Out of This Furnace

by Thomas Bell

impressive. It was America, of course, but he would not feel himself really in America until he was in White Haven, secure in a job and a place to live.

They never had to learn about each other, feeling their way; as Kracha once said, they spoke the same language. They had honestly liked each other almost from

His wages were ten cents an hour, and when bad times came and the company cut wages, nine. It was an excellent month when he made as much as twenty-five dollars.

Very bad paying

Anna. They did the same work, lived in the same ramshackle shanties, wherever they went.

poor living conditions

“I want to rent a larger place and take in a few boarders,” Dorta said. “But it's so hard to find a house. And not everyone will rent to our people.”

No one want to rent places to them because they have little income and it is not steady

Good times were invariably followed by bad, a period of comparative prosperity by a period of slow work and reduced wages which consumed all he'd been able to accumulate.

American industry, for all its boasting, was still crude and wasteful in its methods; and part of the cost of its education,—of that technique it was, in time, to consider, somewhat smugly, as a uniquely American heritage, a gift of God to the corporations of America,—was the lives and bodies of thousands of its workers.

Kracha worked from six to six, seven days a week, one week on day turn, one week on night. The constant shifting of turns made settlement into an energy-saving routine impossible; just when he was getting used to sleeping at night he had to learn to sleep during the day. At the end of each day-turn week came the long turn of twenty-four hours, when he went into the mill Sunday morning at six and worked continuously until Monday morning. Then home to wash, eat and sleep until five that afternoon, when he got up and returned to the mill to begin his night-turn week. The long turn was bad but this first night turn coming on its heels was worse. Tempers flared easily; men fought over a shovel or a look and it was fatally easy to be careless, to blunder.

Long working hours but the pay is very low. He has no time for anything else beside working

But it never did. When human flesh and blood could stand no more it got up at five in the morning as usual and put on its work clothes and went into the mill; and when the whistle blew it came home.

Beside them the house was a row of windows and doorways stretching off on either side in diminishing perspective, washtubs hanging beside every other door.

Their living condistion is very poor

Dubik died two days later, blind and unconscious. The doctors had filled him with drugs to ease his pain and he died without knowing that Dorta was beside him.

In a larger sense it was the result of greed, and part of the education of the American steel industry. The steel companies were using ever larger percentages of the earthy Mesabi ores, which were cheaper to mine and handle than the massive rock ores but which demanded—as the ironmakers were learning—a variation in technique to prevent choking the furnaces.

The company contributed seventy-five dollars toward Dubik's funeral

a glimpse into the unfair treatment of steel mill workers

expe...

He paused. Then, “I'm thinking of going into business.”

a new strategy to make a living

He used to say, what was the use of coming to America if not to live better than we lived in the old country?”

American dreams

A month later he signed papers and became a businessman. That was in October, 1895. A little over a year later he owned two horses and wagons, had a man and two boys working for him, and in a steel box in the trunk in his bedroom he had nearly one thousand dollars in cash.

He made more money

“I'm going to be a citizen soon. I'm going to have the right to vote in a few years.”

the right to vote. liberal

In Europe your emperors and grand dukes own everything and over here it's your millionaires and your trusts. They run the country to suit themselves, and don't think they're going to let you interfere every few years with your miserable vote. Get that into your head. Your vote means nothing. The company man always wins. If he isn't a company man to start with he becomes one afterward; the millionaires see to that.”

Unfair system

She watched him for a moment. Then, “I want you to know the truth. I don't care what other people think or say but I want you to know the truth. I left my sister's house because it was too crowded. Did you know I had to sleep on a mattress on the kitchen floor? I was only waiting until I could get a place of my own.”

poor living conditions

Kracha went to the bank and got a six months' renewal. It cost him seventy-five dollars and the bank made it obvious that they were doing him an unprecedented favor.

“I didn't want to come to America when you sent for me. I was afraid of what you would say when you saw my throat.”

He put on his hat and coat, then faced his children. “I don't want you to cry,” he said. “Your mother is dead. Be good girls and don't make any noise. You understand?”

Business refused to improve, and blaming Spetz, nosy women and the Cuban situation did no good. Elena's funeral had taken all his ready cash and put him in debt to the undertaker; he kept putting off ordering a gravestone from week to week. Zuska's household was costing him almost as much as his own. And in June he could expect to hear from the bank again.

He rubbed his hand over his face. “Zuska, how did I get myself into so much trouble? I feel like a man in a foreign country. Little by little I've managed to mix myself in things that are too much for me. Trouble—I can stand trouble. But now I never know what to do next. Maybe I should have stayed in the mill. That's where I belong. And if things don't take a turn for the better soon that is where I'll end up.”

