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.”
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from Terre Haute Tribune Star, March 22, 2009
