The chairman was still more worried when the monster
torchlight procession came off, with the members of
the Doyle Republican Association all in red capes
and hats, and free beer for every voter in the ward—the
best beer ever given away in a political campaign,
as the whole electorate testified. During this
parade, and at innumerable cart-tail meetings as well,
Jurgis labored tirelessly. He did not make any
speeches—there were lawyers and other experts
for that—but he helped to manage things;
distributing notices and posting placards and bringing
out the crowds; and when the show was on he attended
to the fireworks and the beer. Thus in the course
of the campaign he handled many hundreds of dollars
of the Hebrew brewer’s money, administering it
with naive and touching fidelity. Toward the end,
however, he learned that he was regarded with hatred
by the rest of the “boys,” because he
compelled them either to make a poorer showing than
he or to do without their share of the pie. After
that Jurgis did his best to please them, and to make
up for the time he had lost before he discovered the
extra bungholes of the campaign barrel.
He pleased Mike Scully, also. On election morning
he was out at four o’clock, “getting out
the vote”; he had a two-horse carriage to ride
in, and he went from house to house for his friends,
and escorted them in triumph to the polls. He
voted half a dozen times himself, and voted some of
his friends as often; he brought bunch after bunch
of the newest foreigners—Lithuanians, Poles,
Bohemians, Slovaks—and when he had put
them through the mill he turned them over to another
man to take to the next polling place. When Jurgis
first set out, the captain of the precinct gave him
a hundred dollars, and three times in the course of
the day he came for another hundred, and not more than
twenty-five out of each lot got stuck in his own pocket.
The balance all went for actual votes, and on a day
of Democratic landslides they elected “Scotty”
Doyle, the ex-tenpin setter, by nearly a thousand plurality—and
beginning at five o’clock in the afternoon, and
ending at three the next morning, Jurgis treated himself
to a most unholy and horrible “jag.”
Nearly every one else in Packingtown did the same,
however, for there was universal exultation over this
triumph of popular government, this crushing defeat
of an arrogant plutocrat by the power of the common
people.
Chapter 26
After the elections Jurgis stayed on in Packingtown
and kept his job. The agitation to break up the
police protection of criminals was continuing, and
it seemed to him best to “lay low” for
the present. He had nearly three hundred dollars
in the bank, and might have considered himself entitled
to a vacation; but he had an easy job, and force of
habit kept him at it. Besides, Mike Scully, whom
he consulted, advised him that something might “turn
up” before long.
