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The Iron Heel
The Iron Heel
The Iron Heel
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The Iron Heel

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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The Iron Heel is an essential work in the canon of Socialist literature. It caused great controversy on its first publication in 1908 and was banned in several parts of America.


Set between 1912 and 1918, the 'Iron Heel' is the fascistic and militaristic oligarchy which, in collusion with subsidised unions, ruthlessly suppresses democracy and free institutions in America, thus driving voices of dissent and opposition underground, from where this powerful story is presented as the manuscript of the Socialist leaders, Avis and Ernest Everhard.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 27, 2014
ISBN9781848705920
Author

Jack London

Jack London (1876-1916) was an American novelist and journalist. Born in San Francisco to Florence Wellman, a spiritualist, and William Chaney, an astrologer, London was raised by his mother and her husband, John London, in Oakland. An intelligent boy, Jack went on to study at the University of California, Berkeley before leaving school to join the Klondike Gold Rush. His experiences in the Klondike—hard labor, life in a hostile environment, and bouts of scurvy—both shaped his sociopolitical outlook and served as powerful material for such works as “To Build a Fire” (1902), The Call of the Wild (1903), and White Fang (1906). When he returned to Oakland, London embarked on a career as a professional writer, finding success with novels and short fiction. In 1904, London worked as a war correspondent covering the Russo-Japanese War and was arrested several times by Japanese authorities. Upon returning to California, he joined the famous Bohemian Club, befriending such members as Ambrose Bierce and John Muir. London married Charmian Kittredge in 1905, the same year he purchased the thousand-acre Beauty Ranch in Sonoma County, California. London, who suffered from numerous illnesses throughout his life, died on his ranch at the age of 40. A lifelong advocate for socialism and animal rights, London is recognized as a pioneer of science fiction and an important figure in twentieth century American literature.

