Joe Magarac

Steve Mestrovich laid three dolly bars out in the yard behind his house and sent word through the mill towns that whoever lifted the heaviest of them could marry his daughter. Mary was the handsomest girl in the valley and the bars were solid steel, so men came in from Homestead and Braddock, and one came from Johnstown, which nobody present was happy about. Two of them got the middle bar off the ground. Pete Pussick, the local favourite, was one, and he could do nothing at all with the third. Then a stranger walked up, took hold of the biggest bar and lifted it clean with the Johnstown man still hanging off the far end.

He stood over six feet. His shoulders were wider than a pair of doors, his hands were bigger than Pete’s and Elli Stanowski’s together, and when he opened his mouth he said his name was Joe Magarac, that all he knew how to do was work and eat like a donkey, and that he was the only man of steel in the world. Then he pulled his shirt up so they could see he meant it literally. Arms, legs, chest. No flesh anywhere on him.

The prize was Mary. Joe turned her down. He had no time to sit in a house with a wife, he said, because his time belonged to the furnaces, and besides, he had noticed the way she looked at Pete. He winked at her father. The girl went to Pete Pussick and the man of steel went back to work, which is the only thing in the whole saga he ever does willingly.

What he did there was extraordinary and, in the telling, oddly domestic. On a floor where the air tasted of coal smoke and scale and the open hearth kept up a low continuous roar under everything, he would reach into a heat and stir it with his bare arm the way a cook stirs a pot. He pinched off molten steel and drew it out between his fingers into finished rail, several at a time, and rolled the leftovers into cannonballs the way children pack snow. He never slept and he never stopped. The accounts credit him with the output of many men at once, and not one of them suggests he ever wanted an afternoon off, which is the hinge the whole thing turns on.

Where he came from is left deliberately thin. He was born inside a mountain of ore, or at the bottom of a steel mine, depending on the version. It is less an origin than a shrug. He came out of the raw material already finished, which is exactly what a mill would want if a mill could order a man.

His surname is not really a surname. Magarac is the Croatian and Serbian word for donkey, and the academic dictionaries are blunt about what it does when you aim it at a person: an ignorant man, a fool, a stubborn idiot. Every other name in the story is ordinary. Mestrovich and Pussick are the sort of names that were on the doors in Hunkietown. Only the hero is called Jackass. Owen Francis, who first put the saga into print, reported that his Slavic workmates treated the word as a compliment and that saying so out loud set them laughing. Twenty years later Hyman Richman went into the same towns and came back with a flatter finding. The word is never used without a sneer.

Francis published “The Saga of Joe Magarac: Steelman” in Scribner’s Magazine in November 1931. He was a gassed veteran of the first war who had come back to the Pennsylvania mills after Hollywood turned him down, and he wrote that he had heard the story many times over, in the mill and in Hunkie kitchens. There is no trace of Joe Magarac anywhere before that issue. Not in print, not in song, not in the collections of industrial folklore already being gathered. Richman’s fieldwork in 1953 found that most of the Slovak steelworkers he interviewed had never heard of him at all, and Richard Dorson filed him beside Paul Bunyan under a word he coined for the purpose: fakelore.

What happened after 1931 is far easier to document than what happened before it. George Carver retold the saga in 1944 and quietly respelled him Magerac, opening with the line that the name has no significance as far as he could learn. U.S. Steel published comic books in which Joe materialises to a boy and explains steel to him. Somewhere in the process the jackass was promoted to a mule. Jennifer Gilley and Stephen Burnett, reading him against the industry that adopted him, concluded that Magarac is the sum of what capital wanted from a workforce rather than anything the workforce ever wanted for itself. The same men supposed to cherish a hero delighted by unbroken shifts had fought at Homestead in 1892 and shut the industry down in 1919 to get away from them.

Ivan Kovacevic pushed the reading further and put a plausible living man underneath. Frederick Taylor built scientific management in the Pennsylvania steel trade by selecting one strong, obedient, thrifty worker, paying him better, and converting his output into everyone else’s quota. Taylor called his man Schmidt. It takes no great leap to imagine another one called Joe, who lifted more than anyone, whose numbers came back to illiterate crews on coloured slips of paper, and who was therefore called a jackass in a language the bosses could not follow.

