Курс жумысы Пән: Тили уйренилип атырган мамлекетлер адебияты тарийхы Топар

Short stories: “To Build a Fire” “To the Man on the Trail” Son of the Wolf South Sea Tales

Essays and nonfiction: The People of the Abyss (1903) The War of the Classes (1905) Revolution and Other Essays (1906)

Jack London’s works best illustrate the hypothesis that naturalism is a plurimodal, plurigeneric literary discourse. His writings indeed bring together a plurality of literary influences: didactic realism, naturalism, Romanticism, early existentialism, and popular romance. Accordingly, they display affinities with a broad range of literary precursors.

– Romanticism: • James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville

– Existentialism: • Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad

– Didactic realism: • Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells

– Classic naturalism: • Stephen Crane, Frank Norris

– Popular romances • Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island); Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells

Predictably, these multiple influences make for a literary figure riven by contradictions. To most of his readership, London is primarily a nature writer—the author of the Arctic and South Sea stories. Yet his works articulate a literary socio-psychology deeply informed by reflections on the urban-industrial world, with a special emphasis on the latter’s ruthlessness. Also, because his most famous stories feature animal protagonists—White Fang, the young wolf; Buck, the German shepherd returning to the wilderness in The Call of the Wild—London came to be perceived as an author of popular romances for children. More accurately, in today’s terminology, he would be called a writer of young adult fiction. Yet he was an earnest naturalist with serious didactic purposes. London’s position in the literary market is equally paradoxical. London pursued the lifestyle of a bohemian premodernist. He is as such one of the first instances of the tradition of American novelists à la Hemingway, embracing a free, itinerant life. Yet he was also an author of bestsellers.

Above all, present-day readers are bound to be struck by the fact that the author of The Iron Heel writes as an advocate of the Brotherhood of Man while many of his works feature racist and masculinist themes. We indicate below that London’s often crude Nietzschean individualism and masculinist existentialism seemingly contradict his socialist commitment. Yet these contradictions are characteristic of the social movements of the Progressive Era in which he fits. Late-nineteenth-century socialists and Progressives had been deeply influenced by Social Darwinism—the doctrine Darwin’s disciple Herbert Spencer called the “survival of the fittest.” This narrow interpretation of Darwin is now regarded as a hallmark of political conservatism, indeed often a justification for cut-throat capitalism. Yet it enjoyed great respect among a broad range of social scientists at the time because it was cloaked in the prestige of scientific novelty. We should therefore not be surprised to see turn-of-the-twentieth-century advocates of socialist solidarity occasionally endorse social Darwinian principles, even the sinister tenets of so-called scientific racism.

Jack London’s The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel of political anticipation whose main action begins in the writer’s present (1908) and extends into the near future. The novel’s main narrative is presented in the form of a 700-years-old diary—the “Everhard manuscript”— edited by Anthony Meredith, an historical scholar living in a socialist utopia nicknamed the Brotherhood of Man. The protagonists of the main narrative, Avis and Ernest Everhard, are early-twentieth-century socialist activists. Avis, the daughter of a Berkeley professor, initially met Ernest at her father’s San Francisco house, where Ernest was scheduled to give a lecture on socialism. Ernest manages to convert the young woman to the doctrine of the class struggle, soon falls in love with her, and marries her. Later, Avis and Ernest move to Washington, DC in order to allow Ernest to join the US House of Representatives for the Socialist Party of America. The socialist cause is, however, countered by the efforts of capitalists who set up a dictatorial regime of oligarchs called the Iron Heel. Avis and Ernest are forced to set up an underground resistance based in the Sonoma Valley in Northern California. Simultaneously, they work for the oligarchy, and are therefore double agents. The Everhard Manuscript ends on the eve of a socialist insurrection against the Iron Heel—a revolutionary movement that, Anthony Meredith tells us, is bound to fail. The socialist Brotherhood of Man, we learn, will only be victorious several centuries into the future.

Present-day readers of The Iron Heel may find the novel’s political narrative doubly surprising. On the one hand, London seems to take the existence of a fairly vivid American socialist movement for granted, which contradicts common European views of American political history. Still, in the reading of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, we have seen how important the commitment to socialism was for a few member of the American naturalist movement. On the other hand, the dystopian novel portrays the defeat of socialism in America for the foreseeable future, and the rise of a dictatorial capitalist oligarchy. In order to make sense of this mixture of optimism and pessimism, we need to retrace the political context out of which the novel arose, and in particular, the role played by left-wing movements in early-twentieth century America.

Since the Second World War at least, European commentators have been used to thinking of the US as a country devoid of any significant left-wing movement: the US, in this light, seems to embody the uncontested triumph of capitalism. Still, London’s biography and writings reveal that, from the late nineteenth century until the First World War—indeed until the “First Red Scare” of the early 1920s—, socialism, under the leadership of the Socialist Party of America, was a significant third force in American politics.

Like its European counterparts, The Socialist Party of America developed in response to the crises of the nascent urban-industrial economy. In the last third of the nineteenth century—notably in 1877, 1886, and 1893—the US had gone through economic depressions and labor conflicts typical of this historical moment. A particularly violent incident in the labor strife broke out in Chicago in 1886—the Haymarket riot, also known as the Haymarket massacre. Workers had gathered to protest the deaths of a few of their comrades. Someone threw a dynamite bomb at the police. The blast and ensuing police gunfire killed eleven people, among whom seven policemen. Seven anarchists were indicted, and four of them were hanged. The legitimacy of their indictment was later severely questioned. The Haymarket riot and its subsequent controversy had a decisive impact on late-nineteenth-century culture. 6 It served as inspiration for labor narrative of William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, whose main figure is the German immigrant Lindau. Politically, it exacerbated conservative campaigns against unions and political radicals.