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Rating: 3.238095238095238 out of 5 stars
3/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Written in 1908, it is considered to be one of the first dystopian novels. It also is written as a first person narrative from a woman’s POV in manuscripts found later, much later, so it is looking back in history. The novel has many flaws and it is also full of socialist view points but it is also quite amazing how forward looking Jack London was in some aspect. While this is considered ‘soft’ science fiction, it is a political statement. You know from there very beginning sentences that things are not going to go well for the revoluntionaries. Jack London believed that society was evolving in much the way as nature was said to evolve. The book probably does have historical importance for it’s influence on other science fiction and dystopian novels that would follow.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was assigned this novel for an American Fiction course and was not immediately impressed. It is slow to start, but is written as diary entries and once the action begins, it is hard to put down. The scenes of the revolution particularly in the end are descriptive and detailed and provide a clear mental image. The ending was abrupt but fitting for the story. While not something I would necessarily pick for myself, in the end I did enjoy reading it. If I had not known any better, I would have thought it to be a piece of non-fiction prose due to the realistic quality. London's dystopia novel could easily been written today because the underlying messages and themes are just as relatable in today's society as they were then.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The first part of the book has some of the preachiest speechifying one could ever hope to encounter in a dystopian scifi novel. If you enjoy dialectic, do not skip. Once that's all out of the way, the pace picks up appreciably. Prescient in the way an oligarchy would come to control the mass media, which we appear to have arrived at presently. One thing that struck me about this book was how much London, a socialist, writing about people working towards a socialist utopia of equality, still wrote within the class, race, and gender norms of the day.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An unusual novel, largely written as a journal/story of a rebel in the 20th century movement against the Iron Heel dystopian society. Used as a historical document hundreds of years in the future, Avis Everhard describes how the Iron Heel took over the US, with the oligarchs enslaving more and more of the population, moving them at will to do work, and keeping them in ghettos. Everhard describes what happened to people--her father, her husband, a Catholic Bishop friend--who spoke out against the beginnings of the oligarchs as they crushed certain unions and gave huge favors to others to gain their support.Because this was written over 100 years ago, certain aspects are very out of date, particularly anything having to do with technology. But certain aspects seem very up to date, because this sounds like a government Donald Trump would design. We already live in an oligarchy, but people still deny it. Just as they did in this book. The writing is somewhat awkward, though this is my first London. Maybe this is just how he wrote?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very enjoyable and brief read taken from a fictional manuscript describing the life of a revolutionary during the rise of the oligarchy in America.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I think the book would have benefited from some editing and rearranging of the text to make it more readable.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fascinating, and incredibly relevant today. London had seen poverty, the excesses of extreme capitalism, and a widening ‘wealth gap’ in the America of his day, and like many, advocated socialism as a more humane and fair system. Here he writes a cautionary tale about what he believed the conflict inherent to capitalism between owners and workers would inevitably lead to – civil war, or revolution – and comes across even as advocating it. He does this by presenting a journal from one of the wife of one of the (fictional) early Socialist leaders, uncovered by historians in the future, after man had endured hundreds of years under the “Iron Heel” of an Oligarchy, and then were hundreds of years into a more enlightened “Brotherhood of Man”. I don’t buy all of London’s views, and he obviously didn’t have the benefit of seeing just how disastrously communism would play out in the 20th century, but found his descriptions of the power dynamic between owners and workers, the rich and poor – and all of the implications of that – to be highly compelling. There are so many things to chew on here, as the book includes:- Criticism of organized religion’s role in attempting to preserve the status quo, vs. preaching the real message of Christ … among other things, quoting several 19th century Southern church leaders justifying slavery.- Political corruption in the form of lobbyists in Congress eating away at democracy and turning it into a plutocracy, despite voting and what people thought was rule of the people. He also points out decisions like Lochner v. New York (1905), which held that the New York law prohibiting work days longer than 10 hours and work weeks with more than 60 hours was unconstitutional – a sign that wealthy, conservative interests were at play, and which would continue on into the progressive era (something we may see repeating itself in the future).- Echoes of Tolstoy’s idealistic suggestion to ending war – by the common man simply refusing to participate.- The wealthy saying criticisms against them amounted to “class hatred” just as we see today on Fox News, and ironically without the self-reflection of what a system that accelerates the wealth gap amounts to. They also believe they are the saviors of society, when the protagonist finds them not only selfish, but surprised by their “absence of intellectual life.”- London quotes statistics from 1900 as giving this breakdown of Americans: the Plutocratic (in this context, wealthy) class (1%), Middle Class (29%), and Proletarian Class (70%). It’s just fascinating to me to compare this to today, where we have increasing light shed on “the 1%”, which as of 2017 owned 40% of the nation’s wealth, and the bottom 90% owned a shockingly low 20%. In London’s vision, he sees the middle class being squeezed out of existence – and it’s this erosion that we see today.- Criticism of the small businessmen who were angry about being run out of business by big businessmen, who could use economies of scale to better compete – saying that they had had no problem in successively driving others out of business, were motivated by the same principles, and were swimming upstream to think a system that produced lower costs could be undone. I thought this was fantastic. While I cringe over the big businesses today (e.g. Amazon), London’s comments through his character are insightful. His solution is not to limit the big business (“the machine”, as he calls it), but to have workers own it (or the government), spreading the wealth. He also believed in “excessive income taxes, graduated with ferocity, to destroy large accumulations.”- The lengths to which the rich will go to preserve their wealth - buying off labor leaders, breaking unions and undermining them at every turn, sending agents out to incite violence so that armed force can be brought in, and most ominously, simply charging illegality of election results and then using violence. If that doesn’t make the hairs stand up on the back of your head, I don’t know what will. The crisis that threatened American democracy in London’s time was alleviated with social programs following the Depression, leading to rise of the middle class – but we face the problem again in 2019 after decades of the middle class being eroded, starting with the Reagan-era economic policies and tax changes. The novel shows us how full circle we’ve come, and while I don’t think London’s solution of revolution or socialism/communism is the answer, I couldn’t help but feel while reading his book that we’re standing on the same precipice over an abyss, that selfish behavior leads to history inevitably repeating itself, and that grave outcomes are certainly possible – either in the form of violence and a civil war, or a plutocracy that continues to shed all pretenses of being a democracy. It’s chilling, chilling stuff, and fascinating to me how both systems can lead to autocratic power – via the Oligarchy as London describes it here (and which we see examples of), or via communist dictators who brutally enslave their people.As a novel, it doesn’t hold up as well as it should, particularly in the chapters after the revolution breaks out, because it’s predominantly London essentially narrating events of violence. It’s also got a socialist leader who is too perfect – strong in mind and body, courageous, and uncannily prescient, and in that way, it reminded me of Chernyshevsky’s idealistic man in ‘What Is to be Done?’ Artistically the book works well in its first half, but starts faltering in its second half. I did like the journal format, footnoted centuries later by a fictional historian, an effective technique which allowed London to make comments on events from the late 19th century as well as the future, all seen from a distance. One might consider reading this book in tandem with Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ because Rand presents a clearly different (and positive) view of industrialists – as leaders, thinkers, and creators, and instead criticized those that dragged them down via bureaucracy, or via 'levelizing' humanity (ala communism). Personally, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, that absolute communism as in 20th century Russia/China is awful, and absolute capitalism as in the 19th century industrial revolution in Europe/America (and what we’ve trended towards over the last few decades) is also awful. A happy medium is what’s needed.Quotes:On business, he provides this footnote for ‘Wall Street’:“Wall Street – so named from a street in ancient New York, where was situated the stock exchange, and where the irrational organization of society permitted underhanded manipulation of all the industries of the country.”On lawyers and the rich, from Theodore Roosevelt in a commencement speech to Harvard in 1905:“We all know that, as things actually are, many of the most influential and most highly renumerated members of the Bar in every center of wealth, make it their special task to work out bold and ingenious schemes by which their wealthy clients, individual or corporate, can evade the laws which were made to regulate, in the interests of the public, the uses of great wealth.”On plutocracy, from John C. Calhoun:“A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.”And this one, which is stunning, which London says is Abraham Lincoln just before his assassination, but was actually written by John Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary a couple of decades after his death (still, wow!):“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country… Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudice of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”On the rich, from John Stuart Mill’s ‘On Liberty’:“Whenever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its class feelings of superiority.”On the wealth gap, this from Lord Avebury, and Englishman in the House of Lords, in 1906:“The unrest in Europe, the spread of socialism, and the ominous rise of Anarchism, are warmings to the governments and the ruling classes that the conditions of the working classes in Europe is becoming intolerable, and that if a revolution is to be avoided some steps must be taken to increase wages, reduce the hours of labor, and lower the prices of the necessities of life.”
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Well, if I wasn't a socialist before....

    My first Bookslut 100 read of the year. Not so much I was expecting, based on both my prior exposure to Jack London and the description of this as a dystopian sf novel. It took me forever to read as only a few pages would be enough for me to get a righteous rage going, and I'd have to put the book down and walk away for a bit. Not, you know, Octavia Butler rage inducing, but the fact that it would occur to me to make such a comparison at all is a little surprising. Like Butler, where it succeeded is where it felt familiar/possible/looming right around the next corner. Where it failed were the sudden zip-forwards just when we'd transitioned from backstory/motivation to action. Not constant, but there were a few places where I thought, "Wait, we're skipping over this part of the story, why?"

