The Iron Heel (3 page)

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 from a feminist slant that the hero's unexpected disappearance from the narrative's climax allows the heroine Avis to come into her own and play a primary role for the first time rather than a supporting one, the fact is that during these scenes of violence she is still accompanied by male revolutionist companions, who act to protect and save her from the rampaging mob.

More to the point, I think, is that for Avis, the charismatic solitary body of Everhard, as well as his elected representative body, is replaced in the end by the undifferentiated mass body of the people of the abyss. This monstrous bestial underclass had been created by the Iron Heel when it strategically favored certain higher castes of skilled laborer over others. In his previous book
The People of the Abyss
(1903), Jack London disguised himself as an American tramp to recount with sympathy the sufferings of London's East End ghetto dwellers, but the people of the abyss here, caught between masters and revolutionists, are simply the residual dregs of class warfare, a mindless, howling mass of rage and misery. Feared equally by rebels and oligarchs, this throng for London is an object of dread rather than of working-class solidarity or even pity. So what begins as an intense love story ends on an equally extravagant note of disgust and revulsion aimed less at the detested but intangible Iron Heel than at the abject mass spawned in its wake.

Up until this final chaos of clashing bodies, in fact, the figure of the proletariat has remained conspicuously missing from the entire novel. While we are given to understand that Everhard, like Jack London himself, emerged from impoverished working-class origins to lead the revolution, more often than not Avis chooses to emphasize the natural aristocracy of the man, his innate nobility, intelligence, and generosity of spirit that tends to make him superior to the people he presumes to represent. And despite his impressive strength, Everhard earns his living through intellectual work—translating essays and giving speeches—not physical labor. Ernest and his circle of extraordinary comrades thus battle and speak on behalf of the masses but are not of them. Even the early episode of pitiable Jackson and his amputated arm gives us only a glimpse of an ex-proletariat, someone no longer capable of supporting himself by manual labor. So when at last we are suddenly confronted by the collective boiling over of the people of the abyss, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, it is all the more shocking to witness.

London was committed to rendering the personal “feel” of the times from the point of view of the heroic revolutionist leader and his converts rather than from the perspective of the inarticulate mass proletariat or the shadowy Iron Heel. As a result, he inadvertently produces, via Avis's first-person narration, an oddly glamorous account of revolution (however pessimistic and bloody) filled with gaps and contradictions that cannot be fully corrected by the retrospective supplemental analysis provided by historian Anthony Meredith.
The Iron Heel
's grim ending suggests how the novel is more intriguing and relevant today in its sketchy representations of the bad guys rather than its celebration of the good guys (including London's own alter ego). Everhard's earnest prediction of an ever-growing global unconsumed surplus, for example, leading with mathematical certainty to the breakdown of the capitalist system may strike us as a bit quaint, tied as it is to a strictly industrial model of production. But while London's embrace of classic Marxist economic theory seems somewhat outdated, his depiction of the measures the corporate state will take to maintain itself still resonates powerfully.

The novel's great insights clearly reside less in the economic sphere than in the political or, perhaps more accurately, the cultural realm: the Iron Heel in its formative phase fundamentally relies less on naked aggression to pursue its interests than on the tacit support of mutually reinforcing institutions such as the press, the church, schools, and courts of law. Jack London thus anticipates a range of important thinkers, from Theodore Adorno to Antonio Gramsci to Noam Chomsky, interested in how the ruling class (under either totalitarian or “democratic” regimes) succeeds in preserving the established social order by manufacturing and maintaining consent. What Gramsci called hegemony Everhard describes as the molding of public opinion, a dynamic process whereby dominant structures of knowledge and value are continually legitimized as normal, neutral, and natural. As a result, parties who would seem to have a stake in opposing such dominance, such as the small-business owners Ernest cajoles, instead tend to accept the state-sanctioned version of things. When respected figures such as the converted Bishop Morehouse speak out against the established order from within one of these institutions (the pulpit), the newspapers deem him crazy, suffering from nervous exhaustion, and he is involuntarily sent off to an asylum for rest and rehabilitation. Such is the fate of dissent.

