Did Jack London write the SF novel of the Second Trump Presidency?
One of the benefits of reading early science fiction is seeing the many ways these tales of future reflect the past when they were written. The timing of many SF hall of fame stories coincide with major historical events, from Murray Leinster’s First Contact being published the month of Nazi surrender or Judith Merril’s Only a Mother being published the month that Truman and Stalin gave the speeches that inflamed the cold war. The most powerful of SF stories exist outside of time and comment on today as much as they express the thinking of writer’s in the past. One novel that exists in that weird space outside of time is Jack London’s The Iron Heel.
I can’t wrap my head around the idea of how political power was taught, communicated, or reported on in 1907. This is 19 years before Gernbeck used these Amazing Stories to name our genre itself. Teddy Roosevelt had honored his promise not to run for a third term and Republican William Taft beat William Jennings Bryan. Taft was a Yale Skull and Bones guy (like GW Bush and John Kerry) who was fresh off being the secretary of War and his election was on the mind of Radical leftie Jack London sat at a typewriter in the Bay Area and wrote The Iron Heel.
I had made up my mind to read it a few months back when I first heard of it reading Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder. When I put a hold on it, I still thought Kamala Harris was going to save us from another four years of orange-tinted Fascism but here we are. Early in the first Trump presidency, there were many think pieces about the 1934 warning novel It Can’t Happen Here. I read in 2018, and I understood why many felt that it was an important warning.
Written in 1935 Sinclair Lewis wrote this novel over the summer in an obvious attempt to make a point before the 1936 election 88 years ago. There was a speculative aspect as he was writing about an election that at the time had not happened yet. In that election, the democrats were in a primary battle between FDR and a candidate who was a very Trump-like rich populist who was the governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. Lewis was very worried about Long bringing fascism into power if he defeated Roosevelt in that election. He had some far-left views about redistributing wealth but he was also extremely racist. Lewis saw this democrat as being America’s answer to fascism.
What makes that novel interesting is that when it was released it was a dystopian work of speculative fiction. 88 years later it has accidentally become an alternate history novel not unlike Philip K Dick’s Hugo award-winning classic Man in the High Castle. Alternate examples of American Fascism like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America can not be added to the novel whose warnings failed to teach us the right lesson. As Trump tries to flood the zone with executive orders daring judges to stop him from many political moves unthinkable before Project 2025, it feels like these novels failed in their attempts to hold off American Fascism.
It is important to note that Lewis was warning his readers about Hitler more than three years before the Germans invaded Poland. So, he got some things correct. I was surprised by the mentions of concentration camps as I was not sure that anyone in the U.S. knew about them at the time. Sinclair Lewis painted a grim vision, and when I read in 2018 I never thought he would get a second term, I thought the comparisons to the fascist in the Lewis novel were exaggerations. How successful could Trump be? He is a clown. I like many thought he could not bout politically survive January 6th, right?
All that said… with all respect to Sinclair Lewis it fucking has happened here, and I wondered about the role Science Fiction plays. I wondered if it was a modern novel like Ray Nayler’s Where the Axe is Buried (due out in April) or a classic like The Iron Heel has more to say about the moment. Jack London is most well know as the author of the Man vs. Nature classic “The Call of the Wild.” He did however write plenty of genre fiction, author Laird Barron has often referred to the 1902 classic “To Build a Fire” as one of the best all-time cosmic horror stories, and Citadel Twilight has an entire collection of London’s science fiction.
From a purely experimental SF narrative, the way it is composed is super creative. Writing during the build-up to the Taft election London was trying to paint a picture of the working class rising up in the future (1915-ish so future for him) There is a narrative set during this era but excellent moments of super-text footnotes that are the most Science Fictional parts as the idea is that these footnotes were written centuries in the future by a historian. The edition I read also has an introduction by Leon Trotsky who read the book and wrote the introduction after Stalin exiled him and he found his way to France. That is not messing around on the introduction.
The Iron Heel is an intensely radical work of Science Fiction, not just for 1908, it would be considered radical even if it was written today. It is hard to dispassionately rate the SF qualities without addressing the politics. In the process of working on another project, I accidentally discovered a review of The Iron Heel by Damon Knight from 1958. He described it as having exuberant and clumsy conviction. The novel was half a century old already at that point. It was strange to read. Knight who was known for acidic rarely positive reviews was impressed at the point that the book was more SF than he expected. I had the same experience reading the novel when it was 116 years old.
London is acutely aware that the system doesn’t just exploit the workers but he points out that the products the workers make are owned by the system. The system depends on having cogs, as much as what the cogs produce.
