The Immigrant's Dream Meets Reality — The Jungle

Jurgis talks lightly about work because he is young and a giant besides. Older workers tell him horror stories about men broken in the stockyards, but he laughs: bosses already singled him out at Brown's Central Time Station half an hour after he arrived. Jokubas profits from the brickyards they pass while quoting newspaper pride.

The passage from Lithuania costs them precious rubles at every turn: agents, officials in New York hotels that trap immigrants who cannot read English rate cards, and policemen they flee in terror until one finally delivers them to the word stockyards. Jokubas Szedvilas rescues them at last and sends them to Aniele Jukniene's boardinghouse, where mattresses rotate between day and night shifts and a single room sleeps a dozen people. A few days of American prices have already killed the dream of easy riches; they spent home wages on railroad food and arrived poorer than they imagined. A dozen people sleep in shifts on mattresses that never cool at Aniele's.

What follows is a guided tour of environmental ruin. Packingtown's streets are built on garbage dumps; children play in stinking green pools; brickyards fill excavations with waste; winter ice is cut from festering sumps and sold without a thought for germs. On the trolley the smell thickens until they can taste it. Jurgis and Ona walk past made land where wagons dump city refuse and children rake for scraps. The landscape teaches what the advertisement omitted.

Yet as the sun sets and the smokestacks bloom purple against the sky, Jurgis and Ona see only power and opportunity: employment for thousands, freedom, life, love, joy. The yards look like a vision of human energy, not a warning. Arm in arm they walk home while he declares he will get a job tomorrow. Their hope is sincere, and that sincerity is exactly what will make them easy to use. His physical strength and eagerness make him exactly the kind of worker bosses love to exploit, someone who will run to assignments and exhaust himself without question. He is a Lithuanian peasant who convinced Ona's entire extended family to emigrate chasing dreams of prosperity.