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Updated: June 5, 2025
In the forests, all summer long, the branches of the trees do battle for light, and some of them lose and die; and then come the raging blasts, and the storms of snow and hail, and strew the ground with these weaker branches. Just so it was in Packingtown; the whole district braced itself for the struggle that was an agony, and those whose time was come died off in hordes.
Jurgis and Ona were not thinking of the sunset, however their backs were turned to it, and all their thoughts were of Packingtown, which they could see so plainly in the distance. The line of the buildings stood clear-cut and black against the sky; here and there out of the mass rose the great chimneys, with the river of smoke streaming away to the end of the world.
Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going to make himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would soon find out his error for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good work. You could lay that down for a rule if you met a man who was rising in Packingtown, you met a knave.
At such times beauty is necessary, and in Packingtown there is no place to get it except at the saloons, where one can buy for a few hours the illusion of comfort, hope, love, whatever one most longs for. Harsanyi had given Thea a ticket for the symphony concert that afternoon, and when she looked out at the white apple trees her doubts as to whether she ought to go vanished at once.
It was a most cruel thing; here in this district was his home, such as it was, the place he was used to and the friends he knew and now every possibility of employment in it was closed to him. There was nothing in Packingtown but packing houses; and so it was the same thing as evicting him from his home. He and the two women spent all day and half the night discussing it.
Afterward they drifted into a roulette parlor, and Jurgis, who was never lucky at gambling, dropped about fifteen dollars. To console himself he had to drink a good deal, and he went back to Packingtown about two o'clock in the morning, very much the worse for his excursion, and, it must be confessed, entirely deserving the calamity that was in store for him.
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.
The train thundered deafeningly, and a storm of dust blew in his face; but though it stopped now and then through the night, he clung where he was he would cling there until he was driven off, for every mile that he got from Packingtown meant another load from his mind.
Very often a man could get no work in Packingtown for months, while a child could go and get a place easily; there was always some new machine, by which the packers could get as much work out of a child as they had been able to get out of a man, and for a third of the pay. To come back to the house again, it was the woman of the next family that had died.
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 use everything of the pig except the squeal.
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