Rattling Dry Bones:
Jack London, Apostle of Socialism
BY KIRK BANE
05.08.2001 | CULTURE
Americans today remember Jack London as the brilliant, hard-living author of such classic adventure novels as The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea Wolf. Unfortunately, however, we've forgotten--or perhaps we've never been taught--that he was also an outspoken, fiery Socialist, fiercely proud of his lower-class roots. "The future," London believed, "belongs to labor...my faith is in the working-class." Pondering his early years when he toiled as a janitor and in a cannery, London observed," it is the proletarian side of my life that I revere the most, and to which I will cling as long as I live." A militant Socialist, London blasted capitalism as a flawed system, and harangued affluent capitalists, whom he branded "masters of society," for callously exploiting America's workers. London, who defined Socialists as "great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire," envisioned a society "whose principle shall be Each for all and all for Each."
His comrades praised the radical novelist's devotion to the movement. The International Socialist Review lauded London as an "old-fashioned, proletarian, class-struggle Socialist. His socialism is like everything else about him, virile, combative and genuine to the backbone." Upton Sinclair, whose ground-breaking novel, The Jungle, London helped promote, maintained that Jack was a "great revolutionary" who had "a hatred of injustice that burned volcanic fires."
London's most noted Socialist publications include The People of the Abyss(1903), The War of the Classes (1905), The Iron Heel (1908), and Revolution and Other Essays (1910). London not only wrote about revolutionary Socialism, he preached it. In the autumn of 1905, he embarked on a university lecture tour sponsored by the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. London addressed audiences at such renowned institutions as Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. He spoke to tremendous crowds. Two thousand heard him at Harvard, over three thousand at Yale. London pulled no punches at these engagements. He attacked the selfish, dull indifference of college students. London bluntly asserted, "I went to the university [he attended the University of California, Berkeley, in 1896.] I found the university, in the main...clean and noble, but I did not find the university alive." Harshly rebuking the students for their "conservatism and unconcern...toward those who are suffering, who are in want," London also predicted that capitalism's days were numbered. A working-class revolt was at hand, he announced. "The capitalist class has been indicted...The workers of the world, as a class, are fighting the capitalists of the world, as a class...The revolution is here, now. Stop it who can."
In New York, London delivered a blistering speech, excoriating an audience of business elites. He condemned them for their failure to provide a just society and prophesied their imminent end. "A million years ago," London railed," the caveman, without tools, with small brain, and with nothing but the strength of his body, managed to feed his wife and children, so that through him the race survived. You, on the other hand, armed with all the modern means of production, multiplying the productive capacity of the caveman a million times--you are incompetents and muddlers, you are unable to secure to millions even the paltry amount of bread that would sustain their physical life. You have mismanaged the world, and it shall be taken from you...Who will take it from you? We will! And who are we? We are seven million Socialist revolutionists and we are everywhere growing. And we want all you have!" London's wealthy audience sat in disbelief, completely shocked by this incredible outpouring.
His addresses infuriated some listeners while inspiring others. He faced threats, endured severe criticism from the press for his radical "rantings," and saw his books banned from public libraries. Sales of London's works fell because of his revolutionary political convictions. Following his appearance at New Haven, however, he was carried off the podium on the shoulders of jubilant, cheering students. And one professor enthused that London's speech "was the greatest intellectual stimulus Yale has had in many years." In February, 1906, shortly after the conclusion of his speaking tour, London boasted to a friend that he had "rattled the dry bones" of his audiences. He certainly had.
Just ten years later, though, he resigned from the Socialist Party. His support for American intervention in both the Revolution in Mexico and the First World War alienated him from many old comrades. On November 22, 1916, London, burned out, disillusioned, and weakened by drink, died at the age of forty. Not long before his death, London pathetically confessed that he was "weary of everything. I no longer think of the world or the movement...or of writing as an art." But at his peak, especially on the amazing university lecture tour of 1905-06, Jack London was a giant: an unyielding foe of capitalists, a steadfast friend of workers, a fire-breathing apostle of Socialism.
Sources:
- P.S. Foner, The Social Writings of Jack London (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1964)
- M.J. Buhle, P. Buhle, D. Georgakas, Encyclopedia of the American Left (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992)
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| Kirk Bane, a teacher, Kirk Bane, a teacher, lives in Texas |
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