The Iron Heel Read Free

Ernest’s sexual magnetism. Redefining her love as part of a larger “great adventure,” Avis in these transitional middle chapters traces a broader set of historical developments that are global rather than local in scope. In quick succession, Avis details a sweeping series of crises: the threat of a war between America and Germany designed to distract the proletariat by way of patriotic nationalism, a paralyzing international general strike that successfully prevents this war, the defection of the great labor unions and the subsequent rise of a caste system, and a surge in religious revivals—all signs of impending apocalyptic violence. For Everhard, these cataclysms symbolically compel him to trade in his exceptional personal body for the collective body of representative democracy, winning a seat in Congress on the socialist ticket, as he had forecast to Wickson. At this stage, Everhard (and London along with him) still clings to the hope for a peaceful transformation, distinguishing himself and Avis—as “revolutionists”—from the more extreme measures of anarchists and terrorists.
    Everhard’s temporary, surprising metamorphosis into an elected congressman representing his socialist constituents corresponds to changes in the Oligarchy itself, now dubbed by Ernest “the Iron Heel”—a phrase which signals the aggressive methods this ruling class has developed to maintain its mastery at any cost. As Avis discovers while investigating Jackson’s amputation, power, although concentrated in a wealthy few, is preserved by a complex network of economic, political, legal, and cultural interests that negate the free agency of virtually all individuals. What Jack London acutely detects here is the emergence of a corporatist state run by a relatively small number of groups served by a wide range of practices and institutions—the law, the press, the university, the church—already in place and taken for granted as somehow impartial or self-evident. When Everhard and his fellow socialists threaten to disclose the bias of these institutions, the Iron Heel reacts by suspending civil law, suppressing free speech (including the book Economics and Education written by Avis’s father), incorporating independent state militias into the national army, and enlisting the aid of reactionary groups organized to infiltrate and police the revolutionists—all as Ernest had predicted.
    Perhaps the most striking feature of the Iron Heel is its paradoxical mixture of social prominence and secrecy, a sinister combination that may help explain the attraction of the novel to white supremacists and other contemporary fringe movements. It was easy enough for Jack London to write what he knew, creating in Ernest and Avis and their friends a heroic version of himself and his socialist circle of comrades. But it was more difficult imaginatively to penetrate the inner workings of the state, so that we are left with a more abstract and remote set of effects, sometimes brutal and sometimes spectacular, that show us what the masters do and how they operate but not who they are and what they think. Yet perhaps this is less an imaginative failure on London’s part than a more deliberate decision to keep the Iron Heel as hidden as it seeks to keep itself. In fact, the closest we come to seeing the face of the Oligarchy is Mr. Wickson. While acknowledged as only a minor functionary, Wickson not only articulates the Iron Heel’s gospel of Power, but also possesses the very land or space that Avis and other revolutionists in the end will clandestinely occupy—in essence, share—during their (literally) underground existence.
    All too manifest yet simultaneously invisible, at once everywhere and nowhere, the Iron Heel reserves its most spectacular public effect for the floor of Congress. The bomb that Everhard is falsely imprisoned for detonating marks the second key turning point in