John Griffith Chaney, better-known as Jack London, is one of the most widely-read US authors. His short story “To Build a Fire” is regularly used to teach schoolchildren about the concept of “man vs. nature” conflict in narrative fiction. His novels White Fang and Call of the Wild are enduring classics found in virtually every library. In my own public library a declaration attributed to London hangs near the stairwell that begins, “I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.” Stirring stuff from a usually-staid place.

Jack London leaves modern socialists a complicated legacy. While he was at times a class struggle pugilist, at other times he sat in the corner of white supremacy and Empire. London’s ideas were always in tension. He professed Marxist socialism, but mixed it uneasily with an almost Nietzschean Social Darwinism. To follow his political and literary career is to see how the latter aspects of his worldview fought with and eventually overcame the former.

A Novelist for Socialism

For most of his adult life, London was a socialist. In 1896, he joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) before departing in 1901 for the Socialist Party of America (SPA) of Eugene Debs, Victor Berger, Morris Hillquit, and others. When the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was formed in 1905, London headed that organization. In a 1903 article for the Comrade, London wrote an explanation of politics titled “How I Became a Socialist.” London underwent a conversion from his previous faith in individualism when he realized there was a “social pit” waiting to swallow up any hard workers who found they had grown too weak or too slow to keep up in the rapacious world of capitalism. London wrote more about the occupants of the social pit in his 1903 book People of the Abyss, detailing the conditions of working class people in Whitechapel, London.

People of the Abyss serves as a spiritual sequel to The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels. In the book, London echoes Engels’ theory of social murder. He relates the injustices of poverty, homelessness, unsafe working conditions, and other problems of the working class. “Talk of war!” he wrote, “the mortality in South Africa and the Philippines fades to insignificance. Here, in the heart of peace, blood is shed.”^[1] London’s report is justly compared with the 1890 muckraking classic How the Other Half Lives by Jacob A. Riis.

In public speeches, London was often heard to exclaim, “The Revolution is here, now. Stop it who can!” Nevertheless, he was not an Impossiblist who saw no value in political campaigns. His viewpoint kept revolution in its sights, while allowing for electoral politics. He told the Sydney Star “I believe there is much to be gained by political campaigns. The real advantage, in my opinion, is the great opportunity to educate the workers to an understanding of the wrong of the present system and the meaning of class consciousness.” London put himself forward as a candidate, running for mayor of Oakland on the Socialist ticket twice, although he was a better speaker than politician. His best showing was 981 votes, or 8.58%, in 1905. That year, London signed a proclamation supporting the 1905 Russian Revolution alongside Debs, Berger, and Hillquit.

London is usually credited, possibly apocryphally, with “The Scab,” a well-known pro-labor quotation that begins “after God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab.” Whether London was actually the author of that piece or not, he gave a 1903 address to the Socialist Party of Oakland also entitled “The Scab.” In it, London expands the category of scab to include those who work harder than their fellow workers for lower pay, thereby putting others at a disadvantage. London explains, “so long as men continue to live in this competitive society, struggling tooth and nail with one another for food and shelter, (which is to struggle tooth and nail with one another for life), that long will the scab continue to exist.”

In 1905, Western Federation of Miners members “Big Bill” Haywood, George Pettibone, and Charles Moyer were accused of murdering ex-Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg. London sensed a frame-up and wrote a scathing piece for the Socialist. Poking numerous holes in the prosecution’s case, London concluded “something is rotten in Idaho.” Defended by legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow, all three men walked free. Albert Horsley, a onetime union member who was also a paid informant for the mining companies, confessed to the murder and died in prison.

During his speaking tours, London asserted that working women and girls in Chicago were paid only 90 cents a week, a paltry sum even in 1906. Critics accused London of exaggerating their misery for the purposes of socialist propaganda. But the Chicago American backed up the charges in an article later that year, writing that “facts have come to light to prove abundantly the assertion of Jack London, novelist and Socialist lecturer in a New York address, that many girls and women in Chicago earn only 90 cents a week….There are many women in Chicago who earn no more than 90 cents a week.”^[2]

The Iron Heel

In 1908, London wrote his most enduring work of political fiction, the dystopian novel The Iron Heel. Despite his belief in the utility of elections, he was aware the capitalist class would fight to keep its power and prestige. The Iron Heel shows what would happen if the capitalist class won that fight. London explained his viewpoint to the Western Comrade: “History shows that no master class is ever willing to let go without a quarrel. The capitalists own the governments, the armies and the militia. Don’t you think the capitalists will use these institutions to keep themselves in power? I do.”

Although well-known as a novel on the dangers of capitalism and autocracy, the book also contains explanations of socialist doctrine, such as the following:

In the face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist has mismanaged...criminally and selfishly mismanaged...Let us not destroy those wonderful machines that produce efficiently and cheaply. Let us control them. Let us profit by their efficiency and cheapness. Let us run them for ourselves. That, gentlemen, is socialism…^[3]

Reactions to the Iron Heel were mixed. The International Socialist Review stated that while “well calculated… to repel many whose addition to our forces is sorely needed… [The Iron Heel] tends to weaken the political Socialist movement by discrediting the ballot and to encourage the chimerical and reactionary notion of physical force.” The Review was echoed by the bourgeois press. The Independent proclaimed the “semi-barbarians to whom this sort of stuff appeals, may possibly tear down our civilization; they will never lay a single brick of a nobler civilization.” The Outlook opined “...as a work of fiction it has little to commend it, and as a socialist tract it is distinctly unconvincing.”^[4]

But not every reader was so appalled by London’s work. In 1937, Leon Trotsky wrote that London had presciently “foresaw and described the fascist regime as the inevitable result of the defeat of the proletarian revolution. Whatever may be the single ‘errors’ of the novel – and they exist – we cannot help inclining before the powerful intuition of the revolutionary artist.”

