Review: Our Past Without Glory
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 11, 2013
Half starved immigrants from Lithuania newly arrived in America were told that the land of milk and honey was Chicago. "There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything he desires is outside. And there is another kind where the things are behind bars, and the man is outside."Ona and Jurgis saw Chicago as a vision of power, a dream of wonder, human energy where employment gave freedom for life, love and joy.This is a horrendous study of the early animal slaughter and meat packaging industry. "The slaughtering machine ran on. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory."Jurgis Ruckus labored in Brown's Killing Fields and Durham's fertilizer mill. Then with his wife's death, he is blacklisted. Without work, without sustenance, after weeks of trials and tribulations, he becomes a tramp, then a harvester filling he seasonal crops. Being homeless, he wanders over the continent.They all worked in dangerous, unhealthful, squalid places. They wrestled with hunger and privation, always falling victim to brutal firemen,  cheating employers, horrific accidents, disease and death. Injustice and oppression pressed cruelly. The city, even the country was a wilderness quagmire without a visible haven. Organized and predatory greed ruled above he poverty, sickness, threats, hatred, prejudice, fraud and falsehoods.The oppressed knew and had no comforter. They were disheartened, disinherited and finally disconnected from life without respite or any hope of deliverance from these prisons created by those who controlled power through money.  All were caught beneath the juggernaut wheels of greed.  A truly classical work.