The Iron Heel Read Free Page A

the narrative, shifting the novel’s focus from persuasion and then prophecy to open warfare. This episode ends any chance for representative democracy to resolve the growing rift between capitalist and proletariat. As the manuscript’s historical annotator, Anthony Meredith, makes explicit in his footnotes (see chapter 17), the bombing echoes both the Haymarket massacre of 1886 and the 1905 assassination of ex-governor of Idaho Frank Steunenberg, the first U.S. citizen to be murdered by dynamite. As early acts of domestic terrorism, these crucial incidents of bloodshed weighed heavily on Americans around the turn of the century. In London’s view, such orchestrated violence pointed to state conspiracy, enabling the government to claim a state of emergency as a way of violating its own governing principles, including illegally rounding up and detaining labor leaders in the case of the 1905 assassination, and summarily executing threatening foreign-born anarchists in the infamous Haymarket instance. So too does the novel’s fictional Iron Heel use such calculated provocation to justify its suspension of law.
    From this point on in the narrative, Avis’s account gives way to increasingly harrowing scenes of strife and disorder, culminating in the Chicago Commune slaughter. Jack London is certainly not the first American writer to depict class conflict in such stark, apocalyptic terms. But unlike the gruesome endings of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1890), the violence here retains a strange kind of logic whereby revolutionists and state oligarchs effectively mirror one another in their covert operations—no autonomous free agents, but plenty of secret agents. Avis herself notes this strange structural symmetry: “We permeated the entire organization of the Iron Heel with our agents, while our own organization was permeated with the agents of the Iron Heel. It was warfare dark and devious, replete with intrigue and conspiracy, plot and counterplot. . . . There was no trust, no confidence anywhere.”
    The puzzle for London—a problem he similarly dramatized in his other political fictions, from “The Minions of Midas” (1901) to The Assassination Bureau (1910)—is how to tell master from rebel given their indistinguishable tactics: the concealment, infiltration, surveillance, and countersurveillance that develops on both sides of the deadly contest. “In that shadow-world of secret service,” Avis remarks, “identity was nebulous.” When the underground captures and converts Wickson’s own son, à la Patty Hearst, for instance, we are meant to appreciate the instability and interchangeability of ideological positions. Avis for her part becomes a double agent, working for the Iron Heel as a provocateur while she spies on them for the revolutionists. In her heart she clearly never abandons her dedication to the socialist cause, but that cause must remain mostly unexpressed, except in the manuscript that records her solitary thoughts and inner feelings. In the company of others she can no longer clearly tell the difference between friend and foe, particularly during the ending scenes of graphic violence that overtake and submerge her.
    Jack London’s alter ego Everhard is largely exempt from such confusing paranoia because the author chooses to remove him from most of the novel’s concluding violence. Everhard is absent during the Chicago Commune slaughter, and London finally refuses his readers the satisfaction of seeing his hero’s subsequent death and martyrdom (of which we are informed at the very start of the manuscript). Although Everhard is credited with organizing the “Fighting Groups” of guerrilla warriors who will continue to struggle against the Iron Heel for 300 years, his part is limited in this failed First Revolt. While it might be argued