“It is precisely what I am doing. And we intend to take, not the mere wealth in the houses, but all the sources of that wealth, all the minds, and railroads, and factories, and banks, and stores. That is the revolution; it is truly perilous. There will be more shooting, I’m afraid, then I even dream of. But what I am saying, no one today is a free agent. We are all caught in the wheels and cogs of the industrial machine. You found that you were, that the men you talked with were. Talk with more of them. Go and see Colonel Ingram. Look up the reporters that kept Jason’s case out of the papers, and the editors will run the papers. You will find them all slaves of the machine.”
As Trump returns to office he is empowering the richest cabinet in the history of the government. Men and women with large capital assets whose only qualification is loyalty to Trump. The idea that we need business people to run government shows a complete lack of understanding for what the government does. We’re all getting a quick education in how quickly one can ruin a government.
“The weakness in their position lies in that they are merely businessmen. They are not philosophers. They are not biologists or sociologists. If they were, of course, all would be well. A businessman who was also a biologist and a sociologist would know, approximately, the right thing to do for humanity. But outside the realm of business, these men are stupid they know only business. They do not know mankind nor society, and yet they set themselves up as arbiters of the fates of the hungry millions and all the other millions thrown in. History, someday, will have an excruciating laugh at their expense.”
We have seen the mainstream media has shown no ability to stand up to Trump, and becoming a rubber stamp of agenda. Even old guards of the mainstream media like Dan Rather have admitted the media is not up to the task but this is something that Jack London foreshadowed.
“The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist class. Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it.”
The exploitation of voters, who vote against their own self-interest was explored in the Iron Heel by the slow dismantling of the middle class.
“The whole middle class had not yet been exterminated. The sturdy skeleton of it remained, but it was without power. The small manufacturers and small businessmen who still survived were at the complete mercy of the plutocracy. They had no economic or political souls of their own. When the Fiat of the plutocracy went forth, they withdrew their advertisements from the Hearst papers.”
In the Iron Heel, there is a political party called the Grangers. Were they supposed to represent the democrats, at the time? Maybe but they are a political party that refuses to accept their political losses. January 6th and the years of jury-rigging the political system make clear who the Grangers speak to now.
“The trouble arose first with the Grangers in the various states that had captured in the last election. There were dozens of these states, but the Grangers who had been elected were not permitted to take office. The incumbents refused to get out. It was very simple. They merely changed illegality in the elections and wrapped up the whole situation and interminable red tape of the law. The grandeurs were powerless. The courts were in the hands of their enemies.”
The courts being rigged goes back to Mitch McConnell not letting Obama nominate a supreme court justice, but it is not like London didn’t see this coming in 1908.
“And yet you call me an anarchist. You, who have destroyed the government of the people, and who shamelessly flaunt your scarlet shame in public places, call me anarchist. I do not believe in Hellfire and brimstone, But in moments like this I regret my unbelief. Nay, in these moments like this I almost do believe. Surely there must be a hell, for no less place could it be possible for you to receive punishment adequate to your crimes. So long as you exist, there is a vital need for the hellfire in the cosmos.”
Who could piss off Canada? Who could really destroy our system? I thought in the past that I wanted to disrupt the system, but to do so in the light and or direction of justice. It is like every horrible and awful thing that Trump can do he is doing it. In 1908 Jack London foresaw a battle happening between the proletariat and the oligarchy. When he conceived of this battle he envisioned was hot-air balloons being used by the government to destroy the resistance. It was that long ago that Jack London was writing about the battle over the system itself.
“But to return to the people of the abyss. My experiences were confined to them they raged and slaughtered and destroyed all over the city proper, and were in turn destroyed; But never once did they succeed in reaching the city of the oligarchs over on the West side. The oligarchs had protected themselves well no matter what destruction was wrecked in the heart of the city, they and their woman’s kind and children, were to escape hers. I am told there are children played in the parks during those terrible days and that their favorite game was an imitation of their elders stamping upon the proletariat.”
I am struck by the idea that London saw the oligarch’s children playing in the parks while their parents cause suffering among the proletariat. Will we see the proletariat wake up? Trump admitted he won the election because of the price of groceries. Jack London, when writing a future, assumed that the people would wake up and discover their strength. He wrote about the condition of workers but it might be prices that Trump has yet to fix.
“There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is greater because it cannot be taken away. Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers. This strength we cannot be stripped of. It is the primitive strength, it is the strength that is to life germane, it is the strength that is stronger than wealth, and that wealth cannot take away. “But your strength is detachable. It can be taken away from you. Even now the Plutocracy is taking it away from you. In the end, it will take it all away from you. And then you will cease to be the middle class. You will descend to us. You will become proletarians. And the beauty of it is that you will then add to our strength. We will hail you brothers, and we will fight shoulder to shoulder in the cause of humanity. “You”
The Iron Heel is an SF reminder of the stakes, the reasons we fight and lose. There is a strength greater than wealth. Imagination. Imagination helps us envision a different world. I found the experience of reading this book to be powerful it highlights the struggles, but it also does what Science fiction does best. So us a future worth reaching for.
