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
The Depression spreads across the country even as those in charge insist that everything is okay. The “rich and powerful,” however, are “blind, ignorant” and “obsessed with the myth of their own infallibility,” and the worsening economic conditions only reveal the depth of their ineptitude. The steel mill cuts wages by ten percent in October and then by an additional fifteen percent the following spring.
Here, Bell uses the onset of the Great Depression to critique the rich and powerful, including the steel company bosses, who carry themselves in a godlike manner and demand reverence from workers. The Depression has pierced the ruling classes’ air of invincibility by revealing the very real, and very tragic, limits of their supposed financial genius.
Themes
By May, Dobie is only working two days a month, and he is still staying at Perovsky’s now-empty hotel. The one-time local bigwig and politician had sided with the steel company during the 1919 steel strike, a move that cost him steelworker votes. His impending defeat in the election caused the company to back his rival, and Prohibition forced him to turn his saloon into a speakeasy that the authorities eventually shuttered. Perovsky’s misfortunes amused Kracha, who, “remembering the past, made a special trip to Braddock to view the spectacle.” Eventually, Perovsky opened up his hotel in east Pittsburgh and put his mistress in charge of boarders. The Depression, however, has chased those boarders away.
This section marks Perovsky’s long overdue fall from grace. He is a Slovak who shed much of his connections with other Slovaks, and who and ingratiated himself to the steel company and the local Republican machine. Because he sided against steelworkers at the polling places and during labor strikes, the steelworkers in turn voted against him and ended his career in politics. Even a seasoned businessman like Perovsky, it turns out, is no match for the Depression.
Themes
Now two weeks behind on his rent, Dobie tells Perovsky he will have to leave the hotel. After a bit of bargaining, Perovsky agrees to let Dobie stay and run a tab until work picks up again. Meanwhile, the steel mills “[lie] silent month after month, under a sky that [has] never been so clean and blue before.” Dobie’s family does little better than he does. Frank and Alice are evicted for not paying rent and lose all of their furniture, Chuck moves in with his girlfriend’s family, Alice goes to Homestead to live with her daughter, and Frank disappears “into the First Ward.” In Donora, John is stuck working just two days a month, while Anna “[competes] with Negro women” for housework and Agnes barely survives on wages from a chain store.
The Great Depression causes people all over the country to pick up and relocate in order to find work, and Braddock is no exception. The silence of the steel mills means lost wages for thousands of families, but the lack of smoke from its great stacks means Braddock’s sky is clear and blue for once. This contrast--that silent mills mean cleaner air but no jobs, while running mills mean filthy air but plenty of jobs—embodies the simultaneously destructive and creative nature of American heavy industry.
Themes
A general air of “listlessness and decay” settles over the steel towns, as people lose business, cars, homes, and belongings. Families split up and men take to the road to seek work in far-off parts of the country. The public utilities cut off gas, water, and electric lines, and people find ways to skim the services they need. Dobie in particular excels at “by-passing electric meters and constructing long, wired poles to be hooked over the nearest power line.” He watches movies free for weeks.
As the Depression settles over Braddock and the rest of the country, Dobie demonstrates his resourcefulness by figuring out how to bypass paying for utilities. His resourcefulness will come in handy later as a union organizer.
Themes
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Across the state, in big cities and small ones, “Unemployment Councils” march and protest, “shocking the newspapers and the well-fed […] with their fantastic demands for adequate relief, for unemployment insurance, old age pensions and what not.” The authorities dismiss these people as “communists,” and they construct “Hoovervilles,” named after the president “who refused to undermine American self-reliance by feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.” The Depression spares no one except the rich.
Bell again uses the Depression to level scathing criticism at the well-off people who thumb their noses at the million thrust into poverty by the Depression. He particularly mocks the supposed sacredness of American “self-reliance”—so essential to the mythos behind the American Dream—as a curse that causes needless suffering, because it allows the rich to blame the poor for problems that the rich have in fact caused.
Themes
In the midst of the Depression, Dobie falls in love with Julie, who is set to be maid of honor at Agnes’s wedding. Agnes plans to marry George Hornyak, an unemployed man who is ashamed of his Slovak heritage (he calls himself “Horn”) and dreams of becoming an accountant. Julie is lean and tall, with a flat stomach and bony hips. Dobie cannot help but gaze at her “wide mouth, high cheekbones, a windblown mop of light brown hair and gray eyes that seemed forever dancing with laughter.”
Bell highlights Julie’s physical characteristics at several points in the novel, often to emphasize how lucky Dobie feels to have her as a partner. In contrast to Agnes and Horn, Julie and Dobie will turn out to be a partnership that will stand the test of time.
Themes
