The Price of Playing the Game — The Jungle

Freddie's hundred-dollar bill should change everything; instead it delivers Jurgis to a bartender who examines the note, pours one beer, and pockets the rest. When Jurgis protests, the man beats him, police club him, and the court believes the saloonkeeper because the owner pays five dollars a week for Sunday privileges and the magistrate owes his seat to the same machine. Ten days and costs: the victim is sentenced while the thief keeps the bill, and Jurgis learns that money without pull is prey.

In Bridewell he meets Jack Duane again, who maps Chicago's underworld as war against a rigged world. Duane blows out a lamppost, and they mug an insurance agent whose watch and wad yield fifty-five dollars for Jurgis. He reads the newspaper account of the concussed victim who may lose three fingers and learns the game's cost, then accepts anyway because hunger has already answered the moral question before his conscience can.

Duane introduces the graft army that runs the city year-round: saloonkeepers, madams, pickpockets, and police captains who own the brothels they raid, leagued with politicians who buy votes each spring and fall. Buck Halloran pays Jurgis five dollars to collect duplicate pay envelopes under false names at a labor pay office. When Jurgis lands in jail after a drunken fight at a political ball, Halloran phones the district leader and the fine is suspended: he discovers what pull means, and why Connor and the bartender could jail him at will while millionaire thieves remain free.

The education continues through race-track tips from a police-connected runner, muggings of country buyers who stumble from saloons into alleys with cellar escapes, and traps where girls are drugged in fake employment offices. Duane flees when caught drilling a safe, but Bush Harper recognizes Jurgis as the night watchman who once helped naturalize him at Brown's. Harper works for Mike Scully, boss of dumps, ice ponds, and the unpaved street where Antanas drowned; he offers Jurgis a double game in the yards election while Socialists like Tamoszius are treated as enemies who cannot be bought.

Scully needs a Republican stooge elected with brewer's money while Democrats keep power; he wants Jurgis, a known union man, to front a Young Men's Republican Association and deliver Lithuanian votes for Doyle. Harper laughs at the blacklist: Scully's note to Durham puts Jurgis back trimming hogs, and the foreman who once would have fired him says only, All right. Jurgis praises Doyle in the yards while beer, brass bands, and fireworks paint democracy over vote buying, and he handles the beer that buys the votes he delivers.

On election morning Jurgis rides at four o'clock, herds foreigners through the polls, votes half a dozen times himself, and passes fresh arrivals to the next handler for cash from the captain's hundred-dollar bundles. Scotty Doyle, the ex-tenpin setter, wins by nearly a thousand votes; Senator Spareshanks orates about workingmen while Jurgis manages fireworks and meetings. That night he drinks an unholy jag while Packingtown celebrates popular government; the machine counts what it bought, and Jurgis has learned to play by rules that crushed him when he first arrived with clean hands and a bride at his side.