Jack London, Celebrity Socialist at 150

For more than 100 years, his short story, “To Build a Fire,” was required reading for nearly every school kid in the US, most likely to teach them the necessity of survival, though the tale might also have been read as a paean to dying. The fictional nameless protagonist perishes alone in the cold and the snow, unable to build a fire. He’s a failure, not a success story. Now, on the anniversary of his birth in San Francisco, 150 years ago, Jack London, like his fictional protagonist, might be called another dead white male consigned to the slagheap of largely forgotten American authors. Maybe that’s where he should have landed decades ago, though the Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman called him “the only revolutionary writer in America.”  What was she thinking and what did she mean by revolutionary?

It’s true that he belonged to the Socialist Party for 20 years and that he resigned, he explained in a letter, “because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle.” The US Socialist Party was against the US entering World War I. London was for it.  An odd sort of socialist, he wanted to be rich, live in a mansion on an estate with servants and in the manner of the robber barons he claimed were his enemies. With a democratic socialist newly elected the mayor of New York, it might be worthwhile to reexamine the political career of the radical Jack London who ran for mayor of Oakland twice and lost twice. Unlike Zohran Mamdani, he didn’t have a grassroots organization and local organizers with him.

True, he embraced genuine issues; he lobbied for the eight-hour-day and the end of child labor in factories. Also, to his credit, he defended Charles Moyer, William “Big Bill” Haywood and George Pettibone, the three members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) on trial in Idaho and falsely charged with the murder of governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905. That same year and in the wake of the abortive revolution in Russia, he gave rousing speeches from Berkeley to Harvard in which he called for violence and assassinations to overthrow the old order and usher in the new.

At the same time, he also supported the US invasion of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and argued that American Indians should abandon their ways and embrace the ways of the white man.

In a letter dated June 12, 1899, he wrote “The negro [sic] races, the mongrel races, the slavish races, the unprogressive races, are of bad blood – that is, of blood which is not qualified to permit them to successfully survive the selection by which the fittest survive.” Eleven days later he wrote about “the niggers of Africa,” as he called them, and insisted that socialism was “devised for the happiness of certain kindred races.” Twelve days before Christmas in 1899, London reiterated his white supremacist views and explained to a friend, “the black has stopped, just as the monkey has stopped. Never will even the highest anthropoid apes evolve into man; likewise the negro [sic] into a type of man higher than any existing.” Jay Craven, who directed the 2021 movie version of London’s autobiographical novel Martin Eden, was wise enough to cast Black actors in the roles of the fictional white characters and thereby forestall criticism.

London’s defenders have argued that he merely echoed the predominant views of his time. True, Jim Crow ruled much of the nation, but W. E. B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, the same year that The Call of the Wild was published, and in 1909, Du Bois and friends founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Oddly enough, though perhaps not, London was raised by a Black woman who he called “mammy” and described himself as her “white pickaninny,” surely knowing it was a racial slur.

While London was a socialist, he was also an imperialist, a jingoist and a racist; in short a man with contradictions galore that reflected the deep-seated social and political contradictions of American society in the aftermath of the Civil War and the run-up to World War I, a war he wanted the US to join and defeat the Germans. From 1896, when he joined the Socialist Party, until 1916 when he left it, London wasn’t a democratic socialist.

In the essay “How I Became a Socialist,” first published in Comrade in 1903, he wrote that fear of falling into  the “Social Pit” pushed him into the Socialist Party. “The woman of the streets and the man of the gutter drew very close to me,” he explained. “I saw them, saw myself above them…and I confess a terror seized me.” As his daughter Joan London pointed out in her biography of her father, he was attracted to strong charismatic figures, not grassroots organizers and organizations. He had much in common, Joan argued, with Mussolini. George Orwell noted that he had “a fascist strain.” By his own admission, London never attended a Socialist Party meeting.

A celebrity socialist, a socialist with a famous name, as well as a dynamic speaker with an entourage that included Mother Jones and Emma Goldman, he was used by the movement to promote the cause of socialism. He rarely if ever made sacrifices for it. Celebrities can be a liability; they popularize causes but they also draw attention to themselves and their careers as they did in the Sixties. In fact, socialist publications promoted London’s work and helped to make him a best-selling author. On a rare occasion, he was called a fake socialist who lived a life of luxury on Beauty Ranch in Sonoma County, far from the political fray.

If teachers had assigned his work to explore his contractions, London would have been the perfect author to place on reading lists. But for decades London scholars ignored his white supremacist views, jingoism and his fear and abhorrence of miscegenation. There were exceptions, such as Philip Foner, the editor of Jack London: American Rebel, a collection of London’s writings on social issues. Foner pointed out that London never denounced the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the South Pacific, though on one occasion he joined enslavers and observed their expedition into the jungle.

For the most part, biographers and critics have defended London and his books. True, there were always some cracks in the crowd of worshippers, but what seems to have made a real difference in the world of London scholarship and pedagogy was Black Lives Matter. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, teachers could not continue to be uncritical apologists for the author of Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf. Students didn’t buy the accolades they were selling.

Now, with Trump in the White House, racism resurgent and the return of statues for generals of the Confederacy, London might be regarded in some circles as something of a cultural hero. But not so fast. London’s The Iron Heel, predicted the coming of an oligarchy in the US. In that prophetic work, he describes a sinister conspiracy to quash freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, imprison outspoken opponents and critics, control news and information, install a professional army of paid mercenaries, create a secret police force, and wage global warfare for economic hegemony. It has always sold far better around the world than in the US. Read The Iron Heel , of course, and then read his least racist books, The People of the Abyss, about the poverty at the heart of the British Empire, and The Road, about his experiences as a hobo traveling across the US, and his arrest and incarceration in Buffalo, New York.

Let’s hope that Mamdani isn’t sucked into the celebrity circuit and that his family, friends and the citizens of New York help to keep him honest in a city that gave birth to Trump and Giuliani.

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