London's Blemished Legacy

However, London’s politics were far from perfect and often confused. In his standard speech, for instance, he would often quote a statement written by Japanese revolutionaries to Russian revolutionaries during the war between their two nations that stated “for us socialists there are no boundaries, race, country or nationality. We are comrades, brothers and sisters, and have no reason to fight.” In the People of the Abyss, he bemoaned the workers who “ascribe their homelessness to foreign immigration, especially of Polish and Russian Jews...”^[5] But London’s internationalism only went so far, and was often wildly inconsistent. He was sometimes heard yelling out “I am first of all a white man and only then a Socialist!” at Socialist Party of Oakland meetings.^[6] It’s worth remembering that the Oakland of London’s youth was the stomping ground of Dennis Kearney, whose Workingmen’s Party constantly chanted “The Chinese must go!” Journalist Robert Dunn, who likewise covered the Russo-Japanese war, explained that though “a professed Socialist, [London] really believed in the Kaiser’s ‘yellow peril.’”^[7]

A lifelong fan of the sweet science, London supported “Great White Hope” Jim Jeffries in his attempt to defeat Black boxer Jack Johnson in the 1910 Fight of the Century to reclaim the boxing championship for “the white race.” London addressed Jeffries in the San Francisco Call, writing “Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile from Johnson’s face. Jeff, it’s up to you.” London tried to keep two sets of books; he was a revolutionary socialist and a die-hard white supremacist. These contradictions became more acute as London became more monetarily successful and disconnected from his working-class origins.

London’s approach to the Mexican Revolution reveals these tensions. In 1911, he wrote “The Mexican” for the Saturday Evening Post, about a prize fighter who uses his winnings to fund Mexican Revolutionaries. London supported the Mexican Revolution against the corrupt Diaz dictatorship, just as he had supported the 1905 Russian Revolution. In a 1911 statement, reported by the Sacramento Star, London stated he was “with [the revolutionaries] heart and soul in your effort to overthrow slavery and autocracy in Mexico.” When London sought to cover the Revolution as a journalist, however, his views began to change.

It began when London disowned a 1913 article to get credentials as a war correspondent from the US War Department. The piece in question, titled “The Good Soldier," and which appeared in the International Socialist Review, was an anti-militarist broadside. London claimed the piece, which included the lines “No man can fall lower than a soldier—it is a depth beneath which he cannot go. Keep the boys out of the army. It is hell,” had been falsely attributed to him. Satisfied, the War Department bureaucrats granted London his credentials.

Upon arriving in Mexico, London turned against the revolutionaries he previously supported heart and soul. He began praising Victor Huerta, the military dictator and opponent of radical Emilliano Zapata. He wrote, “Huerta is brave. Huerta is masterful.” In a 1914 piece for Colliers, London demanded the US invade Mexico to install a stable government: “The big brother [the United States] can police, organize, and manage Mexico. The so-called leaders of Mexico cannot.” London began to develop class sympathies with the rich and powerful, and believed darker countries needed a benevolent white protector. As part of his belief in white supremacy, London made his peace with US Empire.

Prior to the US entry into World War I, London argued strongly for the US to declare war on Germany. He wrote, “I believe that the present war is being fought out to determine whether or not men in the future may continue in a civilized way to depend upon the word, the pledge, the agreement, and the contract…” London’s final piece of socialist writing was an introduction to muckraker Upton Sinclair’s 1915 anthology A Cry for Justice. Like London, Sinclair ended up supporting the war.

Sensational Even in Dying

The year of his death, London resigned from the SPA. In his resignation letter, London decried the Party’s “lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle.” This was only a pretext. In truth, London resigned because the Party resolutely opposed entry into World War I.

Following London’s death, Eugene Debs eulogized him in the National Ripsaw. Perhaps out of respect for the dead, he made no mention of the author’s support for war or his break with the SPA. A few years later, Debs explained “there was nothing surprising to me in the fact that Jack endorsed the war. His was a romantic mind, an adventuresome spirit, and that combination cannot be expected to sink itself into the grooves of logic and practicability.”^[8] In The Masses, Anna Strunsky Walling remarked on London’s right-ward political drift, but still regretted that he did not live to see the October Revolution that gave birth to the Soviet Union.

Where London would have ended up politically had he not passed at forty is an interesting question. It’s possible he would have, as Walling wished, regained his socialist principles after being inspired by Bolsheviks. He also may have remained as he was: a right-ward moving social democrat. History is replete with the type. George Orwell—who acknowledged People of the Abyss as an inspiration for his Down and Out in Paris and London—saw an even darker possibility. Orwell wrote that given London’s “love of violence and physical strength, his belief in 'natural aristocracy,' his animal-worship and exaltation of the primitive, he had in him what one might fairly call a Fascist strain.”^[9]

Although it is impossible to divide London from what he eventually became, when I see the quotation on the library staircase, I know which London I remember. It is not the jingoist, the racist, and the tin soldier. It is the muckraker, the novelist of The Iron Heel, and intimate of “Big Bill Haywood.”

1. Jack London, The People of the Abyss (The Macmillan Company, 1904), 256.

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2. Philip S. Foner, Jack London: American Rebel (The Citadel Press, 1947), 78.

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3. Jack London, The Iron Heel (Appeal to Reason, 1908), 86, 134.

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4. Foner, 96.

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5. London, People of the Abyss, 106.

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6. Joan London, Jack London and His Times (Doubleday, 1939), 284.

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7. Richard O’Connorm Jack London: A Biography (Little, Brown, and Co., 1964), 214.

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8. Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (Rutgers University Press, 1949), 426.

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9. George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 2: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943 (Hartcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), 31.

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