Iron Heel (Wordsworth American Classics)

This work, set between 1908 and 1912, is a work of socialist literature. The "Iron Heel" is the fascistic and militaristic oligarchy, which, in collusion with subsidized unions, ruthlessly suppresses democracy and free institutions in America, driving voices of dissent and opposition underground.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Foreword

 

CHAPTER I - MY EAGLE

CHAPTER II - CHALLENGES

CHAPTER III - JACKSON’S ARM

CHAPTER IV - SLAVES OF THE MACHINE

CHAPTER V - THE PHILOMATHS

CHAPTER VI - ADUMBRATIONS

CHAPTER VII - THE BISHOP’S VISION

CHAPTER VIII - THE MACHINE BREAKERS

CHAPTER IX - THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM

CHAPTER X - THE VORTEX

CHAPTER XI - THE GREAT ADVENTURE

CHAPTER XII - THE BISHOP

CHAPTER XIII - THE GENERAL STRIKE

CHAPTER XIV - THE BEGINNING OF THE END

CHAPTER XV - LAST DAYS

CHAPTER XVI - THE END

CHAPTER XVII - THE SCARLET LIVERY

CHAPTER XVIII - IN THE SHADOW OF SONOMA

CHAPTER XIX - TRANSFORMATION

CHAPTER XX - A LOST OLIGARCH

CHAPTER XXI - THE ROARING ABYSMAL BEAST

CHAPTER XXII - THE CHICAGO COMMUNE

CHAPTER XXIII - THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS

CHAPTER XXIV - NIGHTMARE

CHAPTER XXV - THE TERRORISTS

 

Notes

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THE IRON HEEL

JACK LONDON (1876-1916) led a wild and colorful life. As a youth he left school at fourteen and worked in a cannery, as an oyster pirate, and as a member of the Fish Patrol in San Francisco Bay. He traveled throughout the country, joined the Gold Rush to the Klondike in 1897, sailed to the Caribbean, studied London’s East End slums, and reported on the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst papers. He read voraciously and always dreamt of being a writer. His short stories of the Yukon were published in magazines and in a collection, The Son of the Wolf, in 1900, bringing him fame. Thereafter he published an enormous number of stories and many novels, including The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Martin Eden.

 

JONATHAN AUERBACH is a professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, with degrees from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Johns Hopkins University. In addition to publishing articles and books on such American authors as Poe and London, he has also written extensively on film, particularly early cinema. He has been awarded Fulbright Fellowships to Portugal, Cyprus, and Tunisia, and has lectured on American studies in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Egypt, and Japan.

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First published in the United States of America by The Macmillan company 1907
This edition with an introduction by Jonathan Auerbach published in Penguin Books 2006

 

 

Introduction copyright © Jonathan Auerbach, 2006

All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
London, Jack, 1876-1916.
The iron heel / Jack London ; edited with an introduction by Jonathan Auerbach ;
notes by Jordan Schugar.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-0-143-03971-6

I. Auerbach, Jonathan, 1954- II. Title. III. Series.
PS3523.O46I7 2006
813’.52—dc22 2005058624

 

 

 

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Introduction

Googling the phrase “the iron heel” produces some surprising results. Although Jack London, in his novel, dramatizes the moment his hero Ernest Everhard coins the term to refer to the despised Oligarchy (see chapter 9), we discover it circulating in a number of prior late-nineteenth-century literary and political texts to signify various kinds of oppression. The Duke in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884) histrionically bemoans his fate “to be always ground into the mire under the iron heel,” while a Henry James character in The Bostonians (1885) invokes it more specifically to mean patriarchy: “They [women] had been trampled under the iron heel of man.” In an 1888 speech, President Grover Cleveland gives it a still sharper thrust, contrasting “trusts, combinations, and monopolies” with “the citizen [who] is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel.”

If we think London, James, and Cleveland make for strange bedfellows, the case grows even more curious when we search the Internet for more recent references. The phrase keeps popping up most remarkably in discussions linked to William Pierce, the author of the race war fantasy The Turner Diaries (1978). Beyond the penchant for bigots and anti-Semites like Pierce to label any big centralized government an “iron heel,” London’s own novel actually turns up as recommended reading on some of these white supremacist Web sites, including one entitled “Get Ready for the Rebirth of Western Culture!” that endorses this “classic story of revolutionary struggle” despite “the commies [who] tried to paint London as one of their own since he was opposed to Capitalism.”

One of those “commies” was Leon Trotsky, who, in a letter to London’s daughter penned some thirty years after the novel’s 1908 publication, praised the narrative’s remarkable “historical foresight” in predicting the rise of fascism, “its economy, . . . its governmental technique, its political psychology.” Trotsky’s comments were not simply referring to Germany in the 1930s but potentially to America as well, especially its dark “alliance between finance capital and labour aristocracy.” That Aryan nationalists and communists alike have championed this novel must give us pause; while it’s fair to say that the white supremacists might be guilty of some serious misreading, The Iron Heel’s depictions of state tyranny, as well as the underground armed resistance against that state, possess a strong appeal open to an unsettling range of interpretations. What follows is one such interpretation that may be more productively pondered after reading the novel than before.

