The Iron Heel

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This article is about the novel. For the film, see The Iron Heel (film).
The Iron Heel
The Iron Heel.jpg
Cover of the first edition
AuthorJack London
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreDystopian novel[1]
Published1908 (Macmillan)
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages354

The Iron Heel is a science fiction novel[1] by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908.[2]

Significance[]

It is considered to be "the earliest of the modern dystopian" fiction,[3] it chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. In The Iron Heel, Jack London's socialist views are explicitly on display. A forerunner of soft science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and 70s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes.[citation needed] The book is unusual among London's writings (and in the literature of the time in general) in being a first-person narrative of a woman protagonist written by a man. Much of the narrative is set in the San Francisco Bay Area. Other events take place in Sonoma County.

The main premise of the book is the rise of a Socialist mass movement in the US - strong enough to have a real chance of winning national elections, getting to power and implementing a radical Socialist program. Conservatives feel alarmed and threatened by this prospect, to the point of their seizing power and establishing a brutal dictatorship in order to avert it. In fact, such a movement never arose in the United States, where Socialist parties and movements would remain marginal throughout the Twentieth Century. However, such mass Left Wing movements would arise in Italy in the early 1920s, in Germany in the early 1930s and in Spain in the late 1930s - leading Conservatives in these countries to support, respectively, Mussolini, Hitler and Franco, out of motives similar to those of Jack London's "Oligarchs". The international developments predicted by London were in fact a mirror image of what would happen in actual history. London foresaw the Oligarchic tyranny arising in the English-speaking USA and Britain, while Germany and Austria would for a time hold out against it before finally succumbing; in practice, it would be Nazi Germany which spearheaded Fascism in its most virulent form, while the British and Americans stood firmly against it.

Summary[]

The novel is told via the framing device of a manuscript found centuries after the action takes place and footnotes by a scholar, Anthony Meredith, circa 2600 AD or 419 B.O.M. (the Brotherhood of Man). Jack London writes at two levels, sporadically having Meredith correcting the errors of Avis Everhard through his own future prism, while at the same time, exposing the often incomplete understanding of this distant future perspective. Meredith's introduction also reveals that the protagonist's efforts will fail, giving the work an air of foreordained tragedy.

The story proper begins with Avis Everhard, a daughter of a renowned physicist John Cunningham, and future wife of socialist Ernest Everhard. At first, Avis Everhard does not agree with Ernest in that the whole contemporary social system is based on exploitation of labour. She proceeds to investigate the conditions the workers live in and those terrible conditions make her change her mind and accept Ernest's worldview. Similarly, Bishop Morehouse does not initially believe in the horrors described by Ernest but then becomes convinced in their truth and is confined to a madhouse because of his new views.

The story covers the years 1912 through 1932 in which the Oligarchy (or "Iron Heel") arises in the United States. Japan conquers East Asia and creates its own empire, India gains independence, and Europe became socialist. Canada, Mexico, and Cuba form their own Oligarchies and are aligned with the U.S. (London remains silent as to events transpiring in the rest of the world.)

In North America, the Oligarchy maintains 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 imminent Second Revolt is sure to succeed. Given Meredith's frame story, the reader knows that Ernest Everhard's hopes will go unfulfilled until centuries after his death.

The Oligarchy is the largest monopoly of 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. Laborers 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. The Mercenaries are officially the army of the US but are in fact in the employ of the Oligarchs.

Asgard is the name of a fictional wonder-city, a city constructed by the Oligarchy to be admired and appreciated as well as lived in. Thousands of proletarians live in terrible poverty there, and are used whenever a public work needs to be completed, such as the building of a levee or a canal.

Analysis[]

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, though London placed quite accurately the time when international tensions will reach their peak (1913 in The Iron Heel, 1914 in actual history), he (like many others at the time) predicted that when this moment came, labor solidarity would prevent a war that would include the US, Germany and other nations.

Further, London assumed that the Socialist Party would become a mass party in the United States, strong enough to have a realistic chance of winning national elections and gaining power, while remaining a revolutionary party still committed to the dismantling of capitalism. The whole book is based on Marx's view that capitalism is inherently unsustainable. This would precipitate a brutal counter-reaction, with capitalists preserving their power by discarding democracy and instituting a brutal repressive regime. Although this exact scenario never came to pass in the US, where the Socialist Party remained small and marginal, events closely followed London's script elsewhere; for example, in Chile in 1973, where the government of socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. This prompted later publishers of London's book to use a cover illustration depicting a poster of Allende being ground beneath the heel of a boot.