Historians decided that the Indians had preferred the vicinity of what was now upper Sixth Street but for Mike it was in Dooker's Hollow, a Dooker's Hollow with no houses, no tipsy coal sheds, no forty-five-degree-angle back yards, that General Braddock—shaking his fist at the invisible enemy, daring them to come out and fight like eighteenth-century Englishmen—was ingloriously shot, while George Washington leaped acrobatically from one horse to another.

All this was a long time happening, and was not accomplished without bitterness and conflict; but none of it ever got into the history books.

Immigrants continued to pour into the valley, taking over whole sections—invariably the worst sections, nearest the river and the mills—of the steel towns.

Kracha's advice to Mike on his exciting discovery of American politics during the first Bryan campaign was generally observed: Think what you like but keep your mouth shut.

No freedoom, no free speech

They had come to America to find work, to make a living. It was their good fortune, perhaps, to come unburdened with many illusions about a land of freedom, a land where all men were equal. They were glad to take whatever jobs were assigned them; they realized that bosses were the same everywhere, and when the epithet Hunky was hurled at them they shrugged. It was hardly pleasant but there was nothing one could do about it. The implied denial of social and racial equality seldom troubled them; as Kracha once said, he had come to America to find work and save money, not to make friends with the Irish.

rooms. Dorta has eleven in four, in three if you don't count the kitchen. What it is to have money!”

poor living conditions

“I want a good life for us, Marcha. For you, for me, for our children.”

The sacrifice of parents

Nine were killed—they were literally baked alive—and five badly burned.

poor working and unfair treatment. People were just cheap labor

The first of the dead were buried the next day, the mill, as was its custom, contributing seventy-five dollars toward the cost of each funeral. Father Kazincy was in bed with a broken leg—he had been thrown by a horse, he was fond of horseback riding, much to the scandal of his more conservative parishioners—and a priest was called over from Duquesne to conduct the services.

Mike liked living in the alley even less than Mary, but they had been unable to rent anywhere else. Their two rooms were at the Twelfth Street end of the row, facing the alley, which of course had no sidewalks and was so narrow that Mary could buy from hucksters' wagons without moving off her own doorstep. The rent was five dollars a month, one dollar less than they had been paying Mrs. Perlak. They shared the cellar and the stairs to the bedrooms with a Mrs. Marga, whose rooms faced the courtyard, overshadowed by the high brick rear of Dzmura's hotel on Washington and forever hung with wash.

Poor living conditions

Mike did some figuring and reckoned that he had earned two hundred and eighty dollars during the year. Without the boarders they would have been, as many were, on the edge of destitution, sunk in debt. Only the boarders, Mary's work, had brought them through without disaster. And Mary was pregnant again.

Can't make any money

“You can be sure I won't vote for Roosevelt or Wilson,” Mike said.

“Did I ask you, Mike? How you vote is your own business.” He slapped him on the back, apparently not minding Mike's dirty clothes. “If you'd like a mouthful of schnapps go across the street to the tailor shop, tell them I sent you. And come into my place tonight. No matter who wins.”

Mike had registered as a Republican—anything else would have been suicidal—but had determined to vote for Eugene Debs, the Socialist. He knew the risk. Should he be found out—and that the company had ways of learning how a man had voted nobody in Braddock doubted—he would be fired. Aided by an assumed name and the obtuseness which had led more than one English-speaking man to say that all Hunkies looked alike to him, he might be able to get a job in Homestead or Duquesne. And then again, he might not.

“I can't say what I want, I can't do what I want, I can't even hope any more that some day things will be better for me. Marcha laughs when I show her how gray I'm getting but just the same I can't work as hard or move as quickly as I did ten years ago. And you know what that means. Slow down and out you go. And then what will become of us?”

and before the rush of memory, the realization of her loss, she broke down.

‘Marcha, always remember this: People are born good, they want to be good. But there is something in the world that makes them bad, something that is always trying to keep them from being good.’ That's what he told me.”

“It takes a long time for the dead to die.”

The houses on either side seemed buried in trees and vegetation because Mary's yard was bare, with hardly a blade of grass showing. When it rained half the water that fell on the hill coursed like a flood through her yard; because it had no back fence traffic between the hillside and the road, children, chickens, even an occasional cow, used it for a thoroughfare. The outhouse was a skinny booth set in the most conspicuous position on the slope back of the house. House and outhouse sat naked on naked ground, everything exposed, ugly and bare.

poor living conditions. Life had not improved for them

Twenty dollars a month?”

so little, not much progress is made

“You can't afford to have such feelings. Learn to fight. If you don't fight people think you're afraid and walk on you twice as hard. You have no husband to fight for you now so you've got to learn to do it yourself.”

What's the use of working if I can't buy something for myself once in a while?”

The join of materialism