Any attempt to understand the politics of The Iron Heel must start with its formal framework. Clearly a larger-than-life idealization of himself, Jack London’s romantic autobiographical hero Ernest Everhard remains at the heart of the novel, stoutly embodying the noble spirit and principles of the revolution. As early as 1896 London was known as “the Boy Socialist of Oakland,” and following his rapid rise to literary fame nearly a decade later (1905-06), he actively promoted the proletariat cause by delivering a series of talks across the country intended to educate Americans about the coming ascendancy of socialism. Many of the arguments and positions adopted by Ernest in the course of the novel closely resemble London’s own lectures and essays.

Yet the fictional figure of Everhard is bent or mediated in two important ways: by historical retrospect and by gender. Rather than offering a transparent account of his life, London relies on the literary convention of a found manuscript, beginning with a “Foreword” presumed to be written some seven centuries in the future by a historian named Anthony Meredith, who throughout the manuscript offers annotations, explanations, statistics, and excerpts from contemporaneous speeches and pamphlets intended to shed light on the narrative’s centuries-old events. Most noticeably, Meredith right off the bat seeks to undermine some of the flattering claims testifying to Everhard’s greatness, before we even have a chance to process these claims. As in the case of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), an important influence on London, the rhetorical effect here is to diminish and render unfamiliar the story’s own time frame (1912-32) from the vantage point of a future society already assumed to have attained a perfect socialist Brotherhood of Man (BOM). To this end, Meredith inserts all kinds of scholarly footnotes intended to explain to his BOM readers strange and ostensibly obsolete capitalist terms and practices such as “Wall Street,” “strike-breakers,” and “bankruptcy.” While at times this literary technique may strike us as tedious or crude, it does signal London’s effort to give the immediacy of revolutionary struggle a longer historical view.

Historian Meredith insists that the narrator lacks perspective, being “merged” with the narrated events. But he does value the “Everhard Manuscript” for being such a “personal document,” for so vividly conveying what he calls “the feel of those terrible times” (italics in original). Here is where gender carries great significance, for structures of feeling and intimate emotion entail for London the feminine. Hence his decision to cast the novel’s first-person narrator as Avis Everhard-Ernest’s adoring lover, wife, and corevolutionist. Out of Jack London’s enormous literary corpus, including dozens of novels and hundreds of stories, Avis Everhard represents his most sustained and complete effort to impersonate a female narrator, at once a fully imagined character as well as the tale’s recorder and commentator. Projecting a passionate woman’s voice to recount the very public history of class warfare in America, London seeks to blur any clear separation between the personal and the political.

Like any number of London’s heroines, Avis is a prototypical daddy’s girl, closely attached to her father, who is a University of California-Berkeley physics professor (her mother is conveniently dead). When Ernest suddenly enters her world in the first chapter (entitled “My Eagle”), he disrupts her bourgeois complacency but leaves the family’s patriarchal dynamics intact, functioning less as a rival to the father than a younger, more physically attractive extension of him. The first third of the novel thus works simultaneously as a love story and a conversion narrative, as Ernest, with his rough, bold mannerisms, talks and charms his way into her life at the same time he convinces her, her father, and family friend Bishop Morehouse to join the socialist movement. These early chapters are organized by a series of dialogues whereby Ernest debates and masters his capitalist interlocutors apparently by virtue of his rapier logic and command of fact. But his ability to sway others depends more directly on his magnificent sheer presence and his charisma, which in turn depend on his sexualized body that continually captures and compels the attention of Avis. He is, after all, Ernest Everhard—no Viagra needed.

If the fascist state in Germany and Italy in the 1930s relied on a cult of personality, London seemingly in anticipation shifts personality away from the Iron Heel—a remarkably shadowy entity, as we shall see—to give such appeal to the revolutionary side. The idea of a hero would seem to demand for London an equivalent degree of hero worship, with his female lead Avis serving as its primary source. In this regard the Ernest-Avis fictional relationship closely parallels the actual marriage between Jack and his wife, Charmian, who by 1905 had become the writer’s muse, amanuensis, and publicity agent all rolled into one. Early on, Avis’s gushing adoration sometimes threatens to engulf the novel’s politics, such as her over-the-top equation of Ernest’s manly vigor as “the apostle of truth” with the sufferings of Christ. On occasion London does attempt some damage control here, undercutting or at least tempering the woman’s adulation by way of Anthony Meredith’s “Foreword,” or by brief moments of irony in the narrative itself. Puzzled that others do not notice the same “radiance that seemed to envelop him as a mantle” that she sees, for example, Avis goes on to blame “the tears of joy and love that dimmed my vision.” But for the most part, London seems constitutionally unable or unwilling to ironize his first-person narrator in any systematic way, and as a result her maudlin account of idolization and conversion, mixing together the spiritual and the sexual, teeters on the brink of wretched exc...