'The Iron Heel at 100’

Bad times inhibit good writers, but they also inspire them. Just look at the new and recent arrivals in bookstores and libraries. The double-barreled assault on civil liberties and human rights, by the administration of President George Walker Bush, has, if nothing else, spurred an outpouring of books, both fiction and nonfiction, condemning the erosion of American democracy and the perceived drift toward totalitarianism. Jack London—the best-selling twentieth-century American author, who was born in 1876, the year of the American Centenary, and who died in 1916, the year before the United States entered the First World War—would surely not be surprised. In fact, one might well anoint London the founding father of the contemporary body of literature about political repression, including Henry Giroux's The Emerging Authoritarianism in the United States, Matthew Rothschild's You Have No Rights, Chris Hedges's American Fascists, Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Crimes Against Nature, and Philip Roth's disquieting 2003 novel The Plot Against America. Of course, there are many others that cover much the same terrain.

Sinclair Lewis, who wrote the electrifying classic It Can't Happen Here (1935)—about the advent of a Nazi regime in Washington, D.C.—owed much of his inspiration to London's The Iron Heel, which was first published in 1908, and which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. London's dystopian novel also inspired George Orwell when he wrote 1984, and it deserves recognition as the first modern American novel to sound the alarm about the dangers of a dictatorship in the United States. The Iron Heel has never achieved the popularity of London's dog stories—The Call of the Wild and White Fang—but from the moment that Europe began to drift toward fascism in the 1920s, and then throughout the twentieth century, it was widely read in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and hailed as a great, prophetic work of art by the likes of Leon Trotsky, the exiled Russian revolutionary, and Anatole France, the Nobel Prize-winning French novelist.

One hundred years after its initial publication, London's political ideas and cultural insights seem remarkably contemporary. Indeed, in The Iron Heel, he describes a sinister conspiracy, by an oligarchy, to quash freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, imprison its outspoken opponents and critics, control news and information, install a professional army of paid mercenaries, create a secret police force, and wage global warfare for economic hegemony. There's also guerrilla warfare, furious acts of wanton terrorism, and cold-blooded terrorists—a world roiling in violence that might be taken for the world of the twenty-first century. Here's a book that demonstrates the veracity of Ezra Pound's remark that "the artist is the antenna of the race."

Like much overtly political fiction and didactic storytelling, The Iron Heel tends to emphasize ideas and ideological concerns at the expense of character development and plot, but London, the artist, could not help but craft a story with suspense, drama, and bigger-than-life, cinematic scenes that depict bloody warfare and horrific massacre in the streets of the United States. In the handwritten notes for the novel that he originally entitled "Oligarchy," he scrawled, "What scenes are given let them be striking to make up for absence of regular novel features," and he made good on that admonition to himself. The change in the title of the novel, from "Oligarchy" to The Iron Heel, shows London moving away from an idea to a compelling and vivid image that enlivens his story.

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London wrote no major political novel after The Iron Heel, but he did not cease to serve as the "antenna of the race." In The Scarlet Plague (1915), one of his last books, he anticipated the arrival of AIDS and HIV, and predicted a pandemic that would sweep across the world and decimate the human race.  Surely a novelist with that much imagination and prescience deserves more attention from literary scholars than he has so far received.

~ From: The Iron Heel at 100 Jack London — The Artist as 'Antenna of the Race' ~