London closely links this ceaseless shaping of public opinion in the novel to the Iron Heel's brilliant ability to adapt to changing circumstances, especially its co-opting of an increasingly disgruntled skilled labor force. In order to placate the stronger labor unions, the Iron Heel establishes a system of caste, building comfortable schools and suburban houses for these favored few. What may look at first glance like the government's commitment to raising the standards of living turns out to be, on closer inspection, the dominant class's further crushing of the proletariat, creating a widening gulf between rich and poor that still remains a central feature of American capitalism. This compromising and bribing of labor is the aspect of London's vision that most impressed Trotsky, who understood the privileging of certain groups of workers at the expense of others to be a divide-and-conquer tactic resembling the machinations of Hitler and Mussolini. One specific way the Iron Heel aims to destroy working-class unity is by provoking war, substituting “America
versus
Germany” in place of “Socialism
versus
Oligarchy,” as Avis remarks, foreseeing our country's entry into World War I. Such divisive strategies are surely not limited to fascist regimes; from the Spanish-American War to the invasion of Iraq, the United States has relied on jingoistic nationalism to help establish its economic and military supremacy abroad. Disguising and distracting from a host of problems at home, patriotic war becomes the “health of the State,” as Randolph Bourne noted a decade after London's novel, converting those oppressed malcontents most likely to cause trouble into a willing mass of servants who “proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives.”

Narrowly averted by a worldwide general strike, war between nations remains one of the Iron Heel's most ostentatious threats in the novel. Yet perhaps the most salient or prescient aspect of London's account would seem to be the exact opposite of such open display—that is, the narrative's emphasis on secrecy and concealment. In his rendering of undercover police, spying, and infiltration, London drew explicitly on the recent events of the failed 1905 Russian Revolution. To squelch the rebellion, Russian authorities relied on a range of measures, including counteragitation (“The Black Hundreds”) and a national identification, or passport, system, designed to keep an eye on dissidents. Yet as London himself appreciated, we need not look abroad to repressive foreign governments for such examples of the state's intrusion into the daily private lives of its citizens. Only a few months after
The Iron Heel
was published, the United States set up a Bureau of Investigations (subsequently renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI) to monitor suspects (communist subversives, civil rights leaders, war protestors, artists) outside the bounds of normal criminal activity. The FBI marks one starting point for an ever burgeoning state surveillance apparatus culminating nearly a century later in the passage of the Patriot Act, the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, and the internment of prisoners beyond regular (and regulated) constitutional U.S. jurisdiction. In the name of national security, civil liberties are suspended, and suspected terrorists are indefinitely locked up without access to lawyers. Surely Jack London would not have been surprised by such developments, forecast as they are in his farsighted conceiving of the Iron Heel.

Shrouded in invisibility, the state can remain beyond the law as it tracks and contains any potential menace to its order. In accordance with the Iron Heel's own preoccupation with guarding its secrets, London (as I have previously suggested) gives relatively few details about who actually runs the Oligarchy and what its masters believe. Power maintaining power, after all, would seem not to require a very deep psychology. Yet at one pivotal moment near the end of her account, Avis Everhard does stop to wonder about the enemy. Let me close by reiterating what her fight against tyranny has finally taught her. With some admiration, Avis contemplates how the Iron Heel had managed to discipline itself, apprenticing its youth “to education, to art, to the church, to science, to literature,” all as a way of continuing to mold “the thought-processes of the nation in the direction of the perpetuity of the Oligarchy.” She continues:

 

It's difficult to imagine a better gloss on Bush's America.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Auerbach, Jonathan.
Male Call: Becoming Jack London
. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

Cassuto, Leonard, and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, eds.
Rereading Jack London
. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Clymer, Jeffrey A.
America's Culture of Terrorism
. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Foner, Philip S.
Jack London, American Rebel: A Collection of His Social Writings Together with an Extensive Study of the Man and His Times
. New York: Citadel, 1947.

Gair, Christopher.
Complicity and Resistance in Jack London's Novels
. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997.

Homberger, Eric.
American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39
. London: Macmillan, 1986.

Johnston, Carolyn.
Jack London—An American Radical?
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984.

London, Joan.
Jack London and His Times: An Unconventional Biography
. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.

Redding, Arthur S.
Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence
. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.

Shor, Francis Robert.
Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America, 1888-1918
. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997.