Industrialization and Destruction Theme Analysis

The title of Bell’s novel references how everything that happens therein literally and metaphorically comes from “out of the furnace.” The furnaces bring both life and death; it symbolizes both creation and destruction. The steel mills inspire Slovak immigrants to come to America with hopes of achieving a better life. Yet while the mills provide income for Slovaks to support their families, workers are subject to endless hours, terrible wages, and a loss of autonomy. Furnace work wrecks men’s bodies and souls and strains their relationships with their families. In the worst cases, the dangerous conditions kill workers, while others live with physical and psychological scars. American industry, therefore, creates and destroys in equal measure. It fuels American economic life, but it also poisons and destroys the American environment. Bell thus positions the mills—and, implicitly, industrialization at large—as simultaneously symbols of freedom and enslavement: they create the conditions for humans to thrive, but they are also a dehumanizing force that destroys individual people and reduces them to anonymous parts in a vast industrial machine.

The novel emphasizes the ways in which the furnaces lay waste to the natural environment. “The mills came to Braddock,” Bell writes, “stripping the hills bare of vegetation, poisoning the river, blackening heaven and earth and the lungs of the workers.” Thanks to the mills, Braddock is a dirty, polluted place. The soot from the mill stacks darkens the clouds and leaves a thick film of black soot on the streets and houses where people live. The river is “one-third water, one-third mud and one-third human and industrial sewage.” Yet living amongst such pollution becomes normal for the mill workers and their families. Mary, for example, returns from a summer on the ocean and claims that she “never noticed the smoke and dirt so much before.” The environmental destruction that comes with industrialization is one reminder of the toll America pays for capitalist progress; in the process of creating America, industrialization is also destroying America.

For the thousands who live and work in mill towns like Braddock, American heavy industry makes life miserable through dehumanizing conditions that steadily brutalize the human body and mind. Kracha first learns from Dubik the toll millwork takes on the body. “The furnaces are going day and night, seven days a week, all the year round,” Dubik explains, “I work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep, until there are times when I couldn’t tell you my own name […] what a life!” For Dubik, work is life, to the point where he no time to educate himself or even go to church. Mike similarly experiences the extreme exhaustion that comes with work in the steel mill. When he must work the “long turn”—24 straight hours—work and life bleed together. Bell writes how “exhaustion slowly numbed his body, mercifully fogged his mind” until he “became a mere appendage to the furnace.” Mike becomes so weary that his very humanity gives in to the power of the machine. The sheer amount of his body that Mike gives to the mils without hope of a better job, or even respect from his fellow workers drives him to despair. He curses the steel companies as “misusers of men” who brutalize those who make American industry run. According the Bell, the basic function of American industry is to feed upon “the lives and bodies of thousands of its workers” who it purports to help thrive. This “gift of God to the corporations of America” is a literal human sacrifice in the name of industrial progress.

The frequent deaths of millworkers in Braddock demonstrates explicitly the destructive tendency of American industrialization. Accidents in the mills play significant roles in the lives of the novel’s protagonists. Kracha is the first to experience the loss of a loved one when the top of a furnace explodes, killing his best friend, Dubik. The company rules Dubik’s death an accident, but Bell notes that the mills are using cheaper, more combustible ores. He therefore attributes Dubik’s death to greed, suggesting that far from being an “accident,” death is an essential component to American industry itself. The novel’s most significant death to the mill is that of Mike. His skull crushed and his body burned, Mike’s death is both brutal and casual. Mary “couldn’t imagine wanting to go on living” without her husband, but she must. Mike’s death thrusts Mary into depression and poor health, and she “almost wished that the dead could take with them the memories of the living.” In Braddock, the death of a steelworker reverberates through families and communities.

American industrialization promises employment, progress, and freedom, but Bell is more concerned with shedding light on the human costs that the mythology of industrial progress papers over. At the Washington, D.C., hearing on company unions, Bell writes that “a jury of ghosts” should decide a verdict on the steel companies’ dismissal of human life. “Mike Dobrejcak and Mary and Pauline, Joe Dubik and Kracha—the maimed and the destroyed, the sickly who died young, the women worn out before their time with work and child-bearing,” Bell writes, are the people who paid the destructive price so that American industry could create an empire.