Truth. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1901-1908, 1906-07-21
THE LABoRER IN PAckINeTowN.

attention has entirely neglected the
"wage-slave," as he calls him, the i'm
migrant, the laborer whose lot in
Packingtown is by all account hard
one. His main purpose, Mr.. Sinclair
says in an article in the New York
Evening World, was not to expose 1.-THE
condemned-mea industry" but rather
to make the average American SYM
pathize with the story of the foreign
born wageslave in Packingtown." 81
do not want to be ungracious," he adds,
but l fear that The Jungle would
have been much longer in doing it's
work had it's appeal been simply to the
hearts and consciences of its readers
and not at all to their stomachs." He
goes on:
And yet we are tied up in the same
country with these strangers, and their
fate is our fate; the way our country
goes in the future depends upon what
opportunities and what life we give
them. They are coming here at the
rate of million a year, and If we
think that we can allow them to be
beaten and degraded without limit, and
not pay fearful penalty for it our
selves, we make great mistake.
THE whole country Is at this mo-
ment struggling against the power Of
the trusts. You yourself are suffering
from their encroachments and are
fighting to free yourself. And 1t is
the power of the political machine
which holds you down. and the power
of the machine is founded upon the
foreign vote, which is bought.
about twelve years ago old p. d.
Armour, at the close of great strike,
had declared with an oath that he
would fix the population of Packing
town so that it would never call a
strike upon him again; and so he had
set his agents at work to bring out
hordes of emigrants from eastern Eu
rope-Lithuanians Poles, Bohemians,
and Slovaks. | met dozens of men who
had come as a direct result of his en-
deavor Strangers had come to their
village-men who spoke their own Ian
guage and were familiar with their
ideas. and who told wonderful tales
about free America and about the great
packing factories and the tremendous
wages that were paid there. One could
get over for almost nothing, for ar
rangements had been made with the
steamship company, and so they had
sold out all that they owned and come,
sometimes whole families of them,
sometimes half dozen families from a
single village. They had poured into
Packingtown, one swarm after another
and as result old p. d. Armour had
had all the labor he could use and had
beaten down wages to the starvation
point and made himself one of the
richest men in America and his son
one of the half dozen masters Of the
destiny of the American people,"
These ignorant strangers, he adds,
had been plundered from the moment
they left their native village" On
every hand they are cheated and prey
ed upon by grafters, real estate sharks
and what not. Mr.. Sinclair condenses
section of "The Jungle" showing
how houses are sold to immigrants on
the instalment plan and then taken
from them, after hundreds of dollars
have been paid in, for inability to pay
an instalment at certain time. He
continues:
"The typical tenement house in
Packingtown is a two-story frame
building having four small rooms on a
floor. A floor will be rented by fam
lily, which will then take in boarders
to help make expenses. Single men
of whom there are large numbers. oc.
nocinnollu ranf fot for thap,caluoe,