The idea of a strong and militant mass Socialist Party emerging in the US was linked by London with his prediction that the middle class would shrink as monopolistic trusts crushed labor and small- to mid-sized businesses. Instead the US Progressive Era led 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 were passed during the Progressive Era, with further reforms during the New Deal of the 1930s. Further, economic prosperity led 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, which Marxists such as Friedrich Engels, Georgi Plekhanov or Vladimir Lenin have interpreted as predicting an inevitable succession from feudalism through capitalism and then socialism, ending in a period without a state (also known as full communism), based on Marx's maxim of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Publication history and reception[]

The Iron Heel was published in 1908 by George Platt Brett Sr., who suggested only the deletion of a footnote which he deemed libelous before publication. It sold 50,000 copies in hardcover but generally did not earn the praise of critics. A reviewer in The Outlook concluded that "as a work of fiction it has little to commend it, and as a socialist tract it is distinctly unconvincing".[2]

Influences and effects[]

The Iron Heel is cited by George Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden as having influenced Orwell's most famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.[4] Orwell himself described London as having made "a very remarkable prophecy of the rise of Fascism", in the book and believed that London's understanding of the primitive had made him a better prophet "than many better-informed and more logical thinkers."[5] Specifically, Orwell's protagonist Winston Smith, like London's Avis Everhard, keeps a diary where he writes down his rebellious thoughts and experiences. However, while Everhard's diary remained hidden during the centuries of tyranny to be discovered and published later, Smith's diary falls into the hands of the book's harsh Thought Police, whose interrogator tells Smith not to expect posterity to vindicate him: "Posterity will never hear of you, we will vaporize you".

Harry Bridges, influential labor leader in the mid-1900s, was "set afire" by Jack London's The Sea-Wolf and The Iron Heel.[6]

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."[7]

Chapter 7 of The Iron Heel is an almost verbatim copy of an ironic essay by Frank Harris (see Jack London § Plagiarism accusations).

London's novella The Scarlet Plague (1912), 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.

Frederic Tuten's debut novel The Adventures of Mao on the Long March uses extensive quotes from The Iron Heel, placing them alongside details of Chinese history from 1912 to Mao's rise to power.

Adaptations[]

The novel has been adapted into two Russian films: The Iron Heel (1919) and The Iron Heel of Oligarchy (1999). The first was produced in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, the second - when real-life Oligarchs came to dominate the economy of post-Soviet Russia.

A stage adaptation by Edward Einhorn was produced in 2016 in New York. According to The New York Times, "it serves up food for thought with an appealing heart-on-sleeve warmth".[8] The adaptation was turned into a three-part audio drama podcast in 2021. [9]

See also[]

  • Business Plot - an alleged 1933 political conspiracy by businessmen to overthrow the United States government in reaction to economic reforms.

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b Stableford, Brian (1993). "Dystopias". In John Clute; Peter Nicholls (eds.). The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction (2nd ed.). London: Orbit. pp. 360–362. ISBN 1-85723-124-4.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b Kershaw, Alex. Jack London: A Life. London: HarperCollins, 1997: 164. ISBN 0-00-255585-9
  3. ^ Fromm, Erich: 1984 (Afterword), page 316. New American Library (a division of Penguin Group), 1977.
  4. ^ Orwell: the Authorized Biography by Michael Shelden, HarperCollins ISBN 978-0-06-092161-3
  5. ^ BBC broadcast March 5, 1943,Jack London:Landmarks in American Literature,5, reprinted in, Two Wasted Years, Secker & Warburg, 2001, p.5,7.
  6. ^ "Harry Bridges", by Clancy Sigal; The New York Times, January 7, 1973, p. 388
  7. ^ Hicks, Granville (August 17, 1952). "Player Piano". New York Times. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
  8. ^ Vincentelli, Elisabeth (August 27, 2016). "Review: 'The Iron Heel' Reworks a Jack London Dystopia" – via NYTimes.com.
  9. ^ "Audio Drama THE IRON HEEL to be Released in May". April 23, 2021 – via broadwayworld.com.

Sources[]

  • Francis Shor: Power, Gender, and Ideological Discourse in 'The Iron Heel' . In: Leonard Cassuto, Jeanne Campbell Reesman: Rereading Jack London. Stanford University Press 1998, ISBN 0-8047-3516-6, pp. 75–91 (online copy, p. 75, at Google Books)
  • Tony Barley: Prediction, Programme and Fantasy in Jack London's 'The Iron Heel' . In David Seed: Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors. Syracuse University Press 1995, ISBN 0-8156-2632-0, pp. 153–171 (online copy, p. 153, at Google Books)
  • John Whalen-Bridge: Political Fiction and the American Self. University of Illinois Press 1998, ISBN 0-252-06688-X, pp. 73–100 (online copy, p. 73, at Google Books)

External links[]

Digital editions
Criticism
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