As the identity of the people involved in the Haymarket riot reveals, the first socialist groups to arise in the US in the 1890s were closely linked to radical immigrants from Europe, notably from Germany. German radicals had fled to America to escape the repression following the failed socialist revolutions of 1848 in central Europe. This allowed American conservatives to depict socialism as a noxious foreign import. Yet several movements central to American socialism had appeared on US soil itself. In the 1890s, the Populist Movement had mobilized farmers from the South and the Midwest to resist the iniquitous sharecropping system. The Populist Movement, notably through the actions of Thomas Watson, articulated an extremely well-argued critique of monopoly capitalism, and campaigned for the establishment of an egalitarian, non-capitalist cooperative commonwealth. Populism tapered off in the early twentieth century, and some of its remaining members veered to agrarian conservatism. Yet the Populist rebellion created a political basis for a broader socialist movement extending from the East Coast, across the whole of the Midwest, to the West Coast (Seattle, notably). When the Socialist Party of America was created in 1905, it could therefore not be caricatured as a club of foreign radicals from East-Coast cities. The major leaders of the party, each embodying a specific current, were Victor Berger, Morris Hillquit, Bill Haywood, and Eugene Debs. They all had strong ties to trade unions— the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the anarchist-leaning Industrial Workers of the Word (IWW). The unions had to endure the resolute, sometimes violent opposition of employers’ association and militias of strike breakers.

The high point of the Socialist Party of America’s influence occurred with its electoral successes in the presidential election of 1912: socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs won 900,000 million votes (6% of the vote), making the socialist party a force to be reckoned with at the national level. Debs scored a slightly higher number of votes in 1920, though this result corresponded to a lower fraction of the overall suffrage (3.4%). By 1920, the Socialist Party had, however, been weakened by several factors. The American socialists, like some of their more ideologically consistent European brethren, had opposed the First World War. They considered the war effort a capitalist venture no socialist should join. This principled position was, however, bound to seem unpatriotic even to some of their left-wing constituents. The issue was the more delicate as a fair portion of American socialists had German ancestry, and were therefore suspect of harboring pro-German and anti-British feelings. Once the US joined the conflict in 1917, the anti-war stance of the party could be considered treasonous. Additionally, in 1917, the Socialist Party was bitterly divided by controversies over the Soviet Revolution. A significant fraction of the party supported Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)’s Bolsheviks. The split led to the creation of the Communist Party of the USA, which endorsed a radical agenda that never attracted the wide support enjoyed by the former SPA.

After the First World War, the political mood of the US was fired up by nationalism, and turned against both the reforming zeal of the Progressive Era and the political radicalism of the socialists. This conservative turn was triggered by powerful strikes in early 1919, and by a spate of anarchist bombings. These radical actions were perceived as byproducts of the Bolshevik revolution on American soil. They were therefore put down by indiscriminate force—indeed by the unleashing of the First Red Scare. About two hundred left wingers were deported, and a few socialist elected officials were expelled from state assemblies. Though conservative hysteria against the Left subsided after the early twenties, the political climate of the period remained hostile to anti-capitalist politics. The 1920s— nicknamed the “Roaring Twenties”—were a period of unbridled financial speculation, leading to the stock market crash of 1929. Fear of radicalism in the 1920s also inspired the inadequately motivated prosecution and execution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927.

In the 1930s, Left-wing politics enjoyed a new boost due to the economic disaster of the Great Depression. During this decade, left-wingers became fellow travelers of a progressive coalition headed by Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the initiator of the reform program called the New Deal. The radical fringe of this coalition was, however, not the Socialist but the Communist Party, as well as the new industrial trade unions whose creation had been made possible by Roosevelt’s labor legislation (the Wagner Act). The New Deal coalition cemented popular support for US intervention in WWII. After the Soviet Union joined the conflict, a popular front therefore came into existence to support the struggle against Nazism. After the end of the war, this coalition broke up, as the Soviet Union became the new enemy in the Cold War. Left-wing radicalism was severely prosecuted again, with even more harshness than in the early 1920s. It became the target of the anti-communist “witch-hunts” led, notably, by Sen. Joseph McCarthy (“McCarhyism”).

Overall, the misadventures of the American left suggest indeed that the majority of US voters, influenced by conservative opinion campaigns, proved reluctant to endorse policies based on social solidarity. By comparison, the socialist movement in Europe was able to develop social democratic policies whose main achievement was the creation of an extended social security system. Those mechanisms of solidarity do exist in the United States, yet in a more limited fashion. They were set up by Progressive-Era politicians, by Roosevelt’s New Deal, by the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s, and, more recently, by Pres. Barack Obama’s administration (medical coverage under the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare”). In typically American fashion, however, these solidarity mechanisms rely to a large extent on private, capitalist financing rather than on state subsidies. Instead of social democracy, the American system is best described as “corporate liberalism.” Thus, while the actual history of the twentieth century turned out to be significantly different from the anticipation narrative of The Iron Heel, we may at least credit London for adequately discerning that a socialist victory in the US could not be taken for granted.