The Iron Heel and 1984-Part One

This is a story of two families, two writers, and two books.

John Griffith Chaney was born on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California. The man who is believed to have been his father, William Chaney, was an attorney and a journalist. Chaney was also an astrologer. For some time in the 1870s William Chaney lived with a woman named Flora Wellman. Whether the two were married or not is a question that may never be answered. Like the supposed father of her child, Flora Wellman had skills both practical and whack-tical. In addition to teaching music, she conducted seances during which she is supposed to have channeled the spirit of Black Hawk.

Chaney the astrologer and Wellman the spiritualist were a pair, but not for long. She became pregnant and announced publicly that Chaney had demanded that she have an abortion. He disclaimed parentage. She shot herself. Temporarily deranged at around the time of her son's birth, she gave him into the care of a former slave named Virginia Prentiss. Late in 1876, Flora Wellman married John London, a disabled Civil War veteran. Having earlier gained a new surname, Flora Wellman's son, the adolescent John London, began calling himself Jack. Jack London went on to become an extraordinarily prolific, active, and successful author of short stories, novels, and non-fiction. Like a fast-burning candle, he soon exhausted himself and died on November 22, 1916, at his ranch near Glen Ellen, California. He was just forty years old.

Like an apple, Jack London didn't fall far from his parents' tree. Son of an astrologer who repudiated him and a once-deranged spiritualist who was unable to give him everything that a fatherless boy might need, Jack London became an atheist and a socialist. In other words, he subscribed, like them, to beliefs with little purchase on reality. That's a simplistic assessment to be sure. I prefer what Clarice Stasz wrote in her online biography: "[The] contradictory themes in his life and writing make him a difficult figure to reduce to simple terms." I am reminded of our current president, who was also repudiated by his father and more or less rejected by his mother, both of whom also subscribed to whacky beliefs. Like London, he was a drug-user and is more or less leftist in orientation. Moreover, his beliefs have seemingly arrived on the fringes of reality. My belief is that he will never be able to forgive the world for what his parents did to him and that he will forever wish to punish us all for their inadequacies. One difference between these two orphans is that Jack London was a man of action and accomplishment. (1)

Jack London moved in socialist circles, an apt image for a belief system that--like the worm Ouroboros--has aspects of inversion, solipsism, and infantilism. American socialists of his time included Victor L. Berger (1860-1929), Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), William James Ghent (1866-1942), George D. Herron (1862-1925), Morris Hillquit (1869-1933), and London's fellow author Edward Bellamy (1850-1898). As a Hoosier, I find it interesting that Debs, Ghent, and Herron were all from Indiana. Ghent was also a member of a Bellamy Club, also called Nationalist Clubs for their desire to nationalize industry. The Bellamy Clubs were named for the author of Looking Backward: 2000-1887, published in early 1888. On December 1, 1888, the Boston Nationalist Club met for the first time. According to a source on Wikipedia,

Boston club members were overwhelmingly of the middle class and included no small number of Theosophists. . . . Indeed, fully half of the members of the first Nationalist Club were members of the Theosophical Society, including key leaders [Cyrus Field] Willard and [Sylvester] Baxter. (2)

I have included the reference to the middle class to point out that revolutionaries are often, if not exclusively, drawn from the middle class. And I have included the reference to Theosophy because of its place, along with socialism and countless other related beliefs, in the ever-expanding web of crackpot ideas spun from the nineteenth century. I am reminded once again of the quote from "The Miracle of Moon Crescent" by G.K. Chesterton (1924):

You hard-shelled materialists were all balanced on the very edge of belief--of belief in almost anything.

Put another way, once people stop believing in God, they are likely to believe in anything, no matter how preposterous. Or, as John Cougar Mellencamp sang, you've got to stand for something, or you'll fall for anything.

Those early American Socialists and Bellamyites tended to come from religious backgrounds. Their number included George D. Herron, a Congregationalist minister and a teacher at Ripon College in Wisconsin and Grinnell College in Iowa, two schools with ties to Congregationalism and/or Presbyterianism. Herron was married three times. His first wife was Mary Vennette Everhard (1861-1935), daughter of Dr. Aaron Everhard (1824-1892) and granddaughter of John Jacob Everhard (1792-1867), a founder of Emmanuel Church in Wayne County, Ohio, and described as "rigid and uncompromising in his religious belief." (3) Mary Vennette Everhard's mother was Ann Vennette Marsh Everhard (1834-1922). The name Vennette cropped up in at least three generations of Everhard women. The youngest to bear that name was Ann's granddaughter, Margaret Vennette Herron (1885-1973), daughter of George D. Herron and Mary Vennette Everhard. Margaret, better known by her pen name Vennette Herron, wrote a couple of collections of stories. She also contributed to Weird Tales magazine.

