The Iron Heel revisited

September 18, 1996
Issue 

By Richard Frank Chiffings

The author Jack London is remembered — if he is remembered at all — for his wildlife adventure stories. But there is another dimension to Jack London.

I can remember that my mother was greatly affected by his book The People of the Abyss, about the terrible lives of slum dwellers in London. Recently from Hempstead in London, we were now group settlers in the harsh bush of south-western Australia. Reading the book also, a child between 10 and 12, I understood why Mum was moved.

I read The Iron Heel about the same time. (It was first published in 1908.) A world, different from the one I learned about at school, was opened up to me. I now understood what grown-ups meant when they spoke about the necessity for ordinary people to organise against tyrannical authority.

Yes, this was long ago. But if it is so obsolete, why do I get a replay every time I attend a socialist-oriented conference? Time after time the keynote speakers use the same arguments Ernest Everhard, the novel's hero, used in his tension-raising discussions with the people of business, the professions and the church.

Some people — not socialists — rejected The Iron Heel, saying it was communism at its most violent. But why did the socialists of the period reject the book?

Of course, the failure of the revolution of 1905 in Russia would have been fresh in the memory. Then there was the Fabian belief in the inevitable evolutionary demise of capitalism, so popular at the time. But if Jack London could smell smoke in the air, why couldn't the socialists?

In the event, the smoke was rising from fires somewhat different to the fire that Jack London had postulated as a declaration of war between the United States and Germany initiated by the Oligarchy. Jack London's war never got beyond the declaration, because the workers in both Germany and the United States immediately went on strike and so completely immobilised the two countries that the war was called off.

I can remember, when I was a child, hearing the men talk about this workers' strike aborting the war in the novel and speculating about why the Great War was not halted in the same way. Jack London admitted in a letter to another comrade, "I got nothing but knocks from the socialists". In the same letter, he said, "It was a labour of love, and a dead failure as a book. The book buying public would have nothing to do with it."

My family could not afford to buy books. Any book that came into the district was passed around for all to read, in the case of the Iron Heel from the group foreman down to us settlers. Since the foreman was very often hated by the settlers, and as socialist sympathies would have made him unpopular with his superiors, we can only assume that the complexity of human relations, which Jack London builds on in the latter half of the novel, is well beyond the comprehension of our social engineers.

Perhaps this is why, after all this time, the same arguments are being used. But there are differences between then and now. At least one economic concept has been dropped. Consider part of Jack London's explanation of why the American Oligarchy wanted war with Germany: "the war would consume many national surpluses". We don't hear anything about surpluses now. Another reason for war was to "reduce the armies of unemployed that menaced all countries".

But the most questionable difference between then and now, surely, is the complex wording used by those with a public voice today. Everything is full of multi-syllable words and those acronyms so cursed by wartime soldiers. Jack London said it simpler, more clearly, and so much more interestingly. If we go on delving into the novel, we might realise how unwise we are to use the word "imperialism". Instead let us return to descriptions like "plutocracy" and "oligarchy". Also let us beware of soft cuddly words, like "community", products of the Oligarchy's social engineers of the post-London era.

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