for instance, the
movement was growing by leaps and bounds. Chicago was the
industrial centre of the country, and nowhere else were the unions
so strong; but their organizations did the workers little good, for
the employers were organized, also; and so the strikes generally
failed, and as fast as the unions were broken up the men were
coming over to the Socialists.
Ostrinski explained the organization of the party,
the machinery by which the proletariat was educating itself. There
were “locals” in every big city and town, and they were being
organized rapidly in the smaller places; a local had anywhere from
six to a thousand members, and there were fourteen hundred of them
in all, with a total of about twenty-five thousand members, who
paid dues to support the organization. “Local Cook County,” as the
city organization was called, had eighty branch locals, and it
alone was spending several thousand dollars in the campaign. It
published a weekly in English, and one each in Bohemian and German;
also there was a monthly published in Chicago, and a cooperative
publishing house, that issued a million and a half of Socialist
books and pamphlets every year. All this was the growth of the last
few years—there had been almost nothing of it when Ostrinski first
came to Chicago.
Ostrinski was a Pole, about fifty years of age. He
had lived in Silesia, a member of a despised and persecuted race,
and had taken part in the proletarian movement in the early
seventies, when Bismarck, having conquered France, had turned his
policy of blood and iron upon the “International.”28
Ostrinski himself had twice been in jail, but he had been young
then, and had not cared. He had had more of his share of the fight,
though, for just when Socialism had broken all its barriers and
become the great political force of the empire, he had come to
America, and begun all over again. In America every one had laughed
at the mere idea of Socialism then—in America all men were free. As
if political liberty made wage-slavery any the more tolerable! said
Ostrinski.
The little tailor sat tilted back in his stiff
kitchen-chair, with his feet stretched out upon the empty stove,
and speaking in low whispers, so as not to waken those in the next
room. To Jurgis he seemed a scarcely less wonderful person than the
speaker at the meeting; he was poor, the lowest of the low,
hunger-driven and miserable—and yet how much he knew, how much he
had dared and achieved, what a hero he had been! There were others
like him, too—thousands like him, and all of them working-men! That
all this wonderful machinery of progress had been created by his
fellows—Jurgis could not believe it, it seemed too good to be
true.
That was always the way, said Ostrinski; when a man
was first converted to Socialism he was like a crazy person,—he
could not understand how others could fail to see it, and he
expected to convert all the world the first week. After a while he
would realize how hard a task it was; and then it would be
fortunate that other new hands kept coming, to save him from
settling down into a rut. Just now Jurgis would have plenty of
chance to vent his excitement, for a presidential campaign was on,
and everybody was talking politics. Ostrinski would take him to the
next meeting of the branch-local, and introduce him, and he might
join the party. The dues were five cents a week, but any one who
could not afford this might be excused from paying. The Socialist
party was a really democratic political organization—it was
controlled absolutely by its own membership, and had no bosses. All
of these things Ostrinski explained, as also the principles of the
party. You might say that there was really but one Socialist
principle—that of “no compromise,” which was the essence of the
proletarian movement all over the world. When a Socialist was
elected to office he voted with old party legislators for any
measure that was likely to be of help to the working-class, but he
never forgot that these concessions, whatever they might be, were
trifles compared with the great purpose,—the organizing of the
working-class for the revolution. So far, the rule in America had
been that one Socialist made another Socialist once every two
years; and if they should maintain the same rate they would carry
the country in 1912—though not all of them expected to succeed as
quickly as that.
The Socialists were organized in every civilized
nation; it was an international political party, said Ostrinski,
the greatest the world had ever known. It numbered thirty millions
of adherents, and it cast eight million votes. It had started its
first newspaper in Japan, and elected its first deputy in
Argentina; in France it named members of cabinets, and in Italy and
Australia it held the balance of power and turned out ministries.
In Germany, where its vote was more than a third of the total vote
of the empire, all other parties and powers had united to fight it.
It would not do, Ostrinski explained, for the proletariat of one
nation to achieve the victory, for that nation would be crushed by
the military power of the others; and so the Socialist movement was
a world movement, an organization of all mankind to establish
liberty and fraternity. It was the new religion of humanity—or you
might say it was the fulfilment of the old religion, since it
implied but the literal application of all the teachings of
Christ.
Until long after midnight Jurgis sat lost in the
conversation of his new acquaintance. It was a most wonderful
experience to him—an almost supernatural experience. It was like
encountering an inhabitant of the fourth dimension of space, a
being who was free from all one’s own limitations. For four years,
now, Jurgis had been wandering and blundering in the depths of a
wilderness; and here, suddenly, a hand reached down and seized him,
and lifted him out of it, and set him upon a mountain-top, from
which he could survey it all,—could see the paths from which he had
wandered, the morasses into which he had stumbled, the
hiding-places of the beasts of prey that had fallen upon him. There
were his Packingtown experiences, for instance—what was there about
Packingtown that Ostrinski could not explain! To Jurgis the packers
had been equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were
the Beef Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which
had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land,
and was preying upon the people. Jurgis recollected how, when he
had first come to Packingtown, he had stood and watched the
hog-killing, and thought how cruel and savage it was, and come away
congratulating himself that he was not a hog; now his new
acquaintance showed him that a hog was just what he had been—one of
the packers’ hogs. What they wanted from a hog was all the profits
that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from
the working-man, and also that was what they wanted from the
public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were not
considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the
purchaser of meat. That was true everywhere in the world, but it
was especially true in Packingtown; there seemed to be something
about the work of slaughtering that tended to ruthlessness and
ferocity—it was literally the fact that in the methods of the
packers a hundred human lives did not balance a penny of profit.
When Jurgis had made himself familiar with the Socialist
literature, as he would very quickly, he would get glimpses of the
Beef Trust from all sorts of aspects, and he would find it
everywhere the same; it was the incarnation of blind and insensate
Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling
with a thousand hoofs; it was the Great Butcher—it was the spirit
of Capitalism made flesh. Upon the ocean of commerce it sailed as a
pirate ship; it had hoisted the black flag and declared war upon
civilization. Bribery and corruption were its everyday methods. In
Chicago the city government was simply one of its branch-offices;
it stole billions of gallons of city water openly, it dictated to
the courts the sentences of disorderly strikers, it forbade the
mayor to enforce the building laws against it. In the national
capital it had power to prevent inspection of its product, and to
falsify government reports; it violated the rebate laws, and when
an investigation was threatened it burned its books and sent its
criminal agents out of the country. In the commercial world it was
a Juggernaut car; it wiped out thousands of businesses every year,
it drove men to madness and suicide. It had forced the price of
cattle so low as to destroy the stock-raising industry, an
occupation upon which whole states existed; it had ruined thousands
of butchers who had refused to handle its products. It divided the
country into districts, and fixed the price of meat in all of them;
and it owned all the refrigerator cars, and levied an enormous
tribute upon all poultry and eggs and fruit and vegetables. With
the millions of dollars a week that poured in upon it, it was
reaching out for the control of other interests, railroads and
trolley lines, gas and electric light franchises—it already owned
the leather and the grain business of the country. The people were
tremendously stirred up over its encroachments, but nobody had any
remedy to suggest; it was the task of Socialists to teach and
organize them, and prepare them for the time when they were to
seize the huge machine called the Beef Trust, and use it to produce
food for human beings and not to heap up fortunes for a band of
pirates.—It was long after midnight when Jurgis lay down upon the
floor of Ostrinski’s kitchen; and yet it was an hour before he
could get to sleep, for the glory of that joyful vision of the
people of Packingtown marching in and taking possession of the
Union Stockyards!