    Overall I would recommend this to those interested in under-appreciated works of the dystopian sf canon. Readers not ready to put this book in its historical context may be impatient with it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Not my favorite Jack London book, but it wasn't terrible.

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Though praised by the likes of George Orwell, The Iron Heel is decidedly... socialism by the numbers. Perhaps the story explained standard socialist polemics to a contemporary audience in an appealing narrative and in that, gains its value. Since I have a high regard for Orwell, this novel was disappointing.The majority of the book is composed of speeches by the book's hero, Ernest Everhard, against various factions as narrated by his wife. These speeches are normally straw man arguments, wherein the author puts specious arguments in the mouths of the opponents and then shoots them down.One particular episode that stands out is the accusation that theologians are logical relativists. I find it extraordinarily ironic that a materialist, atheist hero is defending absolutism and accusing theistic theologians of standing on relativistic grounds.While disparaging liberal democracy, the story does not, in any way, describe the future socialist government or society. Various hints can be discerned in the footnotes by the imaginary future editor, but nothing concrete. Like many socialists of his day, he knew what he didn't like, but the future was empty platitudes.Unlike Orwell, London had no original thought on the philosophy of socialism, at least in this book, instead restating contemporary socialist dogma. Perhaps his greatest contribution was predicting the shape of impending totalitarian governments (not just the fascists) with their spy games, double agents, agent provocateurs, underground opposition, ubiquitous informers, oppressive atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, summary executions, sham trials, disappearances, and so on. Although he predicted the Iron Heel would rise from the plutocracy, instead it came from the students, the lower bourgeois and the working classes.The book's greatest flaw is the use of the hero's wife, Avis Everhard, to tell the tale. Jack London could not write women. Just as the Sea Wolf's romantic dialogues were incredibly annoying, Avis' unending maudlin fawning quickly gets old. Unfortunately, the whole story is told from her point of view. In the pseudo-Foreword, London himself probably recognized his fault by saying "forgive Avis Everhard for the heroic lines upon which she modeled her husband" and that he was "not so exceptional as his wife thought him to be."
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    The Iron Heel calls itself a novel, but it really isn’t. Basically, it’s a sad excuse for a novelist to expouse his political beliefs on a bully pulpit and call it a novel. There’s no real plot in the story. What there was, is page after page of London spouting his beliefs on socialism. It’s almost as if he had written these long essays on the virtues of socialism and after the fact, decided to make it into a novel. Even if I agreed with his position, which I don’t, it’s completely inappropriate to call this a novel. If I wanted to read about socialism, I would get a non-fiction book on the subject. There is nothing remotely redeemable about this novel, if you want to call it that. I would highly recommend avoiding this, even if you are a practicing socialist.Carl Alves – author of Reconquest: Mother Earth
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Totally over the top, turn of the last century Socialist propaganda, but I was totally hooked. Fascinating and thought provoking. I thought the way the footnotes were worked in was kind of clever.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Dystopian, or very dated alternate history, which drowned me in Marxism and the evils of capitalism as viewed through the lens of the very early 20th century. My perspective, a century later, shows many of these ills have been legislatively remedied. Not much of a story or plot, no real character growth; mostly essay or lecture on socialism, topped off with stomping feet, neo-terrorism and the beginnings of a non-nuclear Cold War.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Out of the decay of self-seeking capitalism, it was held, would arise that flower of the ages, the Brotherhood of Man. Instead of which, appalling alike to us who look back and to those that lived at the time, capitalism, rotten-ripe, sent forth that monstrous offshoot, the Oligarchy.I chose to open with this quote not only because it encapsulates the basic premise of The Iron Heel, but also because I think it gives the reader a good glimpse of Jack London’s writing style. I just love the phrase “rotten-ripe.” It conjures up a picture that no other pair of words might have. The use of alliteration for expressive effects always scores high with me (and London seems to love alliteration almost as much as I do—geeky, I know).This is the second of London’s novels that I’ve read, and as with The Call of the Wild, I found myself disagreeing with much of his philosophy, and at the same time enjoying his craft. I was particularly fascinated by the intertexuality—or, to be more accurate, the intratextuality—of The Iron Heel. The main narrative is a document penned by Avis Everhard, the wife of a prominent revolutionary from the socialist uprising of London’s imagined 20th century; it has been discovered, hundreds of years later, by a scholar who provides a frame narrative in the form of an introduction and footnotes. It is suggested that we take both narrators’ perspectives with a grain of salt—Avis is too emotionally bound up with the revolution, while the scholar is a bit snooty in his utopian enlightenment—and London has a lot of fun with the textual interplay. The fact that some of the footnotes are accurate late 19th and early 20th century anecdotes, and others are completely fictional, only makes sorting through the material more fun.One of the results of this layering of narration makes the book unique as a piece of dystopian literature. It is simply this: we know there will be a happy ending. It will not come for a long time—centuries, in fact, all of them tragic and bloody—but the mere presence of an unbridled voice from the future proves that tyranny will end. And it seems clear that this future society is meant to be viewed as idyllic, even though certain aspects of our culture have disappeared over time, including the majority of H. G. Wells’s writings and the recipe for tamale. I couldn’t care less about Wells, but no tamales? Really? So much for Utopia.One could complain about London’s characters, who often take a back seat to the larger conflict between the socialists and the Oligarchy (or Iron Heel). The most interesting to me were minor figures: Avis’s father, a scientist in all situations; Bishop Morehouse, a saint fighting for principles that few care about; Anna Roylston, a beautiful killer who makes the difficult decision to remain childless. Erenest Everhard, the presumed hero of the piece, is surrounded by such a halo of glory that is difficult to relate to him at all. Avis, the narrator, regularly subsumes herself in order to sketch his portrait, which is a pity, as she had the potential to become a much more interesting figure. The descriptions of their relationship frequently sent me into fits of laughter, although I admit that they disturbed me a bit as well. Take this one: I lay long awake, listening in memory to the sound of his voice. I grew frightened at my thoughts. He was so unlike the men of my own class, so alien and so strong. His masterfulness delighted and terrified me, for my fancies roved until I found myself considering him as a lover, as a husband. I had always heard that the strength of men was an irresistible attraction to women; but he was too strong. ‘No, no!' I cried out. ‘It is impossible, absurd!’“His masterfulness” indeed! One could pass this off as simple datedness, but judging from the little I know of London’s life, I’d say it was indicative of a deep-seated misogyny.Again, my liking for the book is not based on any ideological similarities between London and myself. I am not in any sense a socialist. But I find his exploration of these issues fascinating, and his dialogical rhetoric surprisingly effective. The book does drag in places, but there are some powerful scenarios, such as Mr. Wickson’s revelation regarding the Iron Heel’s intentions, and certainly the Chicago Commune. Overall, I recommend the book.Suggested audio pairing: Muse’s Absolution (also apocalyptic, anti-establishment, and—in places—a bit mushy).
