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Racism and Jack London

This 4th of July was the one hundredth anniversary of the fight between the first black world heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, and Jim Jeffries, who was described as the “Great White Hope,” who was expected to regain the world championship for the white race. Jack London is said to have coined the phrase “Great White Hope,” and if he didn’t, I’m sure he would have if he had thought of it. This phrase, and many others like it, turned the fight into a wildly dramatized spectacle.

Jeffries was touted by Jack London and the rest of the press as the answer to Johnson’s victory over the previous white world champion in Australia. Johnson was a black man who  fought fairly and well, but the press seized a ready audience, and held him up as a villain and a usurper, ready to fall to a white hero.

The Fight

A hero, “The Great White Hope,” was found in Jeffries, a former world champion fighter who had retired to his alfalfa farm in California. The battle between Jeffries and Johnson in Reno, Nevada, was to be a victory pageant for the white race. Millions of dollars in wagers were expected to change hands. Johnson was by far the superior fighter, in top condition, and a better tactician. Jeffries was over-confident, out of shape, and not the equal of Johnson. The fight was to have lasted forty-five rounds, but in the third round Johnson delivered a left hook to Jeffries eye that disrupted his vision and the “Great White Hope” was out in the fifteenth.

American Racism in 1910

The United States, and much of the rest of the world, was a racist place in 1910. As much as anyone may reject racism, I suspect that any white person today who thinks he or she would not have been a racist in 1910 is fooling themselves. Not that it was right to be racist in 1910; it was horribly wrong. The vast majority of whites in 1910 were horribly wrong about race.

I have no evidence, but I suspect that my great-grandparents would have cheered for the “Great White Hope” with complete sincerity. If I had been born in 1849 instead 1949, I probably would have cheered too. But I am very glad that I was born in 1949 and have lived to see a black president. The intervening hundred years was not a waste.

London’s Racism

What of Jack London? Of course he was a racist. Everyone was in those days. And he must be counted among the most despicable because he used racism to sell himself as a journalist. I count myself lucky that I am reasonably certain that my great grandparents never confronted a black person in their entire lives, so their beliefs may have been wrong, but the damage was small. But London built his career on appeal to popular beliefs, and the superiority of the white race was one of his foundation stones. He urged many people on to acts that shed much innocent blood. His descendants– and as an appreciative reader of London, I am one– get little comfort from that.

London’s Legacy

But let me ask a counter question: if Jack London had not written a line, would we be better off today? That is an unanswerable question, but today is my day to step into the ring and take a few punches. The fact that I like Jack London is a clue to my answer. London may not have been open to non-whites, but he was open to the poor and the underdog. Over and over again in his writings he addresses justice and opportunity. And unlike so many authors of his time, London’s heroes do not become rich by befriending the wealthy or discovering buried treasure. His heroes struggle and fight for their places, which they win or lose on their persistence, intelligence, courage, and integrity.

Whatever London’s intentions, the virtues that London espoused, applied by whites and non-whites alike, assaulted racism and eventually dealt it blows as mortal as Johnson’s left to Jeffries’ eye in the third round. Jack London was a despicable racist, like most whites in 1910, but he also brought us a step closer to the end to racism.

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Rex Stout

I began reading Rex Stout at the prompting of Herrlee Creel, the great Chicago sinologist. Creel insisted that his students write well, not only well by academic standards, but by his own standards. He was a great writer himself. He frequently railed against journalists – a word he pronounced with a sour expression – but his own books often made their way to the New York Times best seller list and are written in simple elegant language that was appealing both to scholars and ordinary readers.

Chicago was, and I imagine still is, one of those schools where the title “Doctor” is only accorded to physicians, not PhDs. Calling a professor anything but Mister was the mark of an outsider. When I began taking classes from Mr. Creel, I was a typical undergraduate, filled with academic jargon and vocabulary I had picked up from my first dip into a grown-up intellectual community.

“What do you read, Mr. Waschke?” Mr. Creel said as I entered his office in the the Oriental Institute on the floor above exhibit halls filled with winged bulls topped with human heads. The meeting was to review a paper I had submitted for my senior thesis. Mr. Creel had a reputation for being hard on students, which was why I requested him as an advisor. I had no sense whatsoever back then.

I stammered out the names of a few books I had read recently for classes, the most impressive I could think of.

His look was withering. “You would do better to read Rex Stout. Read him, write like him.” He went on to say that the paper was acceptable, but poorly written. He pointed out some of the worst abuses and we discussed a few points, but he approved the paper for honors, which was all I wanted.

I left the Oriental Institute with a light heart. It was a winter quarter day where the sky matched the gray neo-gothic buildings on the Chicago Quad and a few flakes of snow fluttered down in the breeze off the Lake Michigan.

I headed north on University toward the apartment I shared on 53d and Dorchester. In those days O’Gara’s book store was on 53d and I stopped and found a handful of used paperbacks by Rex Stout. I kind of knew that Nero Wolfe was Rex Stout’s detective because my Dad subscribed to Saturday Evening Post while it was still a real magazine and Nero Wolfe stories appeared there. O’Gara approved of my choices– I think he suggested I pick another one off the shelf that was his favorite and I think I followed his recommendation.

When I got back to the apartment, I started to read. For the rest of the week, I barely kept up with classes, I was so drawn into the world of Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe.

I haven’t completely left. I don’t have all of the stories and novels, but I have most of them and I have read every one several times. And I still haven’t learned to write like Rex Stout.

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Raymond Chandler

Mystery Stories

Many people think that mystery stories are driven by plot and the belief that murder will out. A mystery prepares the reader for the revelation of the villain. This is the kind of story that requires “spoiler” warnings, something that I always take as a warning that the story may not be worth the trouble to read. In the preface to a collection of long short stories, Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler said “The ideal mystery was one that you would read if the end was missing.” The corollary is that an ideal mystery is one that you would read even if you knew the end beforehand. After all, we all know that murder will out, so who cares about the details? The way the murder outs is what counts.

Heroes

Chandler’s stories are about the detective not the plot. Chandler’s detective, Phillip Marlowe, is special. He owes the heroes of the cowboy westerns and the heroes of the romances of Chretien de Troyes and the Mabinogion. Marlow’s chowderhead is a big as Gawain’s, chasing off to establish honor in a corrupt world where the cops are on the take, the heroines cheat, and Marlowe’s best friend will always betray him in the end. Murder may out, but in the outing, it will drag down more than stands. Why read this dismal schmaltz? Is the attraction the hot pepper remarks?

Chandler said in the same preface “As to the emotional basis of the hard-boiled story, obviously it does not believe that murder will out and justice will be done– unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done. The stories were about the men who made that happen.”

Structuralism

A structuralist analysis of the hard-boiled detective looks at the overall structure. A society is structured. Then something happens, like a murder, that throws the structure into chaos. The hard-boiled detective restores order, but in his restoration of order, he adds his own measure of disorder. His disorder carries the potential to transform the society to a higher order where the ideals of the detective prevail. Except the detective seldom prevails. The mean streets stay mean, and Marlowe settles back with another glass of whiskey and waits for the next phone call, a paladin or messiah, ready to transform the world, waiting for the next good chance.