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["Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>]

Lewis's detractors were never able to refute his *facts*,
he did his own research back in 1906. Has anything - except
the technology - changed since then ?

1. votes
2. meat 
========
Substitute "voting district" for city, and the "twice a year" for whatever it 
is now for which political post :

1. Page 253 - The city, which was owned by an oligarchy of businessmen, being 
nominally ruled by the people, a huge army of graft was necessary for the 
purpose of effecting the transfer of power.  Twice a year, in the spring and 
fall elections, millions of dollars were furnished by the businessmen and 
expended by this army ; meetings were held and clever speakers were hired, 
bands played and rockets sizzled, tons of documents and reservoirs of drink 
were distributed, and tens of thousands of votes were bought for cash.  And 
this army, of course, had to be maintained the year round.  The leaders and 
organizers were maintained by the businessmen directly - the aldermen and 
legislators by means of bribes, party officials out of the campaign funds, 
lobbyists and corporation lawyers in the form of salaries, contractors by 
means of jobs, labor union leaders by subsidies, and newspaper proprietors 
and editors by advertisements.  The rank and file, however, were either 
foisted upon the city, or else lived off the populace directly.  There was 
the police department, and the fire and water departments, and the whole 
balance of the city list, from the meanest office boy to the head of a city 
department ; and for the horde who could find no room in these, there was the 
world of vice and crime, there was license to seduce, to swindle and plunder 
and prey.  The law forbade Sunday drinking ; and this had delivered the 
saloonkeepers into the hands of the police, and made an alliance between them 
necessary.  The law forbade prostitution, and this brought the "madames" into 
the combination.  It was the same with the gambling-house keeper and the 
poolroom man, and the same with any other man or woman who had the means of 
getting "graft" and was willing to pay over a share of it ; the green-goods 
man and the highwayman, the pickpocket and the sneak thief, and the receiver 
of stolen goods, the seller of adulterated milk, of stale fruit and diseased 
meat, the proprietor of unsanitary tenements, the fake doctor and the 
"pushcart man", the prize fighter and the professional slugger, the race 
track "tout", the procurer, the white-slave agent and the expert seducer of 
young girls.  All of these agencies of corruption were banded together, and 
leagued in blood brotherhood with the politician and the police ; more often 
than not they were one and the same person - the police captain would own the 
brothel he pretended to raid, the politician would open his headquarters in 
his own saloon, also the wolves of the city council, who gave away the 
streets of the city to the businessmen ; and those who patronized their 
places were the gamblers and prize fighters who set the law at deviance, and 
the burglars and holdup men who kept the whole city in terror.  On election 
day all these powers of vice and crime were one power ; they could tell 
within one per cent what the vote of their district would be, and they could 
change it at an hour's notice.



2. Page 133 - With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working 
in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great 
majority of Packingtown swindles.  For it was the custom, as they found, 
whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, 
either to can it or else into chop it up into sausage.  With what had been 
told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms (salting for 
preserving), 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. 

 

Jonas told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be 
found aour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, 
and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of 
chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, 
whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose.  In the 
pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time 
and increased the capacity of the plant - a machine consisting of a hollow 
needle, attached to a pump, by plunging this needle into the meat and working 
with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds.  And yet, 
in spite of this, these would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an 
odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump 
into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed 
the odor - a process known to the works as "giving them thirty percent".  
Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone 
to the bad.  Formerly these had been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later 
on some ingenious person had hit upon  new device, and now they would extract 
the bone, about which the pad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a 
white hot iron.  After the invention, there was no longer Number One, Two, 
and Three Grade - there was only Number One Grade.  The packers were always 
originating such schemes - they had what they called "boneless hams," which 
were all the odds and ends of pork shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and 
nearly all the meat cut out, and fancy "skinned hams," which were made of the 
oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them 
- that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled "head 
cheese".

 

It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department 
of Elzbeta.  Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and 
mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could 
make any difference.  There was never the least attention paid to what was 
cut up for sausage, there would come all the way back from Europe, old 
sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white- it would be 
dosed with borax and glycerine and dumped into the hoppers, and made over 
again for home consumption.  There would be meat that had tumbled out on the 
floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit 
uncounted billions of consumption germs.  There be meat stored in great piles 
in rooms, and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousand of 
rats would race about on it.  It was too dark in these storage places to see 
well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off 
handfuls of the dried dung of rats.  Therese rats were nuisances, and the 
packers would put poisoned bread out for them, they would die, and rats, 
bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.  This is no fairy story 
and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the 
shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one - there 
were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned 
rat was a tidbit.  There was no place for the men to wash their hands before 
ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water 
that was to be ladled into the sausage.  There were the butt-ends of smoked 
meat, and scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of 
the plants, that would dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there.  
Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some 
jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the 
cleaning out of the waste barrels.  Every spring they did it, and in the 
barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water- and cartload 
after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh 
meat, and set out to the public's breakfast.  Some of it they would make into 
"smoked" sausage - but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, 
they would call upon their chemistry department and preserve it with borax 
and color it with gelatine to make it brown.  All of the sausage came out of 
the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they stamp some of "special," 
and for that they would two cents more a pound.