The Iron Heel quotes

There are butterflies in the sunshine, and from everywhere arises the drowsy hum of bees. It is so quiet and peaceful, and I sit here, and ponder, and am restless. It is the quiet that makes me restless. It seems unreal.

All the world is quiet, but it is the quiet before the storm.

I strain my ears, and all my senses, for some betrayal of that impending storm. Oh, that it may not be premature! That it may not be premature!

In my ears are the cries of the stricken; and I can see, as I have seen in the past, all the marring and mangling of the sweet, beautiful flesh, and the souls torn with violence from proud bodies and hurled to God.

Thus do we poor humans attain our ends, striving through carnage and destruction to bring lasting peace and happiness upon the earth.

And then I am lonely. When I do not think of what is to come, I think of what has been and is no more—my Eagle, beating with tireless wings the void, soaring toward what was ever his sun, the flaming ideal of human freedom.

“As you say, you do not understand,” Ernest replied. “The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively from the facts of experience. The metaphysician reasons from theory to facts, the scientist reasons from facts to theory.

The metaphysician explains the universe by himself, the scientist explains himself by the universe.

”

As fast as the ascertained facts of science have overthrown their subjective explanations of things, they have made new subjective explanations of things, including explanations of the latest ascertained facts. And this, I doubt not, they will go on doing to the end of time.

Gentlemen, a metaphysician is a medicine man.

The difference between you and the Eskimo who makes a fur-clad blubber-eating god is merely a difference of several thousand years of ascertained facts. That is all.”

And always he checked them back to facts. “The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!” he would proclaim triumphantly, when he had brought one of them a cropper.

He bristled with facts. He tripped them up with facts, ambuscaded them with facts, bombarded them with broadsides of facts.

“You seem to worship at the shrine of fact,” Dr. Hammerfield taunted him.

“I take it as proof that Berkeley’s metaphysics did not work, because—” Ernest paused calmly for a moment. “

Because Berkeley made an invariable practice of going through doors instead of walls.

Because he trusted his life to solid bread and butter and roast beef. Because he shaved himself with a razor that worked when it removed the hair from his face.”

“Yes, pig-ethics,” Ernest went on remorselessly. “That is the meaning of the capitalist system. And that is what your church is standing for, what you are preaching for every time you get up in the pulpit.

Pig-ethics! There is no other name for it.

”

“The Church does not protest against it,” Ernest replied. “

And in so far as the Church does not protest, it condones, for remember the Church is supported by the capitalist class.

”

“Nothing much,” he began slowly, “except that the gown you wear is stained with blood. The food you eat is a bloody stew.

The blood of little children and of strong men is dripping from your very roof-beams.

I can close my eyes, now, and hear it drip, drop, drip, drop, all about me.”

“

The crunchin’ of the bones wasn’t nice

,” was his answer.

“What’s right got to do with it?” he demanded back. “You see all those books.” He moved his hand over the array of volumes on the walls of his tiny office. “

All my reading and studying of them has taught me that law is one thing and right is another thing.

Ask any lawyer. You go to Sunday-school to learn what is right. But you go to those books to learn … law.”

“

I’d let me soul an’ body burn in everlastin’ hell for them children of mine

,” was his answer.

“Nor will you be able to take pleasure in sackcloth,” he said gravely. “There are the jute mills, you know, and the same thing goes on there. It goes on everywhere.

Our boasted civilization is based upon blood, soaked in blood, and neither you nor I nor any of us can escape the scarlet stain.

The men you talked with—who were they?”

“I know it is,” he said sadly. “But it is expedient doctrine.

I am a revolutionist, and it is a perilous vocation.

”

“Oh, by the way, while you are ruining your own peace of mind and I am ruining the Bishop’s, you’d better look up Mrs. Wickson and Mrs. Pertonwaithe. Their husbands, you know, are the two principal stockholders in the Mills.

Like all the rest of humanity, those two women are tied to the machine, but they are so tied that they sit on top of it.

”

I did not get an answer.

Colonel Ingram had ingloriously bolted, overturning a palm in his flight.

