The Iron Heel

The Iron Heel is a political novel in the form of science fiction by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908. Background The main premise of the book is the rise of a socialist mass movement in the United Statesstrong enough to have a real chance of winning national elections, getting to power, and implementing a radical socialist regime. Conservatives feel alarmed and threatened by this prospect, to the point of seizing power and establishing a brutal dictatorship in order to avert it. There were some grounds for London to speculate in that direction. In fact, the labor activity in the U.S. had been growing since the late 19th century, with a fourfold increase in union membership in the U.S. from 1880 to 1890 and a tide of union activity in the next few decades. The armament industry of U.S., among others, became strongholds of workers and antiwar militancy; labor unrest peaked in 1919 with over four million workers on strike. By the 1930s and into the 1940s, the largest share of the total labor unrest was in North America; from 1941, with over 4,300 strikes involving 2 million workers. In 1945, a strike by Oil Worker International Union at a Standard Oil facility, spread, affecting the highest number of workers in U.S. history – over 10 percent of the U.S. labor force, with over 5,000 strikes of 4.6 million workers. All that labor militancy was, however, never channeled into a political party with a radical Socialist program. Rather, American unions found a political home in the Democratic Party, which neither was nor claimed to be Socialist, and American Conservatives never felt impelled to take such drastic steps as London foresaw. Something like London's scenario did happen in other countries. Mass left-wing movements arose in Italy in the early 1920s, in Germany in the early 1930s, and in Spain in the late 1930s, leading Conservatives in those countries to support, respectively, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco, out of motives similar to those of Jack London's "Oligarchs".