The Iron Heel Page #17

"The Iron Heel" by Jack London, published in 1908, is a dystopian political novel that explores themes of authoritarianism, class struggle, and revolution. It is considered one of the earliest examples of dystopian fiction, influencing later works like 1984 and Brave New World.

• Novel

								

 the accumulation of vast fortunes, the problem of disposing of these
 fortunes after death was a vexing one to the accumulators. Will-making
 and will-breaking became complementary trades, like armor-making and
 gun-making. The shrewdest will-making lawyers were called in to make
 wills that could not be broken. But these wills were always broken,
 and very often by the very lawyers that had drawn them up.
 Nevertheless the delusion persisted in the wealthy class that an
 absolutely unbreakable will could be cast; and so, through the
 generations, clients and lawyers pursued the illusion. It was a
 pursuit like unto that of the Universal Solvent of the mediæval
 alchemists.

He arose and began, in a few well-chosen phrases that carried an
undertone of faint irony, to introduce Ernest. Colonel Van Gilbert was
subtly facetious in his introduction of the social reformer and member
of the working class, and the audience smiled. It made me angry, and I
glanced at Ernest. The sight of him made me doubly angry. He did not
seem to resent the delicate slurs. Worse than that, he did not seem to
be aware of them. There he sat, gentle, and stolid, and somnolent. He
really looked stupid. And for a moment the thought rose in my mind,
What if he were overawed by this imposing array of power and brains?
Then I smiled. He couldn’t fool me. But he fooled the others, just as
he had fooled Miss Brentwood. She occupied a chair right up to the
front, and several times she turned her head toward one or another of
her confrères and smiled her appreciation of the remarks.

Colonel Van Gilbert done, Ernest arose and began to speak. He began in
a low voice, haltingly and modestly, and with an air of evident
embarrassment. He spoke of his birth in the working class, and of the
sordidness and wretchedness of his environment, where flesh and spirit
were alike starved and tormented. He described his ambitions and
ideals, and his conception of the paradise wherein lived the people of
the upper classes. As he said:

“Up above me, I knew, were unselfishnesses of the spirit, clean and
noble thinking, keen intellectual living. I knew all this because I
read ‘Seaside Library’[3] novels, in which, with the exception of the
villains and adventuresses, all men and women thought beautiful
thoughts, spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed glorious deeds. In
short, as I accepted the rising of the sun, I accepted that up above me
was all that was fine and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and
dignity to life, all that made life worth living and that remunerated
one for his travail and misery.”

 [3] A curious and amazing literature that served to make the working
 class utterly misapprehend the nature of the leisure class.

He went on and traced his life in the mills, the learning of the
horseshoeing trade, and his meeting with the socialists. Among them, he
said, he had found keen intellects and brilliant wits, ministers of the
Gospel who had been broken because their Christianity was too wide for
any congregation of mammon-worshippers, and professors who had been
broken on the wheel of university subservience to the ruling class. The
socialists were revolutionists, he said, struggling to overthrow the
irrational society of the present and out of the material to build the
rational society of the future. Much more he said that would take too
long to write, but I shall never forget how he described the life among
the revolutionists. All halting utterance vanished. His voice grew
strong and confident, and it glowed as he glowed, and as the thoughts
glowed that poured out from him. He said:

“Amongst the revolutionists I found, also, warm faith in the human,
ardent idealism, sweetnesses of unselfishness, renunciation, and
martyrdom—all the splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life
was clean, noble, and alive. I was in touch with great souls who
exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin
wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and
circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire. All about me
were nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and nights
were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with before my eyes,
ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ’s own Grail, the warm
human, long-suffering and maltreated but to be rescued and saved at the
last.”

As before I had seen him transfigured, so now he stood transfigured
before me. His brows were bright with the divine that was in him, and
brighter yet shone his eyes from the midst of the radiance that seemed
to envelop him as a mantle. But the others did not see this radiance,
and I assumed that it was due to the tears of joy and love that dimmed
my vision. At any rate, Mr. Wickson, who sat behind me, was unaffected,
for I heard him sneer aloud, “Utopian.”[4]

 [4] The people of that age were phrase slaves. The abjectness of their
 servitude is incomprehensible to us. There was a magic in words
 greater than the conjurer’s art. So befuddled and chaotic were their
 minds that the utterance of a single word could negative the
 generalizations of a lifetime of serious research and thought. Such a
 word was the adjective Utopian. The mere utterance of it could damn
 any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, of economic amelioration
 or regeneration. Vast populations grew frenzied over such phrases as
 “an honest dollar” and “a full dinner pail.” The coinage of such
 phrases was considered strokes of genius.

Ernest went on to his rise in society, till at last he came in touch
with members of the upper classes, and rubbed shoulders with the men
who sat in the high places. Then came his disillusionment, and this
disillusionment he described in terms that did not flatter his
audience. He was surprised at the commonness of the clay. Life proved
not to be fine and gracious. He was appalled by the selfishness he
encountered, and what had surprised him even more than that was the
absence of intellectual life. Fresh from his revolutionists, he was
shocked by the intellectual stupidity of the master class. And then, in
spite of their magnificent churches and well-paid preachers, he had
found the masters, men and women, grossly material. It was true that
they prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities, but in
spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was
materialistic. And they were without real morality—for instance, that
which Christ had preached but which was no longer preached.

“I met men,” he said, “who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in
their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of
Pinkertons[5] with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories.
I met men incoherent with indignation at the brutality of
prize-fighting, and who, at the same time, were parties to the
adulteration of food that killed each year more babes than even

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