The ending is where the sneer stops being funny. Joe made rail so fast that the orders ran out and the mills closed for a few days. When the men came back they found him in a furnace, standing in his own melt, explaining that he could not bear the closing and that the steel he made of himself would be the finest anyone ever poured. Nobody pulled him out. The melter looked at what came off that heat and told the crew that nobody had ever seen steel like it before, and that it was because Joe Magarac had made it.

There is a colder way to read that scene. In the single year to June 1907, Crystal Eastman counted 195 work deaths in Pittsburgh and 526 across Allegheny County, and Pennsylvania law obliged companies to file a report on every serious accident, which the companies then declined to make public. A man could go into a ladle and the paperwork would stay in a drawer. Whether Joe climbed into that furnace or was assisted is a question the story is very careful not to ask.

His powers and his limits come off the same fact. Because he is steel he cannot burn, cannot tire, cannot be crushed by anything the mill can drop on him, and can take hold of a heat because none of it reaches him. Because he is steel he can be melted, and the mill contains the only thing hot enough to do it. The deeper weakness is arithmetic. A worker who produces without limit produces past the point anybody can sell, and the reward for that is a cold mill and an empty envelope for every man standing beside him. He works himself out of a job and takes the shift down with him.

Nobody has settled what he was meant to be. He was called Hungarian first, then Slovak. Clifford Reutter argued in 1980 that the word is Croatian and so was Joe; Marshall Fishwick pointed out that it is equally Serbian. Kovacevic offers the least comfortable answer available, which is that the man who sets the rate is seldom the man at the bottom of the yard, so Joe need not have been a Hunkie at all. He may have been the American, or the German, against whom the Hunkies were being measured.

He has outlasted the argument and most of the mills. Irwin Shapiro’s 1948 book melts him into a girder, ships him to Washington and builds him into the Capitol, where he overhears two legislators complaining about Slavic immigrants, heats up, comes out of the wall, wrecks a good deal of the city and accepts citizenship as the price of stopping. William Gropper painted him that same year. Frank Vittor mocked up a fountain of him for Point State Park in 1951. A statue of him stood for decades at Kennywood, and he still turns up on murals around Pittsburgh, blond and blue-eyed and bending a bar, which is its own quiet joke on a man named in Croatian. Doris Dyen, working on the region’s industrial heritage, has said that as the mills came down Joe became enormously important to the men they put out, whose sense of who they were went down with the stacks. Whoever invented him, the steelworkers ended up taking the story anyway.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Joe Magarac?

Joe Magarac is a legendary steelworker of the Pittsburgh mills whose body is made of solid steel. He first appeared in print in Owen Francis’s story “The Saga of Joe Magarac: Steelman” in Scribner’s Magazine in November 1931, where he wins a weight-lifting contest, refuses the bride who was the prize, and works the open hearths without ever sleeping or stopping.

What does the name Magarac mean?

Magarac is the Croatian and Serbian word for donkey or jackass, and applied to a person it means a fool or a stubborn idiot. Every other character in the original story carries an ordinary surname, so the hero’s name is the joke. Hyman Richman’s fieldwork in the mill towns found the word was never used without a sneer.

Is Joe Magarac real folklore or fakelore?

The evidence points heavily to fakelore. No reference to Joe Magarac appears anywhere before Owen Francis’s 1931 article, and when Hyman Richman interviewed Slovak steelworkers in 1953 most had never heard of him. Richard Dorson grouped him with Paul Bunyan as an invented hero, though Ivan Kovacevic has argued that Francis’s version keeps genuine old-country storytelling motifs and a joke his informants may have been playing on him.

How does Joe Magarac die?

Joe works so fast that the mills run out of orders and shut down for a few days, and he cannot bear it. The men return to find him standing inside a furnace, melting himself down so the steel made from his body will be the finest ever poured. Nobody pulls him out, and the melter tells the crew that no one had ever seen steel like the heat Joe made.

Why is Joe Magarac a controversial hero for steelworkers?

Because he wants exactly what the mill owners wanted and nothing the workers were fighting for. Jennifer Gilley and Stephen Burnett argued that he represents the ideal employee invented by industry, not a hero built by labour, noting that the same immigrant workforce he supposedly belonged to fought at Homestead in 1892 and struck the whole industry in 1919 for shorter hours and better conditions.

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