Gettysburg Address -- ". . . a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

 Memorial in Gettysburg N. P. designating site of Lincoln's famous address 150 years ago today, Nov. 19, 1863.

Thoughts on The Gettysburg Address, delivered by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Nearly all Americans know the opening of this speech: "Four score and seven years ago . . . . "

Garry Wills's "Lincoln at Gettysburg" does the math on this opening line. We all should. Subtract "four score and seven years" from 1863 and what do you get? You get 1776. After his now famous opening line, Lincoln continues, " our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

The U. S Constitution, written in 1787, ratified in 1788, was not our founding document. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was. There is where we find the guiding philosophy underpinning our new nation.

Conservatives always, and Trumpists today, revere and use to their power-hungry advantage the minority control elements in the Constitution--the electoral college, the two senators for every state, daunting ratification hurdles, even the acceptance and support of slavery in its later, racist configurations. The very concept of "democracy" puts them on edge, creates strains of denial in their thinking, dangerous defenses in their actions.

It can all be confounding, perplexing. Many of us were taught from elementary school into high school to revere the Constitution as a genius created "bundle of compromises," even a permanent, almost god-given, document. It's not. Maybe for the day (eleven score and fifteen years ago), but not for the ages. Lincoln ended his great speech at Gettysburg with this admonition: "[we] shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

It's time. Again.

Can't resist adding this to the Jack London page;

1000 words a day--nothing stopped him.

Labor Day -- 2011

As conservative political forces work hard to turn back the clock on government regulation, it's worthwhile to recall the conditions which created the needs for such governmental action.  Jack London's autobiographical story, "The Apostate" is a good place to start.  This comes from The Library of America "Story of the Week"
site.

http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2011/09/apostate.html

The Apostate

Jack London (1876–1916)
From Jack London: Novels and Stories

Interesting Links
“Child Labor in U.S. History” (Child Labor Education Project, University of Iowa)

Also of interest:
Jack London:
Novels and Social Writings
The People of the Abyss • The Road • The Iron Heel • Martin Eden • John Barleycorn • essays
See the table of contents
1,192 pages

Jack London worked a number of odd jobs during his childhood years in West Oakland, California: delivering newspapers, sweeping salon floors, and setting up pins in a bowling alley. After he completed grammar school in 1890 at the age of fourteen, he found employment at the nearby Hickmott’s cannery, where he spent twelve to eighteen hours a day stuffing pickles into jars—at ten cents an hour. The work was strenuous, tedious, and robotic, and the long hours kept the teenager from his favorite pastime: reading in the local library. As Alex Kershaw notes in his biography of London, “There had been no attempt to outlaw child labor in California, nor was there health and safety regulation, nor any limits on hours worked.” Toward the end of the century, some states began passing laws prohibiting factory and quarry work for children under fourteen, but evasion was widespread and enforcement was spotty. . . . 

New Biography of Jack London

Works on Jack London continue to appear. Here’s a review of one of the latest, James Haley’s
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London.

Johann Hare notes how “Haley calls London ‘the most misunderstood figure in the American literary canon’—but that might be because he is ultimately impossible to understand.”

Understood or not, Hare is certain of London’s literary influence:

If you read his work today, you can see literary semen spraying across the American century as he makes possible some of the most important writers in the United States and beyond. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck rushed to his rawness and imitated it. The Beats followed him onto the road and into a jazzy, improvised style. George Orwell followed him to live among tramps and was inspired to write 1984 by London's own dystopia, The Iron Heel. Everyone from Upton Sinclair to Philip Roth claims him as an influence, and he seems to have left an imprint well beyond that. Look at the pictures of his handsome bulk insolently confronting you from a leather jacket, and you see Marlon Brando and James Dean decades before their time.

from "Jack London's Dark Side"
-- A new biography confronts the good, bad, and repellent.
By Johann Hari
Slate

Debs and London

In July of 1894, Terre Haute’s Eugene V. Debs was clapped into the Cook County Jail in Chicago for his part in the Pullman strike, one of the most famous labor struggles in American history. He was soon released but later stood trial for contempt and was sentenced to six months in the Woodstock jail north of Chicago. Debs scholars have seen this event in his public career as a turning point.

Debs was forty years old. He would go on to lead the Socialist Party of America and run five times for President of the United States. Debs was surrounded by the press of the world as he entered and left jail.

Across the country in Buffalo, New York, on a date close to Debs’s incarceration, Jack London was having his hair clipped short, his mustache removed and the ragged clothes he was wearing traded in for convict stripes. He was chained to another prisoner and marched lock-step into the Erie County Penitentiary on June 29, 1894. London had been found guilty of vagrancy.

Unceremoniously thrown into prison as a “Tramp,” London served thirty days and experienced the horrors common to the corrupt prisons of the day. In this penitentiary he became a part of what he would later call “the shambles of the bottom of the Social Pit.” Debs would later describe the rats and the vermin sharing his cell in the Cook County Jail; London held his experience at arms length and would only note the occurrence of “unprintable details.”

Upon leaving this “Social Pit,” he was, in his words, living “on the ragged edge of nonentity,” an anonymous hobo. After months of riding the rails through Canada, London found his way back to his home in Oakland, destitute but determined. London was eighteen years old.

Writing about this time in his life, London said, “I ran back to California and opened the books.” Among the books he opened were works by Karl Marx and socialist philosophers. Long hours of passionate study and a life led on the hard side of the fence led him to Socialism. On Christmas day 1895, the San Francisco Examiner published London’s short essay, “What Socialism Is.” A colorful profile accompanying London’s piece called him “The Boy Socialist.”