Next I tried the newspapers. I wrote a quiet, restrained, dispassionate account of Jackson’s case. I made no charges against the men with whom I had talked, nor, for that matter, did I even mention them.

You see, the masters are quite sure that they are right in what they are doing. That is the crowning absurdity of the whole situation.

They are so tied by their human nature that they can’t do a thing unless they think it is right.

They must have a sanction for their acts.

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, some day, will have an excruciating laugh at their expense.

”

His arms were around me before I knew. His lips were on mine before I could protest or resist. Before his earnestness conventional maiden dignity was ridiculous. He swept me off my feet by the splendid invincible rush of him.

He did not propose. He put his arms around me and kissed me and took it for granted that we should be married.

There was no discussion about it. The only discussion—and that arose afterward—was when we should be married.

“

You have failed in your management. You have made a shambles of civilization.

You have been blind and greedy. You have risen up (as you today rise up), shamelessly, in our legislative halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the toil of children and babes. Don’t take my word for it.

A million and a half of the men of the working class say that they are going to get the rest of the working class to join with them and take the management away from you.

This is the revolution, my masters. Stop it if you can.

”

As for the dozen men who were clamoring for the floor, half of them began speaking at once. The confusion and babel was indescribable. Never had Mrs. Pertonwaithe’s spacious walls beheld such a spectacle.

These, then, were the cool captains of industry and lords of society, these snarling, growling savages in evening clothes.

Truly Ernest had shaken them when he stretched out his hands for their moneybags, his hands that had appeared in their eyes as the hands of the fifteen hundred thousand revolutionists.

And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words—Power.

Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it.

Power.”

“It is the only answer that could be given. Power. It is what we of the working class preach. We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you.

Your hearts are hard as your heels with which you tread upon the faces of the poor.

So we have preached power. By the power of our ballots on election day will we take your government away from you—”

“

I mean that there is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land.

Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted to say was this:

He is a pure, exalted soul, but he is so unpractical. He’s beyond me. I can’t keep his feet on the earth. And through the air he is rushing on to his Gethsemane. And after this his crucifixion.

Such high souls are made for crucifixion.

”

It is an old trick, old as the class struggle is old—stealing the captains from the army of labor. Poor betrayed labor! If you but knew how many of its leaders have been bought out in similar ways in the past.

It is cheaper, so much cheaper, to buy a general than to fight him and his whole army.

There was—but I’ll not call any names. I’m bitter enough over it as it is. Dear heart, I am a captain of labor. I could not sell out.

The house in which I live cost a hundred thousand dollars, and its furnishings, books, and works of art cost as much more. The house is a mansion. No, it is a palace, wherein there are many servants.

I never knew what palaces were good for. I had thought they were to live in. But now I know.

I took the two women of the street to my palace, and they are going to stay with me. I hope to fill every room in my palace with such sisters as they.”

“Just wait and see,” was the answer. “Not a line, not a thought that he uttered.

The daily press? The daily suppressage!

”

“What honest man, who is not insane, would take lost women and thieves into his house to dwell with him sisterly and brotherly? True, Christ died between two thieves, but that is another story.

Insanity? The mental processes of the man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong.

Therefore the mind of the man is wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and insane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one’s most sane conclusions.

“Poor simple folk,” Ernest said to me in an undertone. “

They see clearly as far as they see, but they see only to the ends of their noses.

”

… you squeezed out the three small groceries here in Berkeley by virtue of your superior combination, you swelled out your chest, talked about efficiency and enterprise, and sent your wife to Europe on the profits you had gained by eating up the three small groceries.

It is dog eat dog, and you ate them up.

But, on the other hand, you are being eaten up in turn by the bigger dogs, wherefore you squeal. And what I say to you is true of all of you at this table. You are all squealing.

You are in the midst of a transition stage now in economic evolution, but you do not understand it, and that’s what causes all the confusion. Why cannot you return? Because you can’t.

You can no more make water run up hill than can you cause the tide of economic evolution to flow back in its channel along the way it came.

