The series will keep coming, at unpredictable intervals, until I run out of interesting additions to my planned bibliography. I hope to add some informative and original commentaries, but please bear in mind I am no more a literary critic or historian than you are, and possibly less. Think of this series as a conversation with an ignorant but opinionated stranger who you sometimes see guzzling ale at an adjacent bar stool in your local pub on gray London afternoons. Please add comments, especially if you know the book. (Spoilers are fine unless otherwise indicated. It depends on the book.)
Much of what I have to say about The Iron Heel was contained in a diary I posted a week or two back. (That’s a link to it. That page includes a link to Project Gutenberg’s free and complete text, downloadable and readable on line, which I may as well put here too.)
The context of that diary was, unsurprisingly, a look at some of the characters who currently seem most intent on fulfilling Jack London’s dire prophecies—while Steve Bannon is off galavanting from pep rally to pep rally in a grand tour of the European Far Right, Erik Prince (of Blackwater infamy) is involved in the latest incarnation of SCL / Cambridge Associates, and even that affable old coke-snortin’ Colonel Ollie North has crawled out of his cellar to offer his big ideas to the Trump Administration. It’s just one Blast from The Past after another, a non-stop playlist of recycled oldies. And like that classic oldie about oldies, Those Oldies But Goodies Reminds Me of You, they’re god-awful, the worst kind of deja vu, not goodies but baddies. Why can’t we pull ourselves out of this retro mire and go somewhere new and better for a change?
Well, you know… those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. And those who repeat it wish they could forget it so they can do it again with a clear conscience. Or whatever.
What we’re dealing with here, though, is a book whose author remembered the future, looking back on events of the 20th, 21st, and 22nd Centuries with 20/20 hindsight—from 1908. (Possibly his book contributed a bit to America’s stopping short of full-blown fascism despite some very close calls.)
Jack London, as I noted in the above-linked diary, was sort of a left-wing proto-fascist. (D.H. Lawrence was another. It’s an interesting phenomenon.) He was immersed in the trends and attitudes and ideas of his day—Darwinism, Nietzsche’s ideal of tough, tragic heroism, etc. He sometimes propagated racist notions (Wikipedia’s section on his racial opinions seems to be deliberately downplaying his reputation in that area).
But he was also among the most militantly leftist literary figures of any time or place, and his raw, powerful proletarian political convictions grew organically out of his youthful struggles and adventures, including a brief but horrific jail sentence for vagrancy.
This gives Jack London a distinctly different outlook from that of the younger Sinclair Lewis (who sold London several plots), whose “It Can’t Happen Here” is told from the point of view of the petit bourgeoisie—genteel New England college professors fighting to put the ignorant gun-totin’ white trash back in their place after they get uppity under the influence of a fascistic rabble-rousing politician. Hillary’s term “deplorable” only appears between the lines in Lewis’s novel, but he could hardly have expressed with any more precision the feelings of educated, privileged, sensitive Americans as they (we) watched aghast as rowdy Trump mobs bellowed their chants at us.
Perhaps The Iron Heel can tell us something about how meetings of the members and guests of the Clinton Global Initiative are viewed by those who believe the Clintons are not on their side, and think the educated elite in the media and the universities are plotting to undermine the American Dream. London’s political instincts are at their most acute when he explains how Oligarchs sincerely believe theirs is a worthy cause and the best hope, the most realistic option, for humanity:
The oligarchs themselves were going through a remarkable and, it must be confessed, unexpected development. As a class, they disciplined themselves. Every member had his work to do in the world, and this work he was compelled to do. There were no more idle-rich young men. Their strength was used to give united strength to the Oligarchy. They served as leaders of troops and as lieutenants and captains of industry. They found careers in applied science, and many of them became great engineers. They went into the multitudinous divisions of the government, took service in the colonial possessions, and by tens of thousands went into the various secret services. They were, I may say, apprenticed to education, to art, to the church, to science, to literature; and in those fields they served the important function of moulding the thought-processes of the nation in the direction of the perpetuity of the Oligarchy.
They were taught, and later they in turn taught, that what they were doing was right. They assimilated the aristocratic idea from the moment they began, as children, to receive impressions of the world. The aristocratic idea was woven into the making of them until it became bone of them and flesh of them. They looked upon themselves as wild-animal trainers, rulers of beasts. From beneath their feet rose always the subterranean rumbles of revolt. Violent death ever stalked in their midst; bomb and knife and bullet were looked upon as so many fangs of the roaring abysmal beast they must dominate if humanity were to persist. They were the saviours of humanity, and they regarded themselves as heroic and sacrificing laborers for the highest good.
They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization. It was their belief that if ever they weakened, the great beast would ingulf them and everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good in its cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged. The horrid picture of anarchy was held always before their child's eyes until they, in turn, obsessed by this cultivated fear, held the picture of anarchy before the eyes of the children that followed them. This was the beast to be stamped upon, and the highest duty of the aristocrat was to stamp upon it. In short, they alone, by their unremitting toil and sacrifice, stood between weak humanity and the all-devouring beast; and they believed it, firmly believed it.
