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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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Jack London: The People of the Abyss

The People of the Abyss is another non-fiction piece by Jack London that I enjoyed so much, I decided to post it in the Vine Maple Studio.

Winter sunshine
Winter sunshine

Jack London was fascinating and more influential than most people realize. I am not a Jack London fan by choice. In the seventies, I went through a phase in which I collected old paperback editions of London’s books. At first, it was a sort of nostalgia for the adventures I enjoyed as a boy. But eventually, I read one too many of his worst potboilers, and decided to drop the effort.

Now, I approach Jack London warily, but I happened to read The Cruise of Snark about a year ago and enjoyed it. Later, I posted it in Vine Maple Studio. This lead me to look again at The People of the Abyss when I happened to be looking through the Jack London list on Gutenberg, although with much initial doubt.

The book Black Like Me came out while I was in high school. It was popular among the intelligentsia of Ferndale High School, but I was repulsed: the masquerade demeaned both the masquerader and the subject of the masquerade. I was equally unimpressed when fifteen years later, Jerry Brown “spent the night in the ghetto.” Anyone who ventures into an impoverished milieu with a publishing contract or an election in mind is a target for charges of insincerity or worse.

I went through my own immersion experience, made more intense by my naiveté, when I was barely eighteen. I got on a train and rode from the farm that is home to the Vine Maple Studio to the south side of Chicago, staying for seven years. I gained no profound insight into the human condition, but I endured disconnection and bewilderment that came from forced interaction with lives that were constrained and driven by poverty that I could not have imagined without direct exposure.

The People of the Abyss is an account of Jack London’s months long sojourn in the slums of London’s East End at the turn of the nineteenth century. The East End was the most infamous slum of London, the backdrop for Oliver Twist and other Dickens novels, and the location of the Jack the Ripper murders, and a wellspring of crime, vice, and degradation. If there was a worse place on earth, Jack London would have argued the assertion down.

The book was, on one level, a journalistic stunt.

But as a journalistic stunt, The People of the Abyss had good literary precedent. Mark Twain used the same stunt in The Prince and the Pauper and he was preceded by centuries in the Arabian Nights. The idea echoes through literature and folk tales.

At some point, original motivations are replaced by the demands of events. Jack London may have begun with a publishers check in mind and a smug desire to flaunt his moral superiority, but in the course of his visit to the East End, he compounded a raft of ideas in a way that contemporary journalists would do well to study carefully and modern politicians, economists and philosophers should be wary of. Within Jack London’s writing, indictments lurk that cannot be dismissed with pleasing phrases about character and initiative.

The People of the Abyss can be found many places on the Internet, but may find the choice of font and spacing on Vine Maple Studio more readable than other versions. Check it out here.

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Reading and Electronic Editions

From the Vine Maple Studio, I plan to share some of the electronic books that I like in the form that I like to read. Perhaps other readers will enjoy them as much as I do.

Paradoxically, I don’t particularly care for electronic books. I read a lot but seldom watch TV or movies. My tastes in reading range widely and my book collection is varied and in the last decade, it has grown to include many electronic books as well as paper. I am surprised that my electronic books are generally older than those in my paper collection. The oldest literature that I own, if you want to call it literature, is a collection of reproductions of Shang Dynasty c. 1200 BC oracle bone inscriptions that was the text book for a seminar on reading the inscriptions that I took years ago. orac As antiquities, the inscriptions are mildly interesting, tersely chronicling the repeated defeats of the wretched Hsiung Nu and occasionally noting that the king had a toothache. As entertainment, they are barely so-so, but the fact that they are written in characters and language that is closer to modern Chinese than Latin is to French, is astounding. That book is paper, but I have, for example, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which was first published in 1621, in electronic form.

As I said, I prefer paper to electronic books, but electronic books are getting better and they do have advantages. I have a paper copy of Anatomy of Melancholy, the New York Review of Books edition in paper back. It is roughly the size and weight of a large brick and with carpal tunnel, tendinitis, and ulnar nerve entrapment, all souvenirs from years as a computer programmer, anatI have to prop Anatomy on a table to read it comfortably without prescription painkillers, which might enhance William Blake, but not the Anatomy. On the other hand, I can read an electronic edition on my Kindle or PDA without such problems.

The other great advantage to electronic editions is searchability. Computers do a much better and quicker job of skimming 1600 pages of text and finding every occurrence of “black bile” than I can, and when finding every occurrence of black bile is necessary, the electronic edition is a sure winner .

And of course, electronic books are cheaper, sometimes free, and they don’t keep the pulp mills on overtime belching sulfur and chlorine. Also, they are quick. Amazon claims you can get a book on your Kindle in less than a minute, and they come close.

There is no need to discuss the disadvantages of electronic books. Every reader I know, including me, prefers paper when all things are equal. But I will say that electronic readers are improving: the electronic ink display on the Kindle is much easier on the eyes for reading than LCDs or CRTs.  The Kindle display is limited to a gray scale and looks a bit drab, but it uses only reflected light, which is what human eyes have evolved to read; it is a genuine improvement and will very likely continue to improve.

I get many electronic books from Project Gutenberg, the source for my electronic copy of Anatomy Of Melancholy.  Gutenberg is wonderful. They have a large free collection of out-of-copyright books in the public domain that is growing all the time. Project Gutenberg is the reason my electronic books are generally old. Gutenberg makes old books easy to find and free, but I don’t like to read Gutenberg editions directly. I always process the text to suit my exact tastes on whatever display device I happen to be using. That is a perk of being both a reader and a programmer and one that might also benefit the readers of this site.