had been distributed in the industrial centers, wherever
the employers’ associations had been carrying
out their “open shop” program. “You
have lost the strike!” it was headed. “And
now what are you going to do about it?” It was
what is called an “incendiary” appeal—it
was written by a man into whose soul the iron had
entered. When this edition appeared, twenty thousand
copies were sent to the stockyards district; and they
were taken out and stowed away in the rear of a little
cigar store, and every evening, and on Sundays, the
members of the Packingtown locals would get armfuls
and distribute them on the streets and in the houses.
The people of Packingtown had lost their strike, if
ever a people had, and so they read these papers gladly,
and twenty thousand were hardly enough to go round.
Jurgis had resolved not to go near his old home again,
but when he heard of this it was too much for him,
and every night for a week he would get on the car
and ride out to the stockyards, and help to undo his
work of the previous year, when he had sent Mike Scully’s
ten-pin setter to the city Board of Aldermen.
It was quite marvelous to see what a difference twelve
months had made in Packingtown—the eyes
of the people were getting opened! The Socialists
were literally sweeping everything before them that
election, and Scully and the Cook County machine were
at their wits’ end for an “issue.”
At the very close of the campaign they bethought themselves
of the fact that the strike had been broken by Negroes,
and so they sent for a South Carolina fire-eater,
the “pitchfork senator,” as he was called,
a man who took off his coat when he talked to workingmen,
and damned and swore like a Hessian. This meeting
they advertised extensively, and the Socialists advertised
it too—with the result that about a thousand
of them were on hand that evening. The “pitchfork
senator” stood their fusillade of questions for
about an hour, and then went home in disgust, and
the balance of the meeting was a strictly party affair.
Jurgis, who had insisted upon coming, had the time
of his life that night; he danced about and waved
his arms in his excitement—and at the very
climax he broke loose from his friends, and got out
into the aisle, and proceeded to make a speech himself!
The senator had been denying that the Democratic party
was corrupt; it was always the Republicans who bought
the votes, he said—and here was Jurgis
shouting furiously, “It’s a lie! It’s
a lie!” After which he went on to tell them
how he knew it—that he knew it because he
had bought them himself! And he would have told
the “pitchfork senator” all his experiences,
had not Harry Adams and a friend grabbed him about
the neck and shoved him into a seat.
One of the first things that Jurgis had done after
he got a job was to go and see Marija. She came
down into the basement of the house to meet him, and
he stood by the door with his hat in his hand, saying,
“I’ve got work now, and so you can leave
here.”