And is “The Boy Socialist,” the tramp on the road, the kid wrongly convicted of being a vagrant who did hard time, are any parts of these Jack Londons to be found in “The Call of the Wild”?

Many reading “The Call of the Wild” are aware of the fact that London was a part of the stampede north into the Yukon gold fields in 1897. And most recognize that what he brought back from the north wasn’t gold. London returned instead with rich observations of raw nature and stories, true and tall, told around camp fires and shared in the rough miner’s town of Dawson City. We find these riches now in “The Call of the Wild.”

But it is also worth thinking about what Jack London carried with him to the Yukon as well as what he found there. We know this voracious reader and self-taught student of life took two books along, Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” and John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

Open “The Call of the Wild” to any page and Darwin’s influence can usually be found–themes of struggle, adaptation, and survival abound. And the atheist Jack London reading the Christian Milton might well have fixed on these famous passages from “Paradise Lost”:

“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”

“Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n.”

Milton’s influence might be seen coming through in Buck– his “imagination” and his choosing the free, albeit violent, “hell” of nature rather than the obedience and boredom of civilization.

And those dark memories of “the shambles of the bottom of the Social Pit”? Was the Erie County prison a place where a kind of “Law of Club and Fang” also prevailed? And “The Boy Socialist,” filled with the theories of Marx and hard hours of work in the canneries on the docks of San Francisco? Did the personalities and work ethic of Buck’s sled dog “comrades” resemble what London had seen in the struggles early in his life, men of all kinds and character tied to assembly lines like sled dogs of varied traits and spirit harnessed in the traces?

London’s hero early, late and always was Eugene V. Debs. Is it a stretch to imagine some of Debs in John Thornton, the only human being Buck ever really trusted and loved as an equal?

If there is any truth in this last interpretation, Jack London paid Debs a very high tribute. In turn, Debs in a published eulogy at the time of London’s death at age forty, would write, “I felt the great heart of him, loved him, read nearly everything he wrote, and rejoiced in applauding his genius.”
________________
from Terre Haute Tribune Star, March 22, 2009

"Blurbers" Revealed

Blurb #1: “My wife read Jack London stories to me on my death bed. Thank you, Nadeszhda.”–Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov
If you’re not Don Layton, or if you haven’t read much about the Russian Revolution, then you probably don’t recognize Mr. Ulyanov as the revolutionary leader, V.I. Lenin. I’ll come clean and admit that Lenin didn’t send this blurb from beyond his cold grave. But the facts are true, reported in Nadeszhda’s [Lenin's wife] memoir, only the blurb is fabricated. Jack London, by the way, was the most read and honored American author in all the Soviet Union.

Blurb #2: “Jack London’s great theme is the cruelty of Nature. Life is a savage struggle, and victory has nothing to do with justice.”–Eric Blair

Now consider this line by Eric Blair: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever.” And then this excerpt from an author Blair valued highly: “...no appeal...can ever touch you. Your hearts are as hard as your heels as they tread upon the faces of the poor.”

Eric Blair’s pen name was George Orwell. The first of these boot quotations is from Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, “1984.” Those hard-hearted heels on the faces of the poor? This is from Jack London’s disturbing novel, “The Iron Heel,” written in 1908. Orwell also wrote “Animal Farm,” a novel filled with animals acting like people (and one, Old Napoleon, definitely resembles Lenin).

And finally, bringing the endorsements up-to-date, if not necessarily to a higher plane, we have this for your consideration:

Blurb #3: “I read it [“The Call of the Wild”] when I was eight. It’s about my favorite place in the world.”–Samuel Wurzelbacher

Sam, Sam, the next thing you’re going to tell us is how honored you would be to serve as Vice-President in a Sarah Palin administration. Joe the Plumber/Samuel Wurzelbacher’s first book, with co-author Tom Tabback, “Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream,” was just released. I haven’t read it so I can’t report on boots or animals in “Joe’s” work.

It’s clear that London’s writing and “The Call of the Wild” has appeal that is wide and deep. The Big Read is hoping to expand this circle to include readers open to a tale wise and haunting

And the bonus question? -- The beautiful woman in the Blurber quiz post is Jack London's second wife, Charmian. Here she is with Jack in Hawaii. London sometimes called her "Woman Companion," a "type" of woman he contrasted with the "Woman Mother" "type." You might think of this labeling as sexism 1900 style. London should have been wiser about these things. He personally knew the great feminist writer and philosopher of the day, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Any thoughts on the meager presentation of women (human, canine, canine/human) in "The Call of the Wild"?

Name that "Blurber"

How does London do it? It’s art. It’s magic. It’s reading.

Put quotation marks around that last paragraph and it sounds like a blurb, one of those instant endorsements you see on the back of book covers. Shamelessly, I could claim it came from a Big Read supporter, say, Larry Bird, Michelle Obama, Duke Bennett, Bradgelina.

So here’s a short quiz. Name the authors of these authentic “The Call of the Wild” blurbs (the names attached are authentic, but not the monikers by which they are best known.

Blurb #1: “My wife read Jack London stories to me on my death bed. Thank you, Nadeszhda.”–Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov

Blurb #2: “Jack London’s great theme is the cruelty of Nature. Life is a savage struggle, and victory has nothing to do with justice.”–Eric Blair

Blurb #3: “I read it [“The Call of the Wild”] when I was eight. It’s about my favorite place in the world.”–Samuel Wurzelbacher

And as a bonus, name the woman above who was very much a part of Jack London's life.

Answers will be posted tomorrow.