The Iron Heel by Jack London

First published: 1907

Type of plot: Science fiction

Time of work: 1918 to 2832

Locale: The United States, principally San Francisco and Chicago

Principal Characters:

• Avis Everhard, the daughter of a university professor and wife of Ernest Everhard; a proselyte from capitalism to socialism, she is both narrator and actor in the political scene
• Ernest Everhard, a blacksmith turned intellectual revolutionary
• John Cunningham, Avis’s father, a professor of physics at a state university
• Bishop Morehouse, an Episcopal clergyman who neglects to practice the Christian values he preaches
• Anthony Meredith, a social historian who discovers Avis’s manuscript and edits it for publication
• Anna Roylston, the “Red Virgin,” a friend of Avis and the heroine of the battle in the Chicago commune

The Novel

The Iron Heel is supposedly taken from a fragmentary manuscript written in the early twentieth century by Avis Everhard, the militant socialist widow of the socialist leader Ernest Everhard, whose militancy results in his execution by an American fascistic organization called “the Iron Heel,” the militant arm of the great corporate monopolies. The monopolies suppress an uprising of socialist workers who have organized a Chicago commune and rule the United States until 2232, when socialist power eventually triumphs. Avis had hidden her manuscript away in 1932, and it is not found for seven hundred years, when it is discovered by historian Anthony Meredith. He edits the manuscript and supplies the political history of the United States up to his own time. When the story begins, poverty is rife in big cities in the East such as New York City and Boston, where thousands of people live either in cellars or in flimsy, overcrowded tenements. Unemployment is common, with millions of people out of work. Wages are exceedingly low, and woman and child labor are ruthlessly exploited. The “robber barons” of the age keep consolidating their holdings into “trusts,” or virtual monopolies. A small army of the rich exploits the large army of the poor.

When several socialists are elected to Congress, they are not allowed to take office. Fearful of a general strike, the Iron Heel of the oligarchy creates “favored unions”; explodes a bomb in the House of Representatives; employs “Black Hundreds” (counterrevolutionaries such as those employed by the czarist government in the Russian Revolution) to wreck the socialist presses; and hires mercenary soldiers whose mission is to take over the central government.

Meanwhile, Avis has infiltrated the Iron Heel’s intelligence agency as a “mole,” or double agent. She is then caught in the bloody massacre of “the people of the abyss,” the socialist mob of the Chicago commune, and she nearly loses her life. Eventually the fascists triumph and take over the government of the United States. They rule for three hundred years, or until the year 2237.

The memoir Avis began writing in 1932 marks a time when the American socialists have started a counterrevolution against the fascist oligarchy. However, fearing for her own life she hides her memoir, and it is not recovered for seven hundred years. Meanwhile, the American socialists have defeated the fascists and have established the utopia of the Brotherhood of Man. The socialist historian Anthony Meredith has discovered Avis’s memoir, the “Everhard manuscript,” and has edited, annotated, and published it in the year 2632.

Among the revelations of Meredith is that just before World War I, the American oligarchy wanted war with Germany for “a dozen reasons,” mainly because such a war “would reshuffle the international cards” and no doubt put the Americans in full possession of the world market. Hence, on December 4, 1912, a German fleet attacked the American navy at Honolulu, sinking three American cruisers and a cutter and bombarding the city. The next day, both Germany and the United States declare war on each other. However, in the meantime, cables are passing back and forth across the Atlantic between the German and the American socialists, both bodies finally favoring a general strike against both governments to stop the war. In the end, the strike aborted the war altogether.

The Characters

The character Ernest Everhard is undoubtedly London’s own alter ego, who writes and lectures to well-to-do bourgeois groups who support industrial capitalism. Ernest takes pleasure in taunting his audience. When he tells a group that the proletariat will one day in the future triumph over them, one indigent bourgeois rises to his feet and snarls at Ernest: “We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces.”

Ernest’s wife, whom he has converted to socialism, is the daughter of a university professor and a distinguished scientist. Although politically naïve, Avis is the narrator of the fragment that is the “Everhard manuscript”; Ernest has been killed, executed by the fascist organization known as the Iron Heel. He is conceived of as a Nietzschean “blond beast” and in terms of Social Darwinism; that is, he is a working-class prodigy who is also a “natural aristocrat.” He sees his mission in life as to spread the gospel of socialism and to convince those attached to capitalism of the desirability of a socialist society. (Despite London’s desire to give the character of Ernest Everhard a Nietzschean coloring, this blacksmith proletarian intellectual seems likely modeled on or suggested by the New England world-peace evangelist Elihu Burritt (1810-1879), known in his day as “the Learned Blacksmith.”

Critical Context

London wrote The Iron Heel based on his own experiences and his wide reading. His formal education was minimal; nevertheless, he read such serious authors as Ernest Haeckel, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Frederick Nietzsche, and Karl Marx, from whose works he derived his own philosophy. When he wished to insert in The Iron Heel historical incidents such as the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1905, he researched them. Finally, he took certain ideas from contemporary popular fiction, notably Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1891), and H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899).

The Iron Heel ought not to be judged in terms of realism, because it shapes itself into a heroic romance endowed with the contradiction of a Marxist dialectic, an apocalyptic vision of Christianity, and the pains of martyrdom of Social Darwinism.

Critic Charles N. Watson, Jr., rightly judges The Iron Heel to be a “minor revolutionary classic” instead of a major one. It is, Watson argues, a novel “that London seems to have written too much out of his heart, too little out of his head.” Watson keenly points out one of the novel’s most serious flaws: that of the double characterization of Avis. Watson says boldly that London asks his reader “to accept the existence of two Avises simultaneously—the fluttering young woman of the love adventure and the hardened revolutionary of the political drama.” In the long view nevertheless, The Iron Heel offers a reader an imaginative prediction of some of the most important events of the century. Indeed, that expert on the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Leon Trotsky, rendered The Iron Heel high praise as a work of imagination.

Bibliography

Beauchamp, Gorman. “Jack London’s Utopian Dystopia and Dystopian Utopia.” In America as Utopia, edited by Kenneth Roemer. New York: Burt Franklin, 1981. Argues that The Iron Heel is London’s “most noteworthy and sustained fictive future.”

Cassuto, Leonard, and Earle Labor, eds. Reading Jack London, with an afterword by Earle Labor. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996. Throws new insights on London’s fiction.

Johneton, Carolyn. Jack London: An American Radical? Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. A good treatment of London’s leftist leanings.

Labor, Earle, and Jeane Campbell Reesman. Jack London. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1944. A good general survey of London’s work.

Littel, Katherine M. “The Nietzschean and the Individualist.” Jack London’s Newsletter 15 (May-August, 1982): 76-91. A good discussion of traits evident at different stages of London’s career.

Portelli, Alessandro. “Jack London’s Missing Revolution: Notes on The Iron Heel.” Science Fiction Studies 27 (July, 1982): 81. Alleges that some important themes are significant by virtue of their absence in the novel.

Watson, Charles N., Jr. The Novels of Jack London: A Reappraisal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. The chapter on The Iron Heel is an outstanding critical assessment of London’s novel.