Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/51

 every-day matter to them—they were a pack of jackals trying to tear a carcase away from another pack of jackals. But when I stood by my contract with the "Evening World," the "Journal" dropped its contract, and lost its interest, not merely in the working-girls of New York, but also in the sins of the Chicago packers.

The lobbyists of the packers had their way in Washington; the meat inspection bill was deprived of all its sharpest teeth, and in that form Roosevelt accepted it and prepared to let the subject drop. I was bitterly disappointed, the more so because he had made no move about the matter which lay nearest my heart. I had made a remark about "The Jungle" which was found amusing—that "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach." It is a fact that I had not been nearly so interested in the "condemned meat industry" as in something else. To me the diseased meat graft had been only one of a hundred varieties of graft which I saw in that inferno of exploitation. My main concern had been for the fate of the workers, and I realized with bitterness that I had been made into a "celebrity," not because the public cared anything about the sufferings of these workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef.

I had objected to Roosevelt that he was giving all his attention to the subject of meat-inspection, and none to the subject of labor-inspection. His answer was that he had power to remedy the former evils, but no power to remedy the latter. I tried to persuade him to agitate the question and obtain the power; but I tried in vain. "The Jungle" caused the whitewashing of some packing-house walls, and it furnished jobs for a dozen or two lady-manicurists, but it left the wage-slaves in those huge brick packing-boxes exactly where they were before. Ten years later the war broke out, and as these wage-slaves became restive, an investigation was made. Here are a few paragraphs describing the adventures of the Federal investigators:

The first four homes brought expressions of horror from the women of the party, dark, insanitary, pest-ridden rooms and foodless kitchens.

Mrs. Belbine Skupin. Working in the yards. The six Skupin children in their home at 4819 Laflin Street, hugging the stove and waiting for "mother to return." "I didn't think such things existed outside the books," said one indignant young lady visitor, Miss Walsh.

In one home, seven children found. Youngest, a baby of fourteen