The Iron Heel
Glossary
"
- "Proletarian Science" and "Proletarian Philosophy"
- Ernest Everhard's own terms, noted approvingly but also gently critiqued by Meredith's future-historian footnotes as showing "the provincialism of his mind," for his central intellectual project: an inductive, fact-based, working-class-grounded philosophy set explicitly against the "metaphysical" reasoning of clergymen and academic philosophers, who Ernest argues reason from theory to facts rather than facts to theory.
- Related: Ernest Everhard, Dr. Hammerfield
A
- Anthony Meredith
- The fictional twenty-seventh-century historian and editor whose footnotes frame Avis Everhard's manuscript, writing from Ardis in the year 419 B.O.M. (Brotherhood of Man) — a socialist utopia that has finally succeeded centuries after the events Avis describes. Meredith's opening Foreword gently corrects Avis's hero-worship of her husband even while praising the manuscript's unmatched value for conveying "the feel" of a terrible, turbulent era.
- Related: The Everhard Manuscript, The Brotherhood of Man, Avis Everhard
- Avis Everhard
- The novel's narrator — a professor's daughter radicalized by her marriage to Ernest Everhard, writing her manuscript in hiding two months after his execution, in the anxious final days before the Second Revolt she does not live to see succeed or fail. Her account traces her transformation from a class-bound young woman startled by Ernest's boldness at her father's dinner table into a committed revolutionary.
- Related: Ernest Everhard, The Everhard Manuscript, John Cunningham
B
- Bishop Morehouse
- A sweet, scholarly, Christ-like clergyman and family friend of the Cunninghams who undergoes a genuine religious crisis after confronting real urban poverty firsthand — publicly declaring, at an I.P.H. convention, that he has brought two prostitutes into his own mansion because that is what Christ's teaching actually demands. His heresy is simply erased from the next day's newspapers, and Ernest predicts (correctly) that the press will either wait for him to recant or quietly institutionalize him, since the establishment cannot afford to let his witness stand.
- Related: Ernest Everhard, Avis Everhard
D
- Dr. Hammerfield
- One of the clergymen at the Cunningham dinner table whom Ernest Everhard systematically dismantles in debate — defending metaphysics against Ernest's demand for empirical, working "facts," and repeatedly cornered (most memorably when Ernest's jab about earthquakes and falling bricks lands, by coincidence, on the actual scar Hammerfield received in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake).
- Related: Ernest Everhard, John Cunningham
E
- Ernest Everhard
- The novel's revolutionary hero and Avis's husband — a working-class socialist philosopher-agitator, former horseshoer with a prize-fighter's build, whose blunt, fact-hammering debates with clergymen and capitalists carry much of the book's real argument. He coins the phrase "the Iron Heel" for the American oligarchy, is elected to Congress in the socialist landslide of 1912, and is eventually captured and secretly executed by the Mercenaries in 1932 while planning the Second Revolt.
- Related: Avis Everhard, The Iron Heel, The Second Revolt
G
- George Milford
- An obscure agitator whose 1912 pamphlet "Ye Slaves" contained the earliest previously known use of the phrase "the Iron Heel" (borrowed, Meredith deduces, from having heard Ernest Everhard use it in a speech) — and who reappears in Avis's manuscript only to be shot dead in an automobile beside her during the chaos of the Chicago Commune.
- Related: The First Revolt (The Chicago Commune), The Iron Heel
J
- Jack London (Author)
- The American novelist who published The Iron Heel in 1908, imagining an American oligarchy that crushes a rising labor movement with a private army, a bought press, and naked force rather than reform. London puts his own economic and political convictions directly into Ernest Everhard's mouth, making the novel less a polished story than an argument with a plot wrapped around it — often cited as a direct ancestor of Orwell's 1984 and other twentieth-century dystopias.
- Related: Ernest Everhard, The Iron Heel, The Everhard Manuscript
- John Cunningham
- Avis Everhard's father, a distinguished University of California physics professor best known for his work identifying matter and energy — whose "preacher's night" dinner party, where he mischievously invites Ernest Everhard to debate a table of clergymen, is the occasion of Avis's first meeting with her future husband.
- Related: Avis Everhard, Ernest Everhard
T
- The Brotherhood of Man
- The eventual socialist utopia from which Anthony Meredith writes his footnotes, dated "419 B.O.M." — a world that took seven centuries and many crushed revolts (Third, Fourth, and beyond) after the failure of Avis and Ernest's Second Revolt to finally arrive, offering the novel's one note of long-view hope against its otherwise unrelieved account of defeat and atrocity.
- Related: Anthony Meredith, The Second Revolt
- The Everhard Manuscript
- The novel's central framing device: a manuscript written in hiding by Avis Everhard during the last days before the Second Revolt, hidden in a hollow oak at Wake Robin Lodge before her presumed capture and execution, and rediscovered seven centuries later. The novel we read is this manuscript, annotated throughout with footnotes by the future historian Anthony Meredith, creating a double narration — Avis's urgent first-person account and Meredith's calm editorial hindsight.
- Related: Avis Everhard, Anthony Meredith, Wake Robin Lodge
- The Expropriation of the Farmers
- The systematic economic destruction of independent American farmers by a farm trust formed from the pooled surplus of the seven great trusts — farmers driven into debt by controlled railroad rates and bank loans, then dispossessed of their land through unpayable taxes even when they tried to escape the market entirely through primitive barter, a process the novel explicitly compares to (and finds faster and more thorough than) the destruction of the Roman yeomanry.
