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Part 4, Chapter 15
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
Not long after its formation, the CIO swings into action. It forms the Steelworkers’ Organizing Committee (SWOC), which takes over the Amalgamated. The group fills itself with specialists in steel and media and floods the steel towns with a multi-fronted union media campaign to compete with the steel company’s propaganda. The new leadership inside the ERP wages “guerilla warfare” on the organization, “passing resolutions for their publicity value in the minutes, belaboring the City Office with protests, straining the structure of the E.R.P,” until the company union becomes a tool of the CIO itself.
The newly created CIO organization has the resources and knowledge to wage a propaganda war that matches the steel company’s own propaganda. While Dobie and the other steelworkers initiated the effort by taking over membership of the ERP, the CIO finishes the job by providing the public relations resources necessary to beat the company at its own publicity game.
Themes
Dobie is impressed with not only the competence and aggressiveness of the CIO men, but also their diverse backgrounds. Among them are Slovaks, Irish, Germans, Jews, Scotch, and Italians, but they did not fight ethnic battles between themselves and did not act like the passive greenhorns that the company expected them to be. These men are outspoken and fearless, and “they were obviously convinced that they were individually as good as any man alive.” Most importantly, however, they operate under the understanding that the same laws apply to rich and poor alike. They employ newspapers, courts, and legislative bodies for the benefit of working people.
The multiple ethnic backgrounds of the CIO men, combined with the confidence they display in their fight against the steel bosses, make them a stark contrast with the passive steelworkers of Kracha’s era. Among the crucial differences between Dobie’s generation of Slovak-Americans and Kracha is these steelworkers’ refusal to accept the notion that the laws only apply to the poor and not the rich. Their status as the children of immigrants who grew up American creates opportunities to speak up for their chance at the American Dream, opportunities their grandfathers simply did not have.
Themes
The new CIO campaign reaches a climax after the November elections, when it rejects the company’s proposed sliding-scale wage agreement, “a complicated gimmick of index numbers, percentages and dates” that gives the steelworkers little say in the matter. The Labor Board also cites the company for promoting a company union. Dobie has been traveling back and forth to Pittsburgh to speak with representatives from the Labor Board. In early December, he and Hagerty are subpoenaed to testify against the company in Washington, D.C. He knows that Todd and Flack will not approve of the days off he needs to travel, but he goes before them anyway. “There happens to be a rule on the books that says any man who takes time off without permission can be fired,” Todd tells him. Dobie responds that the rule is brand-new and that the company has only enforced it on union representatives.
Throughout the decades, the steel companies have always feared the potential of organized labor, but they have always had enough power to stifle union activity. This passage, however, marks one of the rare instances in Bell’s struggle between capital and labor in which capital, represented by Mr. Todd, not only feels threatened by union activity, but is actually uncertain of whether it can suppress it.
Themes
A CIO representative in Pittsburgh had told Dobie that the company has no right to fire union members for activity outside the plant, but, nonetheless, they will be crass enough to make the threat. “Mr. Todd,” Dobie says, “I've told you I'm a Government witness. I've shown you my subpoena. Then you tell me if I take time off I'll lose my job. Well, I only hope you have your dictograph turned on.” A shocked Todd does not know about the dictograph that a friend of Dobie’s installed in his clock. His face flushed with rage, he reiterates that if Dobie goes to Washington, the company will fire him. Dobie leaves Todd’s office. Before he leaves the mill, he reports Todd’s threat to the union office, where the representative tells him not to worry, assuring him that the company is just trying to scare him.
Although Mr. Todd’s threats do frighten Dobie, he nonetheless stands up to the steel boss because he knows that the law is at last on the side of the union. Dobie’s refusal to be cowed by the company’s threats shocks Todd because threatening workers’ jobs has long been an effective tool in the company’s union-busting arsenal. This passage marks a major turning point in the relationship between capital and labor because the union, as represented by Dobie, for the first time has enough clout to resist the company’s most effective anti-union action.
Themes
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Hagerty is annoyed with Todd’s loud-mouthed threats and confronts him in his office. Dobie waits as the two men hold a brief meeting. He expects to hear verbal fireworks come from inside, but the office remains quiet. After fifteen minutes. Hagerty emerges from the office; his face is dirty, but his eyes are “snapping fire.” A few minutes later, Todd also emerges. Both men seem to be in a hurry. Dobie eventually leaves work early, as he is looking forward to spending the evening with Julie.
