Jack London State Park: Don’t hide the racism

Confronting the author’s clear and troubling bigotry

Opinion by By Jonah Raskin

The Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen has a problem. The powers-that-be know they do, though they’re doing as little as possible about it. The problem is London himself who has always been problematic for people of color and especially now in light of Black Lives Matter.

For nearly his entire adult life, and with few exceptions, he expressed racist views about Chinese, Japanese, Blacks and Mexicans. In novels and journalism, London never concealed them. Read Martin Eden and The Mutiny of the Elsinor and examine his letters. On June 12, 1899 London wrote, “The negro [sic] races, the mongrel races, the slavish races, the unprogressive races, are of bad blood – that is, of blood which is not qualified to permit them to successfully survive the selection by which the fittest survive.”

On December 12, 1899, he argued that “the black [sic] has stopped, just as the monkey has stopped. Never will even the highest anthropoid apes evolve into man; likewise the negro [sic] into a type of man higher than any existing.”

The Park recently drafted a letter about race which was sent to interested individuals. The authors, defined only as “the staff,” aim to show that London was a product of his times when racist ideas were commonplace and that he was no more worse than any other patriotic American citizen. “Raised in a world of contradictions,” the letter states, and goes on to ask “Did Jack London regularly use racist language? Yes. Do people today consider him a racist? Yes.”

The letter does not offer direct quotations from London’s letters in which he used the “n” word and likened Blacks to apes. Nor does it make it clear that London has been called a racist for more than a hundred years. When he died, his longtime friend, Anna Strunsky, published an obituary in The Masses in which she noted that London “believed in the inferiority of certain races and talked of the Anglo-Saxon people as the salt of the earth. He inclined to believe in the biological inferiority of woman to man.”

What the authors of the letter do not say is that Strunsky was an avowed anti-racist, that her husband, a white southerner named William English Wailing, was one of the founding members in 1909 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Putting London in the context of his time means mentioning organizations like the NAACP and whites who were London’s contemporaries and who were foes of racism and Jim Crow.

London’s defenders usually insist that while he was bigoted as a young man, he moved away from bigotery as he aged. But a close reading of London’s articles about Mexico in the early twentieth-century show that he continued to be a bigot, a racist and an imperialist. In “The Trouble Makers of Mexico,” he wrote that Mexico was a nation of “half-breeds,” and that “Like the Eurasians, they possess all the vices of their various commingled bloods and none of their virtues.” He wanted the US to run Mexico.

Recently, the Santa Rosa Symphony canceled a symphonic piece it commissioned that was to celebrate Jack London’s life, on the grounds that London expressed racist views. It’s harder to cancel a whole park. The museum has added material about Jack’s second wife, Charmian. In the process, they canceled his first wife and their daughters, canceled his bigotry and omitted his white supremacist ideas and values.

If the Park wants to survive in the age of Black Lives Matter, it has a moral responsibility to level with the public about London and not simply issue memos for internal use only. In her obit, Strunsky noted that London was “a captive of beauty—the beauty of bird and Bower, of sea and sky and the icy vastness of the Arctic world.” For much of his life, he was also a captive of imperialism, colonialism and the white man’s burden which he inherited from his role model Rudyard Kipling.