I cannot lay too great stress upon this high ethical righteousness of the whole oligarch class. This has been the strength of the Iron Heel, and too many of the comrades have been slow or loath to realize it. Many of them have ascribed the strength of the Iron Heel to its system of reward and punishment. This is a mistake. Heaven and hell may be the prime factors of zeal in the religion of a fanatic; but for the great majority of the religious, heaven and hell are incidental to right and wrong. Love of the right, desire for the right, unhappiness with anything less than the right—in short, right conduct, is the prime factor of religion. And so with the Oligarchy. Prisons, banishment and degradation, honors and palaces and wonder-cities, are all incidental. The great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right. Never mind the exceptions, and never mind the oppression and injustice in which the Iron Heel was conceived. All is granted. The point is that the strength of the Oligarchy today lies in its satisfied conception of its own righteousness.
But lest you think London harbors any secret admiration for the oligarchs or their new system, he goes on to describe the conditions of what we might call the 99%. I expect this could serve as an unvarnished picture of the America Trump would create if he could (or is actually creating right now); he doesn’t need illegal immigrants in his economy because there will soon be no practical difference between citizens and illegal immigrants in terms of wages and working conditions):
The condition of the people of the abyss was pitiable. Common school education, so far as they were concerned, had ceased. They lived like beasts in great squalid labor-ghettos, festering in misery and degradation. All their old liberties were gone. They were labor-slaves. Choice of work was denied them. Likewise was denied them the right to move from place to place, or the right to bear or possess arms. They were not land serfs like the farmers. They were machine-serfs and labor-serfs. When unusual needs arose for them, such as the building of the great highways and air-lines, of canals, tunnels, subways, and fortifications, levies were made on the labor-ghettos, and tens of thousands of serfs, willy-nilly, were transported to the scene of operations. Great armies of them are toiling now at the building of Ardis, housed in wretched barracks where family life cannot exist, and where decency is displaced by dull bestiality. In all truth, there in the labor-ghettos is the roaring abysmal beast the oligarchs fear so dreadfully—but it is the beast of their own making. In it they will not let the ape and tiger die.
By the time he wrote The Iron Heel, Jack London’s literary success had made him an honorary member of the San Francisco elite. He attended the ritual gatherings at Bohemian Grove—latter-day conspiracy theorists would condemn him as an “Insider”! So he knew whereof he spoke and wrote. He reproduced the speech and attitudes of the leaders of what he called The Oligarchy with unerring perfect pitch, immediately recognizable as authentic by anyone born into a time and place where one met up with elderly members of that same generation of privileged American WASPs. (One of my closest childhood friends was an uncle, a law professor born a few years before London, who exploded in fury at any mention of Woodrow Wilson and spent many afternoons with me, his whiskey and his cigars, railing against everything that had gone badly wrong with the world and then, by way of light relief, reciting by heart Victor Hugo’s thoughts on visiting Napoleon’s column. I’m not sure he would have approved of the Oligarchy’s dictatorship, but he was certainly on the same wavelength and shared the same general worldview.)
I haven’t yet decided what the next installment will be, but stay tuned.
Here’s a link to Part One, devoted to Kressmann Taylor’s short story Address Unknown. It’s only 11 pages in a pdf (linked there and also here), but getting caught up in its gathering intensity is a life-changing experience. I deliberately avoided saying anything substantive about it in the accompanying diary and suggest you finish the story before you read any readers’ comments where spoilers may lurk.
Postscript: This subject obviously requires straying freely outside the boundaries of what we here generally consider acceptable discourse, with documentation and links that are often unsavory, from tainted sources, etc— and looking at all of this with a mind open wide enough to gain some understanding of fascism’s immense, enduring, and profoundly depressing appeal. Taylor’s Address Unknown manages to convey a great deal about the magical magnetic power of the new German Chancellor and his movement in very few words. The echoes of 1932-33-34 in feelings of empowerment and resolve aroused by our new President’s movement in 2016-17-18 are surely no accident—remember, Ivana used Donald’s bedtime reading habits (a collection of Hitler’s speeches) as a reason she needed to divorce him.
I think we are now in the honeymoon period—a joyless honeymoon, a calm before the storm. It’s possible America will successfully sue for divorce before it gets a whole lot worse. But I’m quite sure our opposition cannot succeed unless we’re using this relatively calm period to communicate with old friends and schoolmates and co-workers and acquaintances who’ve gone over to the other side. Do not think of them as dead. They have their reasons. Trying listening more than talking, but don’t try to hide your own views. Without understanding those reasons (and sharing ours) we will be stuck in a circle-jerk while the world moves on (and on and on). We can have no more important allies than disillusioned Trump supporters who decide we make more sense after all. We need to make sense of what their beliefs have been—and how our own ideas and strategies must quickly evolve.