Hunkies
In the opening paragraph of the novel, the narrator explains that George Kracha has decided to leave his homeland because the birthright of a Slovak peasant like himself is poverty and oppression under the occupational despotism Hungarian king Franz Josef. Adding ironic insult to injury, the Slovak immigrants will be insulted with the pejorative term “Hunkies” which derives from the word Hungary.
Voting for Debs
Mike Dobrejcak secretly votes for Socialist Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs and hopes that the Republican-machine which runs the town and the steel mill won’t somehow find out, leaving him fired or his pay docked. Happy at first that he gets away with, he later comes to recognize the sad irony that voting for Debs is viewed by the company and the machine as akin to flinging “pebbles again a fortress.” The irony is deepened by the full consequences of casting a vain vote for hope: realizing he will forever be throwing pebbles against a fortress, the hope expressed in voting for Debs ultimately leaves Mike utterly hopeless as he slips into a nihilistic acceptance that his lot is assured and final.
Voting for Debs, Part II
There is still yet another level of irony associated with Mike’s voting for Debs and this level is not one he is able to recognize. Upon recognition that his voting for Debs is not viewed as dangerous enough to warrant reaction, Mike’s descent into nihilism is characterized by the narrator as beautifully rendered subtle foreshadowing: “his impunity was the measure of his impotence.” The irony here is that it is precisely Mike’s sexual potency—in the form of his son Dobie—that will actually result in changes for the working conditions of the steel mill employees which inspired his vote for Debs in the first place.
The Great Depression
Ironically, it is arrival of the Great Depression which put so many millions of Americans out of work that winds up being the stimulus needed to empower the organized labor movement. After decades of being at the mercy of Carnegie’s legion of strike-breakers and subject to the terrible working conditions and low wages, it is with the arrival of the pro-working class Democrat administration of Franklin Roosevelt that unions are finally able to reach a position of power capable of changing the paradigm.
Poor George
The first-generation immigrant whose passage to America charts the rise and fall of the family as well as the labor movement at large is Djura “George” Kracha. It is George who makes the decision to his homeland in an effort to escape the oppression and poverty of the Hungarian oppressor of his culture. George makes this decision based upon the promise of a job with the railroad made by his brother-in-law. George’s story of trying to live the American Dream is one of tragic irony: the job with railroad is short-lived and he soon is working in the mills. He will spend the rest of his life trying to escape the hell of the furnace by pursuing various business endeavors which inevitably fail as a result of squandering and alcoholism and he ultimately winds up right back in the mills where he started.
