The Iron Heel
By Jack London
A dystopian novel depicting the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States.
Table of Contents
MY EAGLE The soft summer wind stirs the redwoods, and Wild-Water ripples sweet cadences over its mossy stones. There are butterflies in the sunshine, and from everywhere arises th...
CHALLENGES After the guests had gone, father threw himself into a chair and gave vent to roars of Gargantuan laughter. Not since the death of my mother had I known him to laugh so...
JACKSON’S ARM Little did I dream the fateful part Jackson’s arm was to play in my life. Jackson himself did not impress me when I hunted him out. I found him in a crazy, ramshackl...
SLAVES OF THE MACHINE The more I thought of Jackson’s arm, the more shaken I was. I was confronted by the concrete. For the first time I was seeing life. My university life, and s...
THE PHILOMATHS Ernest was often at the house. Nor was it my father, merely, nor the controversial dinners, that drew him there. Even at that time I flattered myself that I played ...
ADUMBRATIONS It was about this time that the warnings of coming events began to fall about us thick and fast. Ernest had already questioned father’s policy of having socialists an...
THE BISHOP’S VISION “The Bishop is out of hand,” Ernest wrote me. “He is clear up in the air. Tonight he is going to begin putting to rights this very miserable world of ours. He ...
THE MACHINE BREAKERS It was just before Ernest ran for Congress, on the socialist ticket, that father gave what he privately called his “Profit and Loss” dinner. Ernest called it ...
THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM In the midst of the consternation his revelation had produced, Ernest began again to speak. “You have said, a dozen of you to-night, that socialism is ...
THE VORTEX Following like thunder claps upon the Business Men’s dinner, occurred event after event of terrifying moment; and I, little I, who had lived so placidly all my days in ...
THE GREAT ADVENTURE Mr. Wickson did not send for father. They met by chance on the ferry-boat to San Francisco, so that the warning he gave father was not premeditated. Had they n...
THE BISHOP It was after my marriage that I chanced upon Bishop Morehouse. But I must give the events in their proper sequence. After his outbreak at the I. P. H. Convention, the B...
THE GENERAL STRIKE Of course Ernest was elected to Congress in the great socialist landslide that took place in the fall of 1912. One great factor that helped to swell the sociali...
THE BEGINNING OF THE END As early as January, 1913, Ernest saw the true trend of affairs, but he could not get his brother leaders to see the vision of the Iron Heel that had aris...
LAST DAYS It was near the end of January, 1913, that the changed attitude of the Oligarchy toward the favored unions was made public. The newspapers published information of an un...
THE END When it came time for Ernest and me to go to Washington, father did not accompany us. He had become enamoured of proletarian life. He looked upon our slum neighborhood as ...
THE SCARLET LIVERY With the destruction of the Granger states, the Grangers in Congress disappeared. They were being tried for high treason, and their places were taken by the cre...
IN THE SHADOW OF SONOMA Of myself, during this period, there is not much to say. For six months I was kept in prison, though charged with no crime. I was a _suspect_—a word of fea...
TRANSFORMATION “You must make yourself over again,” Ernest wrote to me. “You must cease to be. You must become another woman—and not merely in the clothes you wear, but inside you...
A LOST OLIGARCH But in remembering the old life I have run ahead of my story into the new life. The wholesale jail delivery did not occur until well along into 1915. Complicated a...
THE ROARING ABYSMAL BEAST During the long period of our stay in the refuge, we were kept closely in touch with what was happening in the world without, and we were learning thorou...
THE CHICAGO COMMUNE As agents-provocateurs, not alone were we able to travel a great deal, but our very work threw us in contact with the proletariat and with our comrades, the re...
THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS Suddenly a change came over the face of things. A tingle of excitement ran along the air. Automobiles fled past, two, three, a dozen, and from them warning...
NIGHTMARE I had not closed my eyes the night before on the Twentieth Century, and what of that and of my exhaustion I slept soundly. When I first awoke, it was night. Garthwaite h...
THE TERRORISTS It was not until Ernest and I were back in New York, and after weeks had elapsed, that we were able to comprehend thoroughly the full sweep of the disaster that had...