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Interesting futuristic accounting of America that is overtaken by the working class. It tells a narrative account of how this takes place through the voice of the hero's wife. London shows a great deal of foreknoledge of what actually happens with the spread of corporatism in America and the world. Nice quick read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was pretty painful to read, although it does feature some surprisingly reasonable arguments for socialism from the perspective of the early 20th century. Other reviewers have mentioned that The Iron Heel is like a collectivist Atlas Shrugged, which couldn't be more accurate. Reading it, you can't help but see Ernest Everhard as an inverted John Galt. Atlas Shrugged and The Iron Heel even have the same literary deficiencies: they are both melodramatic, feature horrible dialogue, and totally lack subtlety. However, I gave Atlas Shrugged five stars and the Iron Heel only three. This is mainly because London didn't write an almost cinematic epic like Rand did. The Iron Heel isn't long enough to portray the downfall of America in a convincing way, and it's significantly less entertaining than Rand's work. Also, while we're comparing Everhard to Galt, in a similar comparison between Avis and Dagny, London's heroine doesn't stand a chance. Avis' character almost feels like an afterthought, thrown in merely to tell Ernest's story. Sure, Dagny isn't exactly a realistic character either, but at least you're rooting for her as you read Atlas Shrugged.On the up side, London's device of scholarly footnotes sprinkled into Avis' "manuscript" was clever. The Iron Heel is worth reading if you love dystopia and/or if you are looking for an interesting foil to Atlas Shrugged. Otherwise, skip it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Friggin' meaty downfall of civilisation, and rise of the oligarchies. Sometimes reads like an inverse Atlas Shrugged, only in a good way. There is a hearty chunk of intrigue and mobs and Pinkertons and strike breakers. It's written in that style I'm kind of stupidly fond of, where there are footnotes (!) and general notation that indicates a scholar/historian came across the text some many years (in this case, three centuries) after it was written. Annotated fictive text. Kinda love it. I guess this guy mostly wrote nature stuff.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A conflicted work, revealing a conflicted author: To mark the 100th anniversary of the 1908 publication of Jack London's The Iron Heel, The Socialist Standard published an article attacking the book as "a decidedly anti-socialist work... considered a classic of its time... for all the wrong reasons". This naturally piqued my interest, and put the novel on my radar to pick up from the library.The Iron Heel is presented as an historical manuscript discovered some seven centuries in the future, a draft of memoirs written in the early 1930s by Avis Everhard, a socialist revolutionary. Avis, assisted by footnotes from a future historian, relates the process through which first America and then the world is taken over by a brutal plutocratic dictatorship -- dubbed the "Iron Heel" -- in the years after 1912. The victory of the Iron Heel comes about despite the best efforts of Avis and her husband, Ernest Everhard, a brilliant socialist philosopher-warrior-prophet-king, "a super-man, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described" (12), and, of course, the fictionalized persona of London himself. Right from the start, we are informed that the Iron Heel is to triumph and reign for centuries, all opposition forced underground into endless guerrilla warfare, which London modeled on the violent conflict between certain Russian revolutionists and the Tsar's Empire.The greatest strength of London's novel, emphasized by Jonathan Auerbach's introduction to the 2006 Penguin edition, is the way both the Iron Heel and the armed resistance opposing it mirror each other in their tactics, strategy, and even ideology. Both infiltrate each other's organizations, and then infiltrate each other's infiltrations; both judge and execute; both must kill or be killed; both know their cause is just and righteous, the source and protection of all that is good in the world; both view the masses/working class/common people as a primitive, backwards and barbaric force to be feared and manipulated against their enemies. The only character who does no harm is merely caught in the crossfire, anonymously gunned down in the streets of Chicago.Unfortunately, such positive aspects of the novel are largely overwhelmed by other features both irritating and troubling. On the purely irritating end, the future historian's footnotes are sometimes used to good effect, but often simply tack on quotes or citations that are too pedantic or artificial to fit in text itself. Forking these off into footnotes doesn't help. And speaking of artificiality, the political debates in the earlier chapters often read less like dialogue than like a simplistic Marxist catechism -- occasional question, long uninterrupted response.Much more disturbing is London's half romantic, half apocalyptic vision of ceaseless warfare between bands of Nietzschean supermen and the shadowy, oppressive state. Coupled with his (perhaps unconscious) racism and (very conscious) "social Darwinism", this helps account for the book's otherwise puzzling appeal to far-right "survivalists" and white nationalists. Indeed, although London's future historian comes from a peaceful, democratic socialist society, much of The Iron Heel is a thinly-veiled social-Darwinist attack on the Socialists of London's day. In the novel, the Socialists disregard Everhard's (London's) warnings about the coming struggle for survival. They are weak and pacifistic, relying on democracy, education, and mass organization to build the co-operative commonwealth, and so they fail. They are completely smashed by the Iron Heel, which persists for centuries before naturally falling apart under its own weight.The style of The Iron Heel as a whole struck me as much more like that of Ayn Rand than that of Karl Marx or any other socialist. The chief difference from Rand's works is that instead of caring only for themselves, London's super-men care (for reasons that are far from convincing) only for a working class that is almost completely invisible. Common people are helpless to liberate themselves, and all the Iron Heel has to do to retain power is buy off (or kill off) whatever super-men rear their heads amongst the "people of the abyss". No wonder the International Socialist Review of the time panned the book as "well calculated to repel many whose addition to our forces is sorely needed".Mussolini was far from the only ex-socialist whose views of struggle, strength, and survival led him to abandon democracy and buy into an Iron Heel of his own. Although Jack London died in 1916 at the age of 40, many see in his work strong suggestions that he was on a similar trajectory. In 1945, George Orwell mused that had London lived longer, "it is hard to be sure where his political allegiance would have lain... One can imagine him in the Communist Party, one can imagine him falling victim to the Nazi racial theory, and one can imagine him the quixotic champion of some Trotskyist or Anarchist sect." In the end, I found the actual story in The Iron Heel considerably less interesting than what the book reveals about its author.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What begins as a battle of the classes in America becomes a global war as a state oligarchy, known as “the Iron Heel,” moves to crush all opposition to its power. Prophetic and inspirational. An important book.