In 1908 Macmillan published The Iron Heel, Jack London's supposedly dystopian novel involving early twentieth-century American socialists and the opposing Oligarchy or Plutocracy of wealthy capitalists, The Iron Heel of the title. I say "supposedly" because the book is actually a combination dystopia/utopia, with two narratives running simultaneously. The main narrative, told in the first person by the wife of a revolutionary, is dystopian and describes The Iron Heel in its formative years, 1912-1932. The sub-narrative, if you want to call it that, is indirect and takes the form of footnotes to the main narrative, which has been discovered many centuries later, after the establishment of a socialist utopia. The Iron Heel is an overtly political novel, a combination of fiction, journalistic exposé, and Jeremiad. It's also something of a hagiography of the narrator's husband, a Christ-like figure who knows all and foresees all. The socialist William James Ghent is mentioned in the book (Bantam, 1971, p. 146), as are many other real people, places, and events. They include the author's own Wake Robin Lodge near Glen Ellen, California, and probably also the author himself, who romantically prophesied his own death:

Once a writer friend of mine had owned the ranch [a hiding place for revolutionaries]; but he, too, had become a revolutionist, though more disastrously than I, for he was already dead and gone, and none knew where or how. (p. 179)

The narrator by the way is named Avis Cunningham Everhard. Her husband, the subject of The Iron Heel, is Ernest Everhard. The temptation is to interpret that name as having some psychosexual meaning. (4) I have a better explanation. Avis' father, like Vennette Herron's father, is a college professor. Ernest Everhard also has something in common with Vennette Herron, for her mother and he share the surname Everhard. I don't think that's any coincidence at all.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) My reason for bringing up the president isn't just as a critique. I'll have more to say later in this series.
(2) The source is Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement by Arthur Lipow (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), p. 226. Cyrus Field Willard (1858-1942) was an American socialist, Bellamyite, Theosophist, and--incongruously--inventor. Sylvester Baxter (1850-1927) was also an American, an urban planner, Bellamyite, Theosophist, and newspaperman.

(3) From History of the Eberharts in Germany and the United States from A. D 1265 to A. D. 1890--625 Years by Uriah Eberhart (Donohue and Henneberry, 1891), p. 70.
(4) Rather than being sexual in its overtones, the name Everhard could just be symbolic of Ernest Everhard's great strength: what better man to resist the relentless Iron Heel than a man who is ever-hard. Likewise, the given name Ernest is obviously an evocation of the adjective earnest, from my dictionary, "serious in intention, purpose, or effort; sincerely zealous."

The Iron Heel in the Bantam paperback edition of 1971, with an introduction by the socialist, anarchist, and propagandist Howard Zinn (1922-2010).

Text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Vennette Herron (1885-1973)

Née Margaret Vennette Herron

Poet, Author

Born September 10, 1885, Zanesville, Ohio

Died March 15, 1973, Lakeland, Florida

You begin your research simply enough, but before long, the extravagant complexity of lives intrudes. A simple biographical sketch becomes a mere introduction to a story too big for the confines of blog entry. (And what an ugly word, blog.) An author of a single story in and a single letter to Weird Tales is revealed to be a most interesting woman, her life embedded in a fascinating story that begins in twin forces of poverty and religious fervor and includes in its chapters: agitation, scandal, exile, the building of institutions, world travel, marriages beginning and ending in exotic places, and even a fatal fall from an Egyptian pyramid. The woman was Vennette Herron, a teller of weird tales and so much more.

Poet and author Vennette Herron and her family all came out of the American Midwest. Her father, George Davis Herron (1862-1925) was a Hoosier, native of a small town with an exotic name, Montezuma, Indiana. His family was poor but devout, and Herron's childhood was "obsessed with premonitions of a religious world mission." He studied at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, from 1879 to 1882, in the process finding a wife in Mary V. Everhard, daughter of the mayor. The couple were married and Herron entered the Congregationalist ministry in 1883. For the next few years, the Herrons moved from state to state. Margaret Vennette Herron was born on September 11, 1885, in Zanesville, Ohio, her younger siblings in Wisconsin and Iowa. It was in Minnesota, however, that George Herron made a name for himself with an 1890 lecture, "The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth." That lecture led to a position in the pastorate at Burlington, Iowa, then to a professorship created especially for him at Iowa College, now known as Grinnell College.

The woman who endowed Herron's chair in Iowa was Caroline A. Sherfey Rand (1828-1905). (1) Her daughter, Carrie Rand (1867-1914) (2), also with Iowa College, worked closely with Herron in his new post. Perhaps inevitably, the two became lovers, and Herron gave up his post, his marriage, and his family to be with her. Although he was still in Grinnell, Iowa, in 1900, his previous life was coming to an end. He and the younger Carrie Rand were married in 1901 in Rochester, New York. Defrocked and vilified, he retreated with his new wife to Florence, Italy.

