Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Out of This Furnace, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Immigration and American Identity
Industrialization and Destruction
The American Dream vs. Reality
Women’s Work
Capital vs. Labor
Summary
Analysis
In May, Johnny writes to Mary about the possibility of a strike at the steel mill. The previous year the American Federation of Labor (A.F.L.) had resolved to target the steel industry and sent organizers into Braddock. In response, the steel company announced a “basic eight-hour day” that does not reduce work hours but does pay time-and-a-half after the first eight hours worked. Johnny thinks that the government ordered the company to do so, but his uncle Frank tells him that “[t]he only reason they started paying time-and-a-half was because they're afraid of the union, and don't let anybody tell you different.”
This passage represents Johnny’s first experience with the struggle between capital and labor that, unbeknownst to him, has defined his young life up to this point. In his naivety, Johnny assumes that the government has more power than the steel company does, but Frank’s explanation that only the union can threaten the steel company provides a foreshadowing moment that hints at the importance unions will soon play in Johnny’s life.
Themes
Johnny is more fixated on earning money to buy a bike. He delights in learning from Frank that the union is scaring the company, but “the atmosphere of secrecy and suppression so characteristic of the mill had never oppressed him.” In this respect, he is “a child of the steel towns long before he realized it himself.”
Much like his grandfather before him, the young Johnny believes he can remain blissfully unaffected by the oppressive power of the steel company. Bell’s characterization of Johnny as a “child of the steel mills” reinforces the reality that the lives of all people in the steel towns are intertwined with the mills themselves, whether they believe it or not.
Themes
The union outlines its demands for the company, which include the right to collective bargaining, a wage increase, an eight-hour day, an end to the long shifts, and one day off per week. The company rejects these demands. Union meetings are outlawed in the steel towns and organizers are arrested on the spot. Father Kazincy, one of Braddock’s parish priests who is sympathetic to the labor movement, lets union organizers meet in the church basement and dares the company to make good on its threats to close his church.
The union’s demands on the steel company are intended to ease the hard lives of the men who work the blast furnaces. By ending the grueling and inhumane long shift, shortening workdays, boosting wages, and gaining the right to bargain with the company on a relatively equal footing, the union wants to give workers fulfilling lives that revolve around leisure and family time in addition to work. In this respect, the union represents the steelworkers’ only hope to achieve the American Dream on their own terms.
Themes
The union vows to strike, and the company makes preparations by building kitchens and bunkhouses inside the mill and installing searchlights along the river front, on shop roofs, and near the railroad tracks heading into the mill. The company also calls in helmeted and mounted state troopers, who quickly become “the most hated human beings ever to be seen in the steel towns.” On the morning of the strike, Johnny and Frank stand outside the mill and observe the state troopers prowling its perimeters. Johnny wishes he could destroy the troopers “merely by pointing his finger.” The pro-company newspapers characterize the strike as “the work of Huns and radicals” who want to “establish Bolshevism in America.”
While the union represents hope for the steelworkers, the steel company is far more powerful, as demonstrated by its ability to marshal law enforcement to its cause and muster warlike fortifications to deal with an impending workers’ strike. Despite his youth and inexperience with labor struggles, Johnny immediately understands that the company’s tactics are cruel and unjust. For its part, the steel company, like the jailer who blamed “hunkies” for Prohibition, resorts to ethnic stereotypes to demonize striking workers for merely wanting their piece of the American Dream.
Themes
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After the first day of the strike, Johnny takes to his bike and spends time visiting his aunt Anna in Donora. He is afraid to return to the steel mill while the strike continues, and asks Anna if her husband, John, can get him a job in Donora. John follows through, and soon Johnny is working construction. He enjoys the work, but on payday, he notices that two dollars have been deducted from his pay. A fellow worker tells Johnny that this organized graft affects every laborer and that if he does not like it, “just don't bother coming back Monday." Johnny is infuriated but remains on the job. When the foreman makes him wash the contractor’s Packard car as punishment for pointing out the graft, Johnny punctures the car’s tire. He works until the end of November and then returns to the steel mill, where the strike stumbles on.
Johnny’s experience with, and subsequent anger over, the wage grafting on the construction site foreshadows the much larger form of grafting he will challenge as a union organizer. Much like the moment he witnessed as a child when a boy slashed another boy’s bike tires out of spite, Johnny deeply resents the obvious display of injustice. This time, however, he attempts to fight back. Fittingly, in an act that harkens back to his first experience with evil, Johnny punctures the foreman’s tire.
Themes
Frank explains that the company alone is not squashing the union; rather, it is the company “plus the Government, plus the newspapers, plus the A.F.L. itself.” Frank also tells Johnny about Blackjack, an infamously violent state trooper who delighted in cracking steelworkers’ heads until a group of workers ambushed him in an alley and beat him close to death. “It will be a long time before he hits anybody else over the head with his club,” Frank states. The union calls off the strike in January, but the company at least announces a ten-percent wage increase. Frank secures a job on the railroad and quits the mill.
Frank explains to Johnny the powerful allies the company has in its fight against the union. Unable to fight against so many opposing forces, some steelworkers attack Blackjack as way to strike back in the only way they can. The fate of the unfortunate trooper is a direct and violent response to the company’s own violent tactics against the striking workers.
Themes
At Christmastime, Johnny visits Mary in the sanitarium. They exchange presents, and Johnny then spends time outside with his brother, Mikie. While exploring the wooded ruins of an old sawmill, Johnny tells Mikie to “call me Dobie, like the fellas in the shop.” The nickname sticks, and he starts going by “Dobie” inside and outside of the steel mill. In the spring, Mary comes down with a cold and her condition steadily worsens. She has now been in the sanitarium for over a year.
John Dobrejcak’s transition from “Johnny” to “Dobie” marks an important moment in the development of his own political awareness in the novel. Having spent his earliest years working independently in a series of different jobs, Johnny has found community and collective identity among fellow steelworkers who bestow on him an affectionate nickname. Johnny’s own embrace of the nickname signals a recognition of the value of solidarity and community over solitariness in the workplace. This recognition will fuel Dobie’s later role as a labor organizer, as well as his continued pursuit of the American Dream that has eluded his family so far. Dobie’s growth, however, also parallels the decline of his mother’s health.
Themes