Book preview

The Iron Heel - Jack London

Trayler

Contents

Introduction

Further Reading

The Iron Heel

1. My Eagle

2. Challenges

3. Jackson’s Arm

4. Slaves of the Machine

5. The Philomaths

6. Adumbrations

7. The Bishop’s Vision

8. The Machine-Breakers

9. The Mathematics of a Dream

10. The Vortex

11. The Great Adventure

12. The Bishop

13. The General Strike

14. The Beginning of the End

15. Last Days

16. The End

17. The Scarlet Livery

18. In the Shadow of Sonoma

19. Transformation

20. A Lost Oligarch

21. The Roaring Abysmal Beast

22. The Chicago Commune

23. The People of the Abyss

24. Nightmare

25. The Terrorists

Introduction

Readers who think of Jack London primarily as a writer of nature stories will be surprised by the pages of his didactic fable and political fantasy, The Iron Heel. In this book, published in 1908 after White Fang (1906) and Before Adam (1907), London created perhaps his most revealing and most controversial novel. Literary critics as well as social and political historians remain in disagreement about the book which received praise from both Eugene V. Debs and Leon Trotsky, but which did not sell well upon publication. As the author himself wrote to Frank Harris, ‘The book-buying public would have nothing to do with it, and I got nothing but knocks from the socialists.’ To this day opinions range widely depending on the spirit in which the book is read. Put most bluntly, readers with a passion for popular socialism presented, as London says, as ‘a proletarian fable in the form of a Heroic romance’ find The Iron Heel both moving and prophetic; readers with a taste for literary masterworks of social and psychological realism find the book, as Labor and Reesman have recently written, ‘lifeless’. ‘The hero, haranguing his various audiences with his pretentious ideological pieties, is a relentless boor. The other characters are merely cardboard foils . . . ’

In The Iron Heel London used two devices to frame his terrifying fable in ways that create both the illusion of objective distance and an aura of historical truth. First, the story is narrated by a woman named Avis Everhard, a character who begins as an intelligent if conventional daughter of a physics professor at the State University of California at Berkeley and ends as a double-agent in the terrorist war between the capitalist oligarchy (the ‘Iron Heel’ of the title) and the socialist underground engaged in a world revolution. Introduced to the novel’s main character, Ernest Everhard, at a dinner party in her father’s house, Avis comes under the spell of the passionate, radical ideologue who argues fearlessly for his cause. It is she who records his revolutionary heroism, and it is through her eyes (at first sceptical, then loving, and eventually idolatrous) that we learn about her ‘Eagle’. Second, Avis’s narrative itself is presented as an historical text written between 1912 and 1932, then hidden away, and eventually edited by the invented historian Anthony Meredith more than seven centuries after the apocalyptic conclusion of her account. It is Meredith who supplies the footnotes to the novel, notes (some of them quite extensive) which provide London with a second level of commentary. It is in the notes that we find the facts which support and amplify the narrative, facts which range from an etymology of the word ‘proletariat’ to a sarcastic description of ‘corporation lawyers’.

As a result of these devices, readers have several foci of interest. For instance, the seduction and political conversion of Avis Cunningham by the man she describes as ‘a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described’, certainly prefigures a now familiar story in the American west. Convinced not only by Everhard’s irrefutable ideology but also by his passion, his sublime physicality, and his ‘great soul’, Avis is led from an initial sympathy for an abused worker through various stages of politicisation to her final identity as a fully engaged revolutionary agent driven to hiding under corpses as mercenaries of the oligarchy murder the masses. Or, consider the plot of political fantasy which London himself thought not so much a prophecy as a warning of what might happen without significant political reform. The Iron Heel recounts in some detail not only the outcome of unbridled capitalism but also the strategies by which the ruling class undermine labour, demolish democracy and precipitate a holocaust. While this fantasy may not reflect the political history of the twentieth century entirely, most readers will find an eerie accuracy in these pages and, perhaps, recognise scenes from the morning paper or the evening news.

