Jack London, Socialism, and Occupy Portland

Jack London’s birthday is coming up in a few weeks. This January 12, 2012, would be the 136th anniversary of his birth in San Francisco, back in 1876 (the U.S. centennial, one may note).

There’s a basement bar here in Portland called the Jack London, downstairs from a venerable lounge on 4th Avenue known as the Rialto. (For many, many years -- until less than a decade ago, I believe -- the latter had a huge misspelled sign out front that identified it to passing drivers on 4th as the “Railto”; now that it has been corrected, I wish I had taken a photo of that.)

The Jack London Bar is not venerable; it opened only last June, although it took its name from an ancient, unlamented fleabag hotel at that location called the Jack London.

The bar has garnered decent Internet reviews for a mid-sized dance floor, laser lights, “makeout-friendly dark corners and couches,” and other nightclub amenities. But the management also has been collaborating with the Oregon Historical Society to host lectures on local history, culture, and celebrities.

Which is how I discovered the place: I dropped in on Nov. 8 to listen to a talk about Tom Burns, a Portland eccentric who owned a bookshop on West Burnside between 3rd and 4th avenues, and used to make speeches on street corners which got him repeatedly hauled in by the police for attacking city government and advocating socialism.

This experience was not unknown to the future author of The Call of the Wild and “To Build a Fire.” After a colorful youth that included long hours working in a cannery at age 13, making an illegal living as an oyster pirate a couple years later and then turning around and serving the law as an employee of the California Fish Patrol, serving on a ship to Japan at 17, getting busted for vagrancy in Buffalo and doing a month in a penitentiary after crossing the U.S. as a tramp, and bulling his way into UC Berkeley at 20, Jack London also made socialist speeches in public (in City Hill Park, Oakland) and got arrested for it.

Anyway, the Jack London Bar wants to celebrate its namesake’s birthday on the 12th and I’ve agreed to read a little something by the guy.

Hoping to find material by London that ties into Occupy Wall Street more than a hundred years later (the bar is, after all, only five blocks north of the squares where Occupy Portland’s camp stood in October and November), I’ve been reading his revolutionary writings.

Beating the drums about labor unrest in this country and the growing numbers of self-described socialists here and overseas in the first decade of the last century, London foresaw the Russian Revolution and many other future developments here and abroad.

He wrote a short novel, The Iron Heel -- part social critique, part science fiction -- which purports to be the memoir of the widow of a socialist revolutionary named Ernest Everhard.

London can be a bit didactic and long-winded (one wonders whether he ever crossed trails with John Reed), both in this novel and in his essays on socialism, so it is not clear I will find something in either that will be fun to read to a live audience. But the force and passion of his mind are something to experience.

The facts of his era, and the quotes he digs up, are among the things that have leaped out at me in my recent reading.

This evening, I encountered footnotes to Chapter 6 (remember, the novel is offered as historic papers), which noted that John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) warned: “A power has risen up in the Government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.”

Also, shortly before his assassination, a note says, President Lincoln wrote: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. … Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

And that was more than 20 years before Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision that laid the groundwork for the concept of corporate personhood that Occupy Wall Street is fighting today!

Maybe this Occupy movement has been coming a lot longer than we thought.

[ Originally published in 1907, the cover of the 1980 edition of The Iron Heel I’ve been reading pictures a boot stomping on a photograph of Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist to become president of a Latin American nation. Allende was born the year after London’s novel was published, and a controversy over whether he committed suicide or was assassinated during the 1973 coup that brought despicable Augusto Pinochet to power has continued almost to this day, with an investigation and exhumation of the body for re-examination only last May! ]