Dobie’s confidence in the face of Todd’s threats inspires Hagerty, and the resulting silence that replaces the expected “verbal fireworks” shows just how much more clout the union has now that the CIO and the Federal Government are behind it. The normally confident Todd is reduced to silent rage.
Themes
Dobie greets his call to Washington with satisfaction. He has been working strenuously for the Labor Board’s investigators, and now it seems that the amount of paperwork he did and the number of questions he answered might not be in vain. “It seemed odd that so much trouble was necessary to prove the obvious fact that the ERP was supported and dominated by the company,” but he realizes that is how the law works. He is not looking forward, however, to leaving Julie at home while he goes to Washington. They say goodbye in the kitchen, and Dobie boards a train to Pittsburgh. When he arrives there, several SWOC officials and a dozen or so witnesses from other steel mills greet him at the train station. They arrive in Washington at seven in the morning, making a stop at the hotel before heading over to the CIO offices. There, Dobie meets John Lewis himself.
There is a vast gulf between what workers in the steel towns experience on a daily basis and what the company plans to present at the hearing through their lawyers. Although he is obviously inexperienced in the law, Dobie dutifully files all of the necessary paperwork to counter the company’s arguments in court because he has faith the system will prevail. The meeting between Dobie and John Lewis is significant, for it joins a new generation union leader from the steel towns with one of the most noted labor leaders in America. The meeting symbolizes the partnership between two previously distinct worlds of labor, united in their common fight against capital’s determination to stifle the American Dream for steelworkers.
Themes
When the labor hearings begin, Dobie finds the law in action to be “a dull, plodding business of questions and answers, objections, conferences, [and] recesses.” Yet, he understands why the Labor Board’s investigators have gone through so much trouble to collect evidence of anti-labor activity from the company. “The company’s lawyers,” he notices, are “politely incredulous of everything and surprised or shocked at nothing.” He wonders how the CIO lawyers’ dry descriptions of company unions and steelworker intimidation could communicate effectively the human impact the company’s actions have on ordinary people. He thinks that this type of hearing should be held in the steel mill yard or in the First Ward, places where people live “without beauty or peace.”
In this key passage, Dobie intuitively begins to understand why the forces of capital have been able to get away with their appalling treatment of workers for so long. The center of political power in America is worlds away from the sweat, blood, suffering, death, and pollution of the steel towns he knows so well. The people that live and die “without beauty or peace” in places like Braddock cease to be people with hopes and dreams, and instead become simple notes in reports over which lawyers can make formal arguments.
Themes
Dobie also believes a jury should be present at the hearings, one made of the people who gave their lives to the steel mills, people like Mike Dobrejcak, Mary Dobrejcak, Pauline, Joe Dubik, and Kracha, as well as “all the thousands of lives the mills had consumed as surely as they had consumed their tons of coke and ore.” During the evenings, he writes to Julie, and she informs him that the Pittsburgh papers are publishing long stories about the hearings. He also takes time to see the sights around Washington.
The judges and attorneys cannot see the damage the steel mills do to human beings, and because the people in the steel towns cannot be there to describe their experiences, Dobie’s understands how important it is for him to testify on their behalf. Dobie is more than a union representative; he is himself a symbol of hope for others just like him.
Themes
When called to the witness stand, Hagerty makes a splash when he reveals that the company had asked him to work as a spy within the ERP and the union. He also endears himself to the press by boasting of his ten children with “another one on the way.” Dobie is the last to take the stand. He begins by revealing that the company threatened to fire him if he testified in Washington. His remaining testimony concerns detailing the ERP’s abuses as a company union, including “the futility of resolutions, the censorship of minutes, the food box affair and Flack's attempt to remove the representatives when they refused to sign the sliding scale agreement.” He gets little mention in the press, which focuses more on Hagerty, but Julie is proud when one of the Pittsburgh papers makes a mention that Dobie was among those workers who testified against the company.
This passage detailing Dobie’s testimony is somewhat anticlimactic. What he says, though certainly essential to Bell’s redemption narrative, is less important than the fact that he has been allowed to come to Washington to give testimony in the first place. Nonetheless, he and Hagerty testify to everything that readers have learned about the steel company’s abuses up to this point. For Dobie and Hagerty, the hearing represents not just the culmination of their hard-fought organizing efforts, but also the culmination of decades of long overdue justice for the men, women, and children who missed the opportunity for union protection, and who saw their American Dreams fade into nothingness.
Themes