And, finally, one must wonder at the figure of Everhard himself. In him is the mixture of strength, idealism, reason and compassion which has typified the romantic, socialist revolutionary discredited, these days, as simply a terrorist. How fearlessly London allows Avis to worship this man, this ‘natural aristocrat’, this ‘blond beast’ who descends from Thomas Jefferson and Friedrich Nietzsche to espouse the gospel of Karl Marx. Here we can sense a hope which was possible before the disclosures following World War II; here is a vision of armed struggle inevitable, justifiable and noble. Everhard’s speeches are full of such hope just as they are full of scorn for the modern church, media and academy which both serve and legitimate the gargantuan greed of the ruling class. ‘And so it was, instead of in paradise, that I found myself in the arid desert of commercialism. I found nothing but stupidity, except for business. I found none clean, noble, and alive, though I found many who were alive – with rottenness. What I did find was monstrous selfishness and heartlessness, and a gross, gluttonous, practised, and practical materialism.’ So Everhard tells ‘the Philomaths’ in Chapter 5 as he goads them to a snarling response: ‘We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labour, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words – Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.’

Most critics agree that, in the character of Everhard, Jack London, an ‘illegitimate child’ born as John Griffith Chaney in San Francisco in 1876, projected an image of himself. His daughter Joan has said: ‘Few of Jack London’s books, even those which were consciously auto-biographical, are so intensely personal,’ and certainly some readers will feel the intensity of that personal struggle at sea and in the goldfields of the Yukon Territory which gives credibility to Everhard’s faith in and admiration for rugged individuals fighting to survive collectively. When in 1916, during the last year of his life, London resigned from the Socialist Labor Party, he charged it with a ‘lack of fire and fight, and . . . [a] loss of emphasis on the class struggle’. What party, after all, could live up to the expectations of the man who imagined Ernest Everhard? For in his short career Jack London had become one of the most widely read and most highly paid authors of his time. As Alfred Kazin observed, ‘The greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived.’ And in Everhard, London distilled the intensity and desire of countless, individual, American revolutionaries who have recognised a kindred spirit in his dream. At a moment when the bombing in Oklahoma City has stirred memories of ‘Ruby Ridge’ and ‘Waco’ (not to mention other items in the catalogue of confrontations between dissident groups and the forces of established law and order in this century), The Iron Heel serves to remind us of the motives for persistent, political violence both ‘at home’ and ‘around the world’.

Dr Albert G. Glover

Piskor Professor of English

St Lawrence University

Further Reading

Joseph Blotner, The Modern American Political Novel, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1966

Max Lerner, ‘Introduction’ to The Iron Heel, Sagamore Press, New York, 1957

Earle Labor and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Jack London, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1994

Nathaniel Teich, ‘Marxist Dialectics in Content, Form, Point of View: Structures in Jack London’s The Iron Heel’ in Modern Fiction Studies, 22 (1976), pp. 85–99

Charles N. Watson Jr, The Novels of Jack London: A Reappraisal, University of Wisconsin Press, 1983

Susan Ward, ‘Ideology for the Masses: Jack London’s The Iron Heel’ in Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin (ed.), Critical Essays on Jack London, pp. 166–79, G. K. Hall, Boston, 1983

The Iron Heel

1. My Eagle

The soft summer wind stirs the redwoods, and Wild-Water ripples sweet cadences over its mossy stones. There are butterflies in the sunshine, and from everywhere arises the drowsy hum of bees. It is so quiet and peaceful, and I sit here, and ponder, and am restless. It is the quiet that makes me restless. It seems unreal. All the world is quiet, but it is the quiet before the storm. I strain my ears, and all my senses, for some betrayal of that impending storm. Oh, that it may not be premature! That it may not be premature!*

[* footnote: The Second Revolt was largely the work of Ernest Everhard, though he co-operated, of course, with the European leaders. The capture and secret execution of Everhard was the great event of the spring of AD 1932. Yet so thoroughly had he prepared for the revolt, that his fellow-conspirators were able, with little confusion or delay, to carry out his plans. It was after Everhard’s execution that his wife went to Wake Robin Lodge, a small bungalow in the Sonoma Hills of California.]

Small wonder that I am restless. I think, and think, and I cannot cease from thinking. I have been in the thick of life so long that I am oppressed by the peace and quiet, and I cannot forbear from dwelling upon that mad maelstrom of death and destruction so soon to burst forth. In my ears are the cries of the stricken; and I can see, as I have seen in the past,* all the marring and mangling of the sweet, beautiful flesh, and the souls torn with violence from proud bodies and hurled to God. Thus do we poor humans attain our ends, striving through carnage and destruction to bring lasting peace and happiness upon the earth.

[* footnote: Without doubt she here refers to the Chicago Commune.]

And then I am lonely. When I do not think of what is to come, I think of what has been and is no more – my Eagle, beating with tireless wings the void, soaring toward what was ever his sun, the flaming ideal of human freedom. I cannot sit idly by and wait the great event that is his making, though he is not here to see. He devoted all the years of his manhood to it, and for it he gave his life. It is his handiwork. He made it.*

[* footnote: With all respect to Avis Everhard, it must be pointed out that Everhard was but one of many able leaders who planned the Second Revolt. And we, today, looking back across the centuries, can safely say that even had he lived, the Second Revolt would not have been less calamitous in its outcome than it was.]

