OUT OF THIS FURNACE (1940)

Thomas (Belejcak) Bell’s novel Out of This Furnace is considered the greatest Pittsburgh novel. It chronicles three generations of Slovak/Rusyn immigrant worker families in the Braddock steel mill. Based on Thomas Bell’s own family, it highlights the role of the women, the ever-present threat of death in the mill and ends with the triumph of union organization in 1937. Bell refused to be ashamed of his “hunky” heritage. He asserted that “the Slovaks with their blood and lives helped to build America, that the steel they produced changed the United States into the most industrialized nation in the world … that the hardships that my grandfather, my father, my brother, sisters and other relatives lived through would never be forgotten.”

Out of This Furnace 1981 Edition

Thomas Bell was a CIO organizer. For him the union struggle for a voice in the workplace was an expression of what it means to be an American.

Thomas Bell’s hometown, Braddock

“Maybe not the kind of American that came over on the Mayflower, or the kind that’s always shooting off their mouths about Americanism or patriotism, some of the god-damnedest heels you’d ever want to see. lt wasn’t where you were born or how you spelled your name or where your father had come from. It was the way you thought and felt about certain things. About freedom of speech and the equality of men and the importance of having one law — the same law — for rich or poor, for the people you liked and the people you didn’t like.” — Thomas Bell