- Related: The Trusts, The General Strike
- The First Revolt (The Chicago Commune)
- The premature, unplanned uprising crushed catastrophically by the Mercenaries — dramatized through Avis's nightmarish, disjointed eyewitness account of Chicago's streets during the fighting: burning ghettos, mass executions, buildings stormed floor by floor with no quarter given or taken, and George Milford, an old acquaintance, shot dead beside her in an automobile. Meredith's footnotes confirm the proletariat inflicted losses roughly equal to what it suffered, even in total defeat.
- Related: The Mercenaries, George Milford, The Second Revolt
- The General Strike
- The labor movement's chief weapon against the trusts, dramatized as the socialist Party gains real congressional power in 1912 — a coordinated withdrawal of labor meant to paralyze the economy and force concessions, undertaken alongside the destruction of William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire and the collapse of the middle class, developments the socialist leadership (though not Ernest) mistakenly read as proof that capitalism's end had finally arrived.
- Related: Ernest Everhard, The Trusts, The Expropriation of the Farmers
- The Iron Heel
- Ernest Everhard's name — first used, per Meredith's footnote, at a private dinner in spring 1912 — for the American plutocracy after it abandons democratic pretense and rules by naked force. Meredith's Foreword insists the Iron Heel was not an inevitable stage of social evolution like feudalism or capitalism, but an aberration, "a whim, a fantasy," that delayed the Brotherhood of Man for centuries rather than advancing it.
- Related: Ernest Everhard, The Oligarchy, The Mercenaries
- The Labor Caste
- The stratum of favored, better-paid workers — skilled tradesmen, foremen, and the like — that the Oligarchy deliberately cultivates and privileges above the general proletariat, buying their loyalty and thereby fracturing labor's solidarity, a divide-and-rule strategy the novel presents as essential to how the Iron Heel maintains power for centuries.
- Related: The Oligarchy, The Mercenaries
- The Mercenaries
- The Oligarchy's private standing army, recruited from the ranks of labor itself and given privileged status and scarlet livery in exchange for loyalty — the force that crushes machine-breaking, strikes, and both the First and Second Revolts, and that carries out the Iron Heel's executions, including Ernest Everhard's, without any surviving record.
- Related: The Oligarchy, The Labor Caste, The Chicago Commune
- The Oligarchy
- The ruling structure the trust magnates build after crushing democracy and the labor movement — a hereditary caste of trust owners maintained by a private standing army of Mercenaries and a co-opted, privileged Labor Caste, ruling through terror, a controlled press, and the deliberate expropriation of farmers and the middle class alike.
- Related: The Iron Heel, The Mercenaries, The Labor Caste
- The People of the Abyss
- London's term (echoing his own 1903 nonfiction book of the same name) for the most degraded, brutalized underclass produced by the Iron Heel's rule — dramatized in a harrowing Chicago Commune set-piece as a drink-maddened mob, "dumb apathy" turned suddenly "dynamic," surging through the streets seeking the blood of their masters, only to be hunted down and driven into Lake Michigan by the Mercenaries in a deliberate mass-drowning that succeeds in killing some forty thousand of them.
- Related: The Mercenaries, The First Revolt (The Chicago Commune)
- The Second Revolt
- The planned, mature, internationally coordinated uprising Ernest Everhard is organizing at the time of his capture and execution in 1932 — intended, unlike the premature First Revolt, to succeed through simultaneous risings across the labor countries of the world. Meredith's Foreword discloses from the outset that it, too, was crushed, with catastrophic consequences including the collapse of socialist governments in Germany, Italy, France, and Australasia, and that centuries of further failed revolts followed before the Brotherhood of Man finally triumphed.
- Related: Ernest Everhard, The First Revolt (The Chicago Commune), The Brotherhood of Man
- The Trusts (The Plutocracy)
- The small number of enormous industrial combines — seven great trusts working in coordination — whose consolidated economic power is the seed from which the Oligarchy grows, controlling railroad rates, bank credit, stock prices, and eventually the political system itself, expropriating farmers, small capitalists, and labor alike in their drive to eliminate competition and surplus.
- Related: The Oligarchy, The Expropriation of the Farmers
- The Wonder Cities (Ardis and Asgard)
- The Oligarchy's grand architectural projects — beautiful planned cities built for the ruling class by immense standing armies of forced serf labor, half a million to over a million workers at a stretch, taking decades to complete (Ardis finished in 1942, Asgard not until 1984). Meredith's own dateline places him writing centuries later from Ardis, now capital of the triumphant Brotherhood of Man — the same city built by slave labor repurposed, after the revolution's final success, as a free society's home.
- Related: The Oligarchy, The Labor Caste, The Brotherhood of Man
W
- Wake Robin Lodge
- The small bungalow in California's Sonoma Hills where Avis Everhard fled after her husband's execution to write her manuscript in hiding — and where, seven centuries later, it is found undisturbed inside a hollow oak, the sole surviving record of her life with Ernest and the earliest days of the Iron Heel.
- Related: Avis Everhard, The Everhard Manuscript
- William Randolph Hearst (as Depicted)
- A real historical figure London fictionalizes within the novel's footnote apparatus as a doomed middle-class demagogue — a newspaper magnate preaching an "emasculated socialism" combined with petty-bourgeois capitalism, destroyed by the Plutocracy simply by cutting off the advertising revenue his papers depended on, since (unlike the trusts, which needed no advertising) his financial base was entirely middle-class.
- Related: The Trusts, The General Strike