The formidable presence of the steel mill dominates every facet of life in Braddock and other industrial towns in western Pennsylvania. In Bell’s novel, the steel mill symbolizes America itself, both its good and bad aspects. With its smokestacks literally towering over Braddock, its blast furnace casting a continuous, fiery glow, and its wages providing the livelihood for thousands of immigrant workers and their families, the Edgar Thomson Steel Works stands as a testament to the hope that American industry gave to Slovaks who came to America. Bell writes that the steel company regularly sent men like Joe Wold back to Slovakia to encourage immigration to Braddock. The promise of steady employment and the freedom to live out the American Dream fills the First Ward with Slovaks like Kracha and Mike Dobrejcak, and though the work is dangerous and the pay is low, many do experience a better life in the mill’s shadows. Especially during periods when the furnace is in high operation, the streets, churches, saloons, and shops of Braddock are alive with people flush with paychecks. Here, they experience joy and community. In this way, the steel mills symbolize the prosperity and hope that American industry brings, but they also symbolize the misery and suffering that are byproducts of life under industrial capitalism. Work in the mill is plentiful, but it is also hard, hot, dirty, and incredibly dangerous. Death and injury are common occurrences for steelworkers, and the loss of men to the mills leave a trail of grief and financial misery within their families and communities. As Bell writes, the mills consumed “thousands of lives […] as surely as they had consumed their tons of coke and ore.” As symbols of America, the steel mills embody America’s hope and despair, creating opportunity and wrenching it away in equal measure.
Steel Mills Quotes in Out of This Furnace
I work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep, until there are times when I couldn't tell you my own name. And every other Sunday the long turn, twenty-four hours straight in the mill. Jezis!, what a life!
These were the same people who snorted disrespectfully when they were reminded that in books and speeches Carnegie had uttered some impressive sounds about democracy and workers' rights.
Hope sustained him, as it sustained them all; hope and the human tendency to feel that, dreadful though one's circumstances might be at the moment, there were depths of misfortune still unplumbed.
That hostility, that contempt, epitomized in the epithet “Hunky,” was the most profound and lasting influence on their personal lives the Slovaks of the steel towns encountered in America.
I feel restless. I want things I can't have—a house with a front porch and a garden instead of this dirty alley—a good job—more money in my pocket— more time for myself, time to live.
They ceased to be men of skill and knowledge, ironmakers, and were degraded to the status of employees who did what they were told for a wage, whose feelings didn't matter, not even their feelings for the tools, the machines, they worked with, or for the work they did.
Flinger of pebbles against a fortress, his impunity was the measure of his impotence.
Once I used to ask myself, Is this what the good God put me on earth for, to work my life away in Carnegie's blast furnaces, to live and die in Braddock's alleys?
A widow is outside everything. Even work is given to her more out of charity than because people want something done.
It takes a long time for the dead to die.
She felt, in those closing days, as though all the evidence that she had lived, all that had made her a person, an individual, was being stripped from her bit by bit.
He was a child of the steel towns long before he realized it himself.
There were few who didn't find something brave and hopeful in its mere presence, the soiled curtains across the windows of what had been a vacant store as heart-lifting as a flag in the wind.
The very things the Irish used to say about the Hunkies the Hunkies now say about the niggers. And for no better reason.
You know, you really ought to be allowed to pick your own place to be born in. Considering how it gets into you.
That was where a hearing of this kind should have been held, in the mill yard or in one of the First Ward's noisome alleys, where words and names were actual things and living people, beyond any lawyer's dismissal—smoke and machinery and blast furnaces, crumbling hovels and underfed children, and lives without beauty or peace.
All over America men had been permitted, as a matter of business, as a matter of dollars and cents, to destroy what neither money nor men could ever restore or replace.