Out of This Furnace: Part 4, Chapter 2 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”