And so it is, in this anxious time of waiting, that I shall write of my husband. There is much light that I alone of all persons living can throw upon his character, and so noble a character cannot be blazoned forth too brightly. His was a great soul, and, when my love grows unselfish, my chiefest regret is that he is not here to witness tomorrow’s dawn. We cannot fail. He has built too stoutly and too surely for that. Woe to the Iron Heel! Soon shall it be thrust back from off prostrate humanity. When the word goes forth, the labour hosts of all the world shall rise. There has been nothing like it in the history of the world. The solidarity of labour is assured, and for the first time will there be an international revolution wide as the world is wide.*

[* footnote: The Second Revolt was truly international. It was a colossal plan – too colossal to be wrought by the genius of one man alone. Labour, in all the oligarchies of the world, was prepared to rise at the signal. Germany, Italy, France, and all Australasia were labour countries – socialist states. They were ready to lend aid to the revolution. Gallantly they did; and it was for this reason, when the Second Revolt was crushed, that they, too, were crushed by the united oligarchies of the world, their socialist governments being replaced by oligarchical governments.]

You see, I am full of what is impending. I have lived it day and night utterly and for so long that it is ever present in my mind. For that matter, I cannot think of my husband without thinking of it. He was the soul of it, and how can I possibly separate the two in thought?

As I have said, there is much light that I alone can throw upon his character. It is well known that he toiled hard for liberty and suffered sore. How hard he toiled and how greatly he suffered, I well know; for I have been with him during these twenty anxious years, and I know his patience, his untiring effort, his infinite devotion to the Cause for which, only two months gone, he laid down his life.

I shall try to write simply and to tell here how Ernest Everhard entered my life – how I first met him, how he grew until I became a part of him, and the tremendous changes he wrought in my life. In this way you may look at him through my eyes and learn him as I learned him – in all save the things too secret and sweet for me to tell.

It was in February 1912 that I first met him, when, as a guest of my father’s* at dinner, he came to our house in Berkeley. I cannot say that my very first impression of him was favourable. He was one of many at dinner, and in the drawing-room, where we gathered and waited for all to arrive, he made a rather incongruous appearance. It was ‘preacher’s night’, as my father privately called it, and Ernest was certainly out of place in the midst of the churchmen.

[* footnote: John Cunningham, Avis Everhard’s father, was a professor at the State University at Berkeley, California. His chosen field was physics, and in addition he did much original research and was greatly distinguished as a scientist. His chief contribution to science was his studies of the electron and his monumental work The Identification of Matter and Energy, wherein he established, beyond cavil and for all time, that the ultimate unit of matter and the ultimate unit of force were identical.

This idea had been earlier advanced, but not demonstrated, by Sir Oliver Lodge and other students in the new field of radioactivity.]

In the first place his clothes did not fit him. He wore a ready-made suit of dark cloth, that was ill adjusted to his body. In fact, no ready-made suit of clothes ever could fit his body. And on this night, as always, the cloth bulged with his muscles, while the coat between the shoulders, what with the heavy shoulder-development, was a maze of wrinkles. His neck was the neck of a prize-fighter,* thick and strong. So this was the social philosopher and ex-horseshoer my father had discovered, was my thought. And he certainly looked it, with those bulging muscles and that bull-throat. Immediately I classified him – a sort of prodigy, I thought, a Blind Tom** of the working class.

[* footnote: In that day it was the custom of men to compete for purses of money. They fought with their hands. When one was beaten into insensibility or killed, the survivor took the money.]

[** footnote: This obscure reference applies to a blind negro musician who took the world by storm in the latter half of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era.]

And then, when he shook hands with me! His handshake was firm and strong, but he looked at me boldly with his black eyes – too boldly, I thought. You see, I was a creature of environment, and at that time had strong class instincts. Such boldness on the part of a man of my own class would have been almost unforgivable. I know that I could not avoid dropping my eyes, and I was quite relieved when I passed him on and turned to greet Bishop Morehouse – a favourite of mine, a sweet and serious man of middle age, Christ-like in appearance and goodness, and a scholar as well.

But this boldness that I took to be presumption was a vital clue to the nature of Ernest Everhard. He was simple, direct, afraid of nothing, and he refused to waste time on conventional mannerisms. ‘You pleased me,’ he explained long afterward; ‘and why should I not fill my eyes with that which pleases me?’ I have said that he was afraid of nothing. He was a natural aristocrat – and this in spite of the fact that he was in the camp of the non-aristocrats. He was a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche* has described, and in addition he was aflame with democracy.

[* footnote: Friedrich Nietzsche, the mad philosopher of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, who caught wild glimpses of truth, but who, before he was done, reasoned himself around the great circle of human thought and off into madness.]

In the interest of meeting the other guests, and what of my unfavourable impression, I forgot all about the working-class philosopher, though once or twice at dinner I noticed him – especially the twinkle in his eye as he listened to the talk first of one minister and then of another. He has humour, I thought, and I almost forgave him his clothes. But the time went by, and the dinner went by, and he never opened his mouth to speak, while the ministers talked interminably about the working class and its relation to the Church, and what the Church had done and was doing for it. I noticed that my father was annoyed because Ernest did not talk. Once father took advantage of a lull and asked him to say something; but Ernest shrugged his shoulders and with an ‘I have nothing to say’ went on eating salted almonds.

But father was not to be denied. After a while he said:

‘We have with us a member of the working class. I am sure that he can present things from a new point of view that will be interesting and refreshing. I refer to Mr Everhard.’