Vennette Herron, like her father, attended college when most people her age were still in high school, if in school at all. In 1900, at age fourteen, she was a college student in her adopted hometown of Grinnell, Iowa, where her father taught and lectured. A decade later, with the 1910 census, she was living in Newton, Massachusetts, with her mother and siblings. Vennette had married by then, but her husband, Charles B. Wagner, was nowhere in sight, at least in the enumerator's big book. Although her occupation was listed as "None," Vennette had already started in her career as a writer. From before World War I and into the 1930s, she authored stories for a number of magazines, including Ainslee's Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Romance, The Smart Set, Telling Tales, and Women's Stories. Her book Perfume and Poison, a mix of verse and fable, was printed in 1917 by a publishing house in Boston.

In 1921, Vennette Herron applied for a passport so that she could visit her father, then living in exile in Switzerland, as well as Italy and other European countries. In one way or another, she became sidetracked and ended up in Java, where she married soon enough a Dutch engineer named Johannes Jacobus van der Leeuw. The American vice consul presided at the couple's wedding in Batavia on the day after the bride's birthday, on September 11, 1922. The marriage was brief. In 1925, in The Hague, Vennette divorced her husband for "desertion." She lived in Florence for several years during the 1920s and '30s. In 1932, Vennette returned to the United States (as Vannetta van der Leeuw Herron), renewing her citizenship and settling in Darien, Connecticut. Two books came out of her experiences overseas: Peacocks and Other Stories of Java (1927) and Italian Love and Other Stories (1930). The New York Times liked Peacocks. In its review (Jan. 29, 1928), the paper wrote:

It is Miss Herron's curious achievement in "Peacocks" to paint for us a colorful and glamourous background of the East and yet, against that background, to show us people who become bored and estranged[,] and love which rather dies than endures.

Twice-divorced and the product of a broken home, Vennette Herron knew something of love and the end of love.

Vennette's father, George Davis Herron, married to Carrie Rand, and after her death in 1914, to Frieda Bertha Schöberle, fathered four additional children. Elbridge Rand Herron, a child of George D. Herron's second marriage, died from a fall from the pyramid at Giza in 1932. The elder Herron--Congregationalist minister, teacher, lecturer, author, socialist, and activist--died in Bavaria, Germany, on October 9, 1925. (3) His very full life amounted to just sixty-three years.

His daughter, Vennette Herron, wrote one letter to Weird Tales (Dec. 1934) and followed that up with a single story whose title almost looks like random typing, "Toean Matjan." (4) The story, involving a tiger, appeared in the January 1938 issue of "The Unique Magazine" and was illustrated by Virgil Finlay. That is the last credit I have found for Vennette Herron. She died on March 15, 1973, in Lakeland, Florida, at the age of eighty-seven.

Notes
(1) The Wikipedia entry on George D. Herron is incorrect in calling her Mrs. Elizabeth D. Rand. I believe the error comes from conflating her name with her husband's name. In any case, Carolyn Amanda Sherfey Rand was born on February 4, 1828, in Hagerstown, Maryland. Her husband, Elbridge Dexter Rand, was a very wealthy lumber merchant. (The total value of his estate in 1870 was $250,000.)
(2) Carrie Rand was born on March 17, 1867, in Burlington, Iowa. She applied for a passport on November 8, 1899, for purposes of traveling abroad in about November 1900. Her mother, the aforementioned Carrie A. Rand (aka Mrs. E.D. Rand), applied for a passport the same day for the same purpose. She gave her occupation as "capitalist." She and her daughter were similarly occupied at the time of the 1900 census.
(3) It's worth noting that George Davis Herron, a socialist, relied so heavily upon the auspices of a capitalist and upon the capitalist or free enterprise system. But this is always the case with socialists.

(4) A commenter below has translated the title to mean "Mister Tiger."

Vennette Herron's Letter and Story in Weird Tales

Letter to "The Eyrie" (Dec. 1934)

"Toean Matjan" (Jan. 1938)

Further Reading

There is a great deal of information available on George Davis Herron on the Internet, on Wikipedia and other sources. Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916 [Vol. 1], includes a lengthy entry on him. (The quote above is from that source.) His life and work would make a worthy project for a biographer. Vennette Herron's Perfume and Poison (1917) is available on the Internet. Her other books are common enough as to still be available, even on Ebay.

Vennette Herron's passport photograph, 1921, when she was in her mid-thirties and about to embark on a long and adventurous trip overseas.

One of the outcomes of her time in other countries was her collection Peacocks and Other Stories of Java (1927).

Revised slightly June 6, 2015; February 19, 2023.
Thanks to Randal A. Everts for providing the death date and place of Vennette Herron. Thanks to A Family Member for corrections and clarifications.
Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley