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Part 1, Chapter 9
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
Kracha works dutifully in Braddock just as he did in Homestead. “The company lost no opportunity to impress upon him that his services could be dispensed with at any time,” and Kracha is happy just to have a job. Jobs in the steel mill, however, are hard and dangerous. Men working the night shift walk “across the black, lifeless plain of the mill yard toward the blast furnaces, looming huge in the early dusk.” Kracha works with molten steel, poison gas, ore, coke, and crushed limestone from six to six, seven days a week, alternating weekly between the day and night shift. He deals with the endless fatigue, bodily pain, and mental fog by drinking. Only hope sustains the steelworkers, until hope comes to “a sudden, unreasonable end” when many are carried out of the mill, never to return.
The nature of industrial work combined with capital’s outsized power means that workers are disposable. Kracha is well aware of his powerlessness to improve his working conditions, but his position as an unskilled laborer is so degraded that he considers having a job (however brutal, dangerous, and low-paying it is) to be its own reward. This is precisely the type of defeatist attitude that capital wants its workers to adopt. Only a union can make mill jobs better for workers, which is why capital is vociferously anti-union.
Themes