Joshua made the sun stand still upon Gibeon, but you would outdo Joshua. You would make the sun go backward in the sky. You would have time retrace its steps from noon to morning.

And man has been achieving greater and greater combinations ever since. It is combination versus competition, a thousand centuries long struggle, in which competition has always been worsted.

Whoso enlists on the side of competition perishes.

”

“Not when the government suspends civil law. In that day when you speak of rising in your strength, your strength would be turned against yourself. Into the militia you would go, willy-nilly. Habeas corpus, I heard someone mutter just now.

Instead of habeas corpus you would get post mortems.

If you refused to go into the militia, or to obey after you were in, you would be tried by drumhead court martial and shot down like dogs. It is the law.”

And in the time to come, when you rise in your strength, remember that you will be rising against the property of the trusts, and the liberty of the trusts, according to the law, to squeeze you.

Your teeth are pulled, gentlemen. Your claws are trimmed.

In the day you rise in your strength, toothless and clawless, you will be as harmless as any army of clams.”

The ownership of the world, along with the machines, lies between the trusts and labor. That is the battle alignment. Neither side wants the destruction of the machines. But each side wants to possess the machines. In this battle the middle class has no place.

The middle class is a pygmy between two giants.

Don’t you see, you poor perishing middle class, you are caught between the upper and nether millstones, and even now has the grinding begun.

“Then,” Ernest answered, “you, and labor, and all of us, will be crushed under the iron heel of a despotism as relentless and terrible as any despotism that has blackened the pages of the history of man.

That will be a good name for that despotism, the Iron Heel.

”

But you have the concrete wealth, twenty-four billions of it, and the Plutocracy will take it away from you. Of course, there is the large likelihood that the proletariat will take it away first. Don’t you see your position, gentlemen?

The middle class is a wobbly little lamb between a lion and a tiger. If one doesn’t get you, the other will.

And if the Plutocracy gets you first, why it’s only a matter of time when the Proletariat gets the Plutocracy.

Amidst the crashing of the middle men, the small businessmen and manufacturers, the trusts stood firm. Nay, the trusts did more than stand firm. They were active.

They sowed wind, and wind, and ever more wind; for they alone knew how to reap the whirlwind and make a profit out of it.

And such profits! Colossal profits! Strong enough themselves to weather the storm that was largely their own brewing, they turned loose and plundered the wrecks that floated about them.

There was the matter of the house—our home. A mortgage was foreclosed on it, and we had to give up possession.

Of course there wasn’t any mortgage, and never had been any mortgage.

The ground had been bought outright, and the house had been paid for when it was built. And house and lot had always been free and unencumbered.

“Six cents, lady,” she said, nodding her head gently while she went on stitching. She stitched slowly, but never did she cease from stitching.

She seemed mastered by the verb “to stitch.”

“For all that work?” I asked. “Is that what they pay? How long does it take you?”

“No, it is not the hunger that makes the heart ache,” she explained. “

You get used to being hungry. It is for my child that I cry.

It was the machine that killed her. It is true she worked hard, but I cannot understand. She was strong. And she was young—only forty; and she worked only thirty years. She began young, it is true; but my man died.

“For truly now,” he said, “I am feeding his lambs. And I have learned a great lesson.

The soul cannot be ministered to till the stomach is appeased.

His lambs must be fed bread and butter and potatoes and meat; after that, and only after that, are their spirits ready for more refined nourishment.”

“The money? I have it deposited in many different banks under different names. It can never be taken away from me, because it can never be found. And it is so good, that money. It buys so much food.

I never knew before what money was good for.

”

“Christ told the rich young man to sell all he had,” Ernest said bitterly. “The Bishop obeyed Christ’s injunction and got locked up in a madhouse. Times have changed since Christ’s day.

A rich man today who gives all he has to the poor is crazy. There is no discussion. Society has spoken.

”

For the first time the German warlord faced the men of his empire who made his empire go. Without them he could not run his empire. The novelty of the situation lay in that their revolt was passive. They did not fight. They did nothing.