The others betrayed a well-mannered interest, and urged Ernest for a statement of his views. Their attitude towards him was so broadly tolerant and kindly that it was really patronising. And I saw that Ernest noted it and was amused. He looked slowly about him, and I saw the glint of laughter in his eyes.

‘I am not versed in the courtesies of ecclesiastical controversy,’ he began, and then hesitated with modesty and indecision.

‘Go on,’ they urged, and Dr Hammerfield said: ‘We do not mind the truth that is in any man. If it is sincere,’ he amended.

‘Then you separate sincerity from truth?’ Ernest laughed quickly.

Dr Hammerfield gasped, and managed to answer, ‘The best of us may be mistaken, young man, the best of us.’

Ernest’s manner changed on the instant. He became another man.

‘All right, then,’ he answered; ‘and let me begin by saying that you are all mistaken. You know nothing, and worse than nothing, about the working class. Your sociology is as vicious and worthless as is your method of thinking.’

It was not so much what he said as how he said it. I roused at the first sound of his voice. It was as bold as his eyes. It was a clarion-call that thrilled me. And the whole table was aroused, shaken alive from monotony and drowsiness.

‘What is so dreadfully vicious and worthless in our method of thinking, young man?’ Dr Hammerfield demanded, and already there was something unpleasant in his voice and manner of utterance.

‘You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong – to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration.

‘Do you know what I was reminded of as I sat at table and listened to you talk and talk? You reminded me for all the world of the scholastics of the Middle Ages who gravely and learnedly debated the absorbing question of how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. Why, my dear sirs, you are as remote from the intellectual life of the twentieth century as an Indian medicine man making incantation in the primeval forest ten thousand years ago.’

As Ernest talked he seemed in a fine passion; his face glowed, his eyes snapped and flashed, and his chin and jaw were eloquent with aggressiveness. But it was only a way he had. It always aroused people. His smashing, sledgehammer manner of attack invariably made them forget themselves. And they were forgetting themselves now. Bishop Morehouse was leaning forward and listening intently. Exasperation and anger were flushing the face of Dr Hammerfield. And others were exasperated, too, and some were smiling in an amused and superior way. As for myself, I found it most enjoyable. I glanced at father, and I was afraid he was going to giggle at the effect of this human bombshell he had been guilty of launching amongst us.

‘Your terms are rather vague,’ Dr Hammerfield interrupted. ‘Just precisely what do you mean when you call us metaphysicians?’

‘I call you metaphysicians because you reason metaphysically,’ Ernest went on. ‘Your method of reasoning is the opposite to that of science. There is no validity to your conclusions. You can prove everything and nothing, and no two of you can agree upon anything. Each of you goes into his own consciousness to explain himself and the universe. As well may you lift yourselves by your own boot-straps as to explain consciousness by consciousness.’

‘I do not understand,’ Bishop Morehouse said. ‘It seems to me that all things of the mind are metaphysical. That most exact and convincing of all sciences, mathematics, is sheerly metaphysical. Each and every thought-process of the scientific reasoner is metaphysical. Surely you will agree with me?’

‘As you say, you do not understand,’ Ernest replied. ‘The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively from the facts of experience. The metaphysician reasons from theory to facts, the scientist reasons from facts to theory. The metaphysician explains the universe by himself, the scientist explains himself by the universe.’

‘Thank God we are not scientists,’ Dr Hammerfield murmured complacently.

‘What are you, then?’ Ernest demanded.

‘Philosophers.’

‘There you go,’ Ernest laughed. ‘You have left the real and solid earth and are up in the air with a word for a flying machine. Pray come down to earth and tell me precisely what you do mean by philosophy.’

‘Philosophy is – ’ (Dr Hammerfield paused and cleared his throat) ‘something that cannot be defined comprehensively except to such minds and temperaments as are philosophical. The narrow scientist with his nose in a test-tube cannot understand philosophy.’

Ernest ignored the thrust. It was always his way to turn the point back upon an opponent, and he did it now, with a beaming brotherliness of face and utterance.

‘Then you will undoubtedly understand the definition I shall now make of philosophy. But before I make it, I shall challenge you to point out error in it or to remain a silent metaphysician. Philosophy is merely the widest science of all. Its reasoning method is the same as that of any particular science and of all particular sciences. And by that same method of reasoning, the inductive method, philosophy fuses all particular sciences into one great science. As Spencer says, the data of any particular science are partially unified knowledge. Philosophy unifies the knowledge that is contributed by all the sciences. Philosophy is the science of science, the master science, if you please. How do you like my definition?’

‘Very creditable, very creditable,’ Dr Hammerfield muttered lamely.

But Ernest was merciless.

‘Remember,’ he warned, ‘my definition is fatal to metaphysics. If you do not now point out a flaw in my definition, you are disqualified later on from advancing metaphysical arguments. You must go through life seeking that flaw and remaining metaphysically silent until you have found it.’

Ernest waited. The silence was painful. Dr Hammerfield was pained. He was also puzzled. Ernest’s sledgehammer attack disconcerted him. He was not used to the simple and direct method of controversy. He looked appealingly around the table, but no one answered for him. I caught father grinning into his napkin.

‘There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysicians,’ Ernest said, when he had rendered Dr Hammerfield’s discomfiture complete. ‘Judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods? They have added to the gaiety of mankind, I grant; but what tangible good have they wrought for mankind? They philosophised, if you will pardon my misuse of the word, about the heart as the seat of the emotions, while the scientists were formulating the circulation of the blood. They declaimed about famine and pestilence as being scourges of God, while the scientists were building granaries and draining cities. They builded gods in their own shapes and out of their own desires, while the scientists were building roads and bridges. They were describing

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