During and for several months after the close of the first World War a shortage of man power existed in the Pennsylvania and West Virginia steel industry. Attracted by wages of $4 a day, Southern farm Negroes moved North to enter the steel mills. From the point of view of tenant farmers living in a state of virtual peonage the low wages of the mill workers seemed riches, while there was an additional inducement to desert the land in the expectation of enjoying greater social freedom. The mass migration which drained large sections of the South of its farm labor, causing a new problem for agriculturists, also created a series of problems for Northern employers and labor leaders. At the time the unions were conducting their initial efforts to organize the steel industry on a closed-shop basis and the employers were relying increasingly on Negroes as strike-breakers. Consequently the unions watched this influx with mounting anxiety. Also to be reckoned with was the fear of the white workers that they might eventually be displaced by Negroes willing to accept lower wages and working conditions. These and other aspects of the Southern Negro migration are touched upon in this story [Blood on the Forge] of the three Moss brothers—Melody, Chinatown and Big Mat—who abandon their worn-out tenant farm in the red clay hills of Kentucky to work in a West Virginia steel mill. Through the narration of their experience as industrial workers we perceive social and economic issues that are part of the history of an epoch.

Written by a Negro author with notable objectivity, [Blood on the Forge] is a starkly realistic story involving social criticism as searching as any to be found in contemporary literature; but Mr. Attaway, though his protagonists are of his own race, has not singled out the Negro as the sole victim of unjust conditions. He shows native white Americans and immigrant Slavs working under the same system of low pay, cruelly long hours and unnecessary hazards to life and limb. Many of these injustices have since been rectified, but that fact does not detract from the story value of a tale which holds one's attention primarily by its realistic characterizations, the vividness and intensity of dramatic moments and its pathos. There is a double theme: the Negro competing with the white man in an abnormal condition of the labor market, and the man of the soil forced to make an adjustment with urban industrial life.

Big Mat, a physical giant with the mentality of a child who has never learned to play, tries to remain faithful to his wife, Hattie, who waits in Kentucky until he shall have earned enough money to send for her. He reads his Bible regularly and saves his pay. His brothers persuade him to attend a dog fight, where he meets Anna, a Mexican girl of the red light district, and yields to the urgings of his physical nature. Like other unmarried steel workers, Melody and Chinatown spend their pay on corn whiskey, dice and women. The greater social freedom for Negroes turns out to be largely delusive, for their chief competitors, the Slavs, hate them, while white Americans and Irish preserve a guarded attitude. When the union organizers appear the black workers are easily brought into the employers' camp, being persuaded that, as the least efficient racial group, their only chance of continuing on the job consists in making the best of present conditions.

Working in the terrific heat of blast furnaces and open hearths while under a complex of moral and emotional tensions, the brothers fall under the spell that ensnares all steel men. But one sees in the attitude of these black men something more—a transference of their mystical worship of earth to that other primal element, fire, yet not without a struggle and a haunting sense of apostasy. Earth will be avenged for man's presumption in converting it into steel.

This novel portraying life in the raw is not for those who shun the unlovely aspects of human nature, who have a distaste for bloodshed and the cruder manifestations of sex. Indeed one of its chief claims to literary distinction consists in the author's refusal to sentimentalize his earthy men and women. The artistic integrity Mr. Attaway evinced in his first book, Let Me Breathe Thunder, is equally evident in the faithful depiction of the primitive approach to life of a social group on whose laborious efforts the whole scheme of modern industrial life is based.