And by doing nothing they tied their warlord’s hands.

He would have asked for nothing better than an opportunity to loose his war-dogs on his rebellious proletariat. But this was denied him. He could not loose his war-dogs.

The general strike took the form of a great national picnic. And the idea of the solidarity of labor, so evidenced, appealed to the imagination of all. And, finally, there was no danger to be incurred by the colossal frolic.

When everybody was guilty, how was anybody to be punished?

The United States was paralyzed. No one knew what was happening. There were no newspapers, no letters, no despatches. Every community was as completely isolated as though ten thousand miles of primeval wilderness stretched between it and the rest of the world.

“Do you know what will happen to Farley and his strikebreakers? I’ll tell you. Strikebreaking as an occupation will cease.

There won’t be any more strikes. In place of strikes will be slave revolts.

Farley and his gang will be promoted to slave-driving. Oh, it won’t be called that; it will be called enforcing the law of the land that compels the laborers to work. It simply prolongs the fight, this treachery of the big unions.

“

Social evolution is exasperatingly slow, isn’t it, sweetheart?

”

It was slow work, and perilous, and often were our efforts rewarded with costly failures.

The Iron Heel had triumphed in open warfare, but we held our own in the new warfare, strange and awful and subterranean, that we instituted.

All was unseen, much was unguessed; the blind fought the blind; and yet through it all was order, purpose, control. We permeated the entire organization of the Iron Heel with our agents, while our own organization was permeated with the agents of the Iron Heel.

“

Listen to the bellowing of the well-fed beasts.

”

but in moments like this I regret my unbelief. Nay, in moments like this I almost do believe. Surely there must be a hell, for in 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 hellfire in the Cosmos.

”

There wasn’t enough powder in it. It made a lot of smoke, but hurt no one except me. It exploded right at my feet, and yet it did not kill me.

Believe me, when I get to throwing bombs, I’ll do damage. There’ll be more than smoke in my petards.

”

He testified to this at the trial, but no one believed him. Besides, the whole thing, in popular slang, was “cooked up.” The Iron Heel had made up its mind to destroy us, and there was no withstanding it.

There is a saying that truth will out. I have come to doubt that saying.

Nineteen years have elapsed, and despite our untiring efforts, we have failed to find the man who really did throw the bomb. Undoubtedly he was some emissary of the Iron Heel, but he has escaped detection.

He was mad for life. It was pitiable. He refused to let go of me, despite the hands of a dozen comrades. And when at last he was dragged shrieking away, I sank down fainting upon the floor.

It is far easier to see brave men die than to hear a coward beg for life.

They had better food to eat, less hours of labor, more holidays, and a greater amount and variety of interests and pleasures. And for their less fortunate brothers and sisters, the unfavored laborers, the driven people of the abyss, they cared nothing.

An age of selfishness was dawning upon mankind.

And yet this is not altogether true. The labor castes were honeycombed by our agents—men whose eyes saw, beyond the belly-need, the radiant figure of liberty and brotherhood.

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.

For that matter, the strength of the Revolution, during these frightful twenty years, has resided in nothing else than the sense of righteousness. In no other way can be explained our sacrifices and martyrdoms.

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.

And just now the word has gone forth that new levies are being imposed for the building of Asgard, the projected wonder-city that will far exceed Ardis when the latter is completed.

And yet, outside of pain, the only feeling I possessed was one of curiosity. How was it going to end? What would death be like? Thus did I receive my red baptism in that Chicago shambles.

Prior to that, death to me had been a theory; but ever afterward death has been a simple fact that does not matter, it is so easy.

But the Mercenaries were not content with what they had done. They invaded the entrance, killing the wounded and searching out the unhurt that, like ourselves, were playing dead.

The automobile drew up at a railroad station. Here we would catch a train to New York. As we waited on the platform, three trains thundered past, bound west to Chicago. They were crowded with ragged, unskilled laborers, people of the abyss.

“Slave-levies for the rebuilding of Chicago,” Ernest said. “You see, the Chicago slaves are all killed.”