The Iron Heel

From Freepedia

The Iron Heel is a novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908.

It is a dystopian work about the rise of a proto-fascist tyranny in the United States. It is perhaps the novel in which Jack London's socialist views are most explicitly on display. It is a favorite of many London aficionados. It reminds many readers of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and is cited by Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden as having influenced that work.

Harry Bridges, influential labor leader in the mid-1900s, was "set afire" by Jack London's The Sea-Wolf and The Iron Heel.^[1]

Granville Hicks, reviewing Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, was reminded of The Iron Heel: "we are taken into the future and shown an America ruled by a tiny oligarchy, and here too there is a revolt that fails."

Chapter 7 of The Iron Heel is an almost verbatim copy of an ironic essay by Frank Harris; see Jack London: Accusations of plagiarism

Serious fans of science fiction also consider this novel to be a masterpiece. Fans of soft science fiction in particular see it as a forerunner of science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and 1970s which stressed future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes.

London's novella The Scarlet Plague, and some of his short stories, are placed in a dystopian future setting that closely resembles that of The Iron Heel, although there is no actual continuity of situations or characters.

Plot and Alternate History

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

The novel is based on the "Everhard Manuscript" written by Avis Everhard which she hid and which was subsequently found centuries later. In addition, this novel has an introduction and series of (often lengthy) footnotes written from the perspective of scholar Anthony Meredith. Meredith writes from around 2600 AD or 419 B.O.M. (the Brotherhood of Man). Jack London thus writes at two levels, often having Meredith condescendingly correcting the errors of Everhard yet, at the same time, exposing the often incomplete understanding of this distant future perspective.

The Manuscript itself covers the years 1912 through 1932 in which the Oligarchy (or "Iron Heel") arose in the United States. In Asia, Japan conquered East Asia and created its own empire, India gained independence, and Europe become socialist. Canada, Mexico, and Cuba formed their own Oligarchies and were aligned with the US. (The fates of South America, Africa, and the mid-East aren't given.)

In North America, the Oligarchy maintain power for three centuries until the Revolution succeeds and ushers in the Brotherhood of Man. During the years of the novel, the First Revolt is described and preparations for the Second Revolt are discussed. From the perspective of Everhard, the immanent Second Revolt is sure to succeed but, from the distant future perspective of Meredith, we readers realize that Everhard's hopes were to be crushed for centuries to come.

The Oligarchy are the largest monopoly trusts (or robber barons) who manage to squeeze out the middle class by bankrupting most small to mid-sized business as well as reducing all farmers to effective serfdom. This Oligarchy maintains power through a "labor caste" and the Mercenaries. Labor in essential industries like steel and rail are elevated and given decent wages, housing, and education. Indeed, the tragic turn in the novel (and Jack London's core warning to his contemporaries) is the treachery of these favored unions which break with the other unions and side with the Oligarchy. Further, a second, military caste is formed, the Mercenaries, who are, officially, the army of the US but, really, are in the employ of the Oligarchs.

The Manuscript is, really, Everhard's autobiography as she tells of: her privileged childhood as the daughter of an accomplished scientist; her marriage to the socialist revolutionary Ernest Everhard; the fall of the US republic; and her years in the underground resistance from the First Revolt through the years leading to the Second Revolt. By telling the story of Avis Everhard, the novel is essentially a adventurous tale heavily strewn with social commentary of an alternate future (from a 1908 perspective). However, the future perspective of the scholar Meredith deepens the tragic plight of Everhard and her revolutionary comrades.

Given that The Iron Heel is now a century old, this novel has a somewhat alternate history feel because, as with Orwell's 1984, the dating of these novels are now in our past. Jack London ambitiously predicted a breakdown of the US republic starting a few years past 1908 but various events have caused his predicted future to diverge from actual history. Most crucially, London predicted that labor solidarity would prevent a war that would include the US, Germany, and other nations in 1913; actual history records that nationalism overwhelmed the international solidarity of labor and socialists. Further, London predicted that the middle class would shrink as monopolistic trusts crushed labor and small to mid-sized businesses. Instead the US Progressive Era lead to a breakup of the trusts, notably the application of the Sherman Antitrust Act to Standard Oil in 1911; at the same time, reforms such as labor unions rights passed during the Progressive Era with further reforms during the New Deal of the 1930s. Further, economic prosperity lead to dramatic growth of the middle class in the 1920s and after World War II.

Through the writing of Everhard and, particularly, the distant future perspective of Meredith, London demonstrated his belief in the historical materialism of Marxism which predicts an inevitable succession from feudalism through capitalism and, finally, ending with socialism.

Taken as prediction, the events in The Iron Heel do not foreshadow any real historical events with any striking degree of accuracy. As with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, it has been a constant temptation to partisans to point out fancied resemblances between Jack London's fiction world, and governments or trends that they deprecate. For example, in 1924, the Conference for Progressive Political Action—a group connected with Robert LaFollette—refers to:

The success of the Conference for Progressive Political Action in attacking the grip of this big business oligarchy, whose rise to power was so clearly forseen by Jack London nearly twenty years ago in The Iron Heel...^[2]