The Iron Heel

Table of Contents

 

 

THE IRON HEEL

JACK LONDON (1876-1916) led a wild and colorful life. As a youth he left school at fourteen and worked in a cannery, as an oyster pirate, and as a member of the Fish Patrol in San Francisco Bay. He traveled throughout the country, joined the Gold Rush to the Klondike in 1897, sailed to the Caribbean, studied London's East End slums, and reported on the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst papers. He read voraciously and always dreamt of being a writer. His short stories of the Yukon were published in magazines and in a collection,
The Son of the Wolf,
in 1900, bringing him fame. Thereafter he published an enormous number of stories and many novels, including
The Call of the Wild, White Fang,
and
Martin Eden
.

 

JONATHAN AUERBACH is a professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, with degrees from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Johns Hopkins University. In addition to publishing articles and books on such American authors as Poe and London, he has also written extensively on film, particularly early cinema. He has been awarded Fulbright Fellowships to Portugal, Cyprus, and Tunisia, and has lectured on American studies in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Egypt, and Japan.

In every corner of the world, on every subject under the sun, Penguin represents quality and variety—the very best in publishing today.

For complete information about books available from Penguin—including Penguin Classics, Penguin Compass, and Puffins—and how to order them, write to us at the appropriate address below. Please note that for copyright reasons the selection of books varies from country to country.

 

In the United States:
Please write to
Penguin Group (USA), P.O. Box 12289 Dept. B, Newark, New Jersey 07101-5289
or call 1-800-788-6262.

In the United Kingdom:
Please write to
Dept. EP, Penguin Books Ltd, Bath Road, Harmondsworth, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 0DA.

In Canada:
Please write to
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3.

In Australia:
Please write to
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, P.O. Box 257, Ringwood, Victoria 3134.

In New Zealand:
Please write to
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, North Shore Mail Centre, Auckland 10.

In India:
Please write to
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Panchsheel Shopping Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017.

In the Netherlands:
Please write to
Penguin Books Netherlands bv, Postbus 3507, NL-1001 AH Amsterdam.

In Germany:
Please write to
Penguin Books Deutschland GmbH, Metzlerstrasse 26, 60594 Frankfurt am Main.

In Spain:
Please write to
Penguin Books S. A., Bravo Murillo 19, 1º B, 28015 Madrid.

In Italy:
Please write to
Penguin Italia s.r.l., Via Benedetto Croce 2, 20094 Corsico, Milano.

In France:
Please write to
Penguin France, Le Carré Wilson, 62 rue Benjamin Baillaud, 31500 Toulouse.

In Japan:
Please write to
Penguin Books Japan Ltd, Kaneko Building, 2-3-25 Koraku, Bunkyo-Ku, Tokyo 112.

In South Africa:
Please write to
Penguin Books South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Private Bag X14, Parkview, 2122 Johannesburg.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,
Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by The Macmillan company 1907
This edition with an introduction by Jonathan Auerbach published in Penguin Books 2006

 

Introduction copyright © Jonathan Auerbach, 2006

All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
London, Jack, 1876-1916.
The iron heel / Jack London ; edited with an introduction by Jonathan Auerbach ;
notes by Jordan Schugar.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-0-143-03971-6

I. Auerbach, Jonathan, 1954- II. Title. III. Series.
PS3523.O46I7 2006
813'.52—dc22 2005058624

 

 

 

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means
without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only
authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy
of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

Introduction

Googling the phrase “the iron heel” produces some surprising results. Although Jack London, in his novel, dramatizes the moment his hero Ernest Everhard coins the term to refer to the despised Oligarchy (see chapter 9), we discover it circulating in a number of prior late-nineteenth-century literary and political texts to signify various kinds of oppression. The Duke in Twain's
Huckleberry Finn
(1884) histrionically bemoans his fate “to be always ground into the mire under the iron heel,” while a Henry James character in
The Bostonians
(1885) invokes it more specifically to mean patriarchy: “They [women] had been trampled under the iron heel of man.” In an 1888 speech, President Grover Cleveland gives it a still sharper thrust, contrasting “trusts, combinations, and monopolies” with “the citizen [who] is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel.”

If we think London, James, and Cleveland make for strange bedfellows, the case grows even more curious when we search the Internet for more recent references. The phrase keeps popping up most remarkably in discussions linked to William Pierce, the author of the race war fantasy
The Turner Diaries
(1978). Beyond the penchant for bigots and anti-Semites like Pierce to label any big centralized government an “iron heel,” London's own novel actually turns up as recommended reading on some of these white supremacist Web sites, including one entitled “Get Ready for the Rebirth of Western Culture!” that endorses this “classic story of revolutionary struggle” despite “the commies [who] tried to paint London as one of their own since he was opposed to Capitalism.”

One of those “commies” was Leon Trotsky, who, in a letter to London's daughter penned some thirty years after the novel's 1908 publication, praised the narrative's remarkable “historical foresight” in predicting the rise of fascism, “its economy, . . . its governmental technique, its political psychology.” Trotsky's comments were not simply referring to Germany in the 1930s but potentially to America as well, especially its dark “alliance between finance capital and labour aristocracy.” That Aryan nationalists and communists alike have championed this novel must give us pause; while it's fair to say that the white supremacists might be guilty of some serious misreading,
The Iron Heel
's depictions of state tyranny, as well as the underground armed resistance against that state, possess a strong appeal open to an unsettling range of interpretations. What follows is one such interpretation that may be more productively pondered after reading the novel than before.

Any attempt to understand the politics of
The Iron Heel
must start with its formal framework. Clearly a larger-than-life idealization of himself, Jack London's romantic autobiographical hero Ernest Everhard remains at the heart of the novel, stoutly embodying the noble spirit and principles of the revolution. As early as 1896 London was known as “the Boy Socialist of Oakland,” and following his rapid rise to literary fame nearly a decade later (1905-06), he actively promoted the proletariat cause by delivering a series of talks across the country intended to educate Americans about the coming ascendancy of socialism. Many of the arguments and positions adopted by Ernest in the course of the novel closely resemble London's own lectures and essays.