Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  As the country seemed divided between the few very wealthy and millions of destitute, only one man in the tiny class of “haves” came to the fore in giving a damn about the plight of the poor. Jacob S. Coxey was a successful Ohio businessman—he was from Flora London’s hometown—who began publicizing a plan for the federal government to print currency and use it to hire the unemployed on road construction, and to allow cities to trade their bonds into the U.S. Treasury in exchange for money to fund local projects. He accomplished his first step, getting his “Good Roads” bill introduced into the Congress, calling for an appropriation of the astronomical sum of half a billion dollars.

  To the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the prospect of the federal government undertaking a jobs program for the poor was anathema. Such a scheme could dry up the labor market and force wages up from the widespread dime an hour. They were equally fearful of placing more money in circulation by backing it with silver. For many years after the Civil War, American currency had continued to be backed by gold, when the amount of paper money needed to service the growing economy far outstripped the new supplies of gold to guarantee the value of the greenbacks. Government monetary policy was to withdraw cash from circulation to maintain the value on what remained, which caused serious deflation. Home values, for instance, dropped below what was still owed on the mortgages. When silver, at the time being mined in much greater quantities, was finally allowed to help back the currency, American lenders, like European investors in the American economy, continued to want payment on demand in gold. As the pro-silver forces grew stronger, lenders preferred to seize assets rather than take payment in currency that they viewed as devalued. Loans were called in, forcing business failures by the thousands, mortgages were foreclosed, and the crisis deepened. The banks discovered that the foreclosed properties and seized assets were worth little in the sinking economy, and realized just how overextended they themselves had become; five hundred of them failed during the course of the depression.

  In Oakland, the most public face of the corporate oligarchy was the railroad, which had been despised by most locals for years—as evidenced by popular sympathy for oyster pirates such as London—and their hatred only intensified when Southern Pacific attempted to press an ownership claim to the entire waterfront. Nationally their reputation was even worse. In this era before regulation, railroads were under no obligation to charge the same rates to all comers or on all lines. The rail barons gave active chase to obtain monopolies on routes by which they could bankrupt competitors’ subsidiary companies by charging ruinous freight rates. The whole spectacle displayed laissez-faire capitalism at its ugliest, and like most depressions, that of the 1890s was brought on by over-arching greed.

  Coxey’s “Good Roads” bill floundered in the Congress, so to demonstrate his popular support, he organized a march from his base in Ohio to Washington. Numbering only about a hundred when it left Ohio, his force grew until Coxey’s marchers, officially named the Commonweal of Christ but widely termed the Industrial Army of the Unemployed, numbered over five hundred. Like streams flowing to a river, more groups of marchers began collecting in the West, intending to reinforce Coxey. One started from Denver, another from Los Angeles; one of the largest groups began forming about a young Oakland printer named Charles Kelly. “Kelly’s Army” got a large boost when the mayor of San Francisco paid the fares to ship some six hundred recruits across the bay to Oakland to get them out of his city. The citizenry of Oakland gamely agreed to provision them, but then also intended to speed them on their way—an initial example of the opposing polarities that kept the Commonweal of Christ moving: widespread sympathy for their cause, combined with fear of being eaten out of house and home if they lingered too long in one place. Free transport was to be provided by Southern Pacific, motivated not by altruism, but by the civic quiet that would result from Kelly’s malcontents, now numbering several hundred, moving out of the area. Temporarily bivouacked at Mills Tabernacle until they could be entrained, the fate of the mob was the subject of daily news and speculation during the brief period they were in Oakland.

  Joined by a friend named Frank Davis, London decided to join the march. He had seen a big swatch of the world in crossing the Pacific, but apart from earning his credibility as a “road kid” by briefly crossing the Sierra Nevada, he had seen nothing of the United States. It was true that Kelly’s and Coxey’s armies were headed to Washington, D.C., and after his galling work experiences at the jute mill and power station, he might get to actually see whether that great American democracy that everyone seemed to revere so much could actually be spurred to effect some positive change for the benefit of someone other than rich plutocrats.

  But politics aside, London hit the road in obedience to wanderlust. Without a job he was a burden to the family. He would be moving as one of a body of as many as 2,000 men, so it was unlikely he would starve, although he knew from previous experience that he could survive living hand to mouth if it came to that. More than anything else, it was adventure. He went to say goodbye to his stepsister Eliza Shepard, with whom he had continued a close relationship; when she learned that he was setting off with almost no money, she extracted from beneath the handkerchiefs in a bureau drawer a $10 gold piece that she had been hoarding to buy a new Easter bonnet and pressed it into his hand.

  Kelly’s Army was scheduled to leave Oakland for Sacramento on the morning of April 6, 1894, but a snag developed when Southern Pacific, which had agreed to transport them, suddenly clarified that it didn’t mean to transport them in coaches, like paying passengers. Instead it provided a string of boxcars into which Kelly’s “soldiers” could be loaded like cattle. On behalf of his army, Kelly declined. Realizing that it was the city of Oakland that was now being held hostage by the mob, a large force of policemen, firemen, and deputized citizens answered a fire alarm and converged on the Mills Tabernacle at two a.m. April 6, demanding that the army get onto the cars at once. Again Kelly refused, and he was taken to jail until the men agreed to decamp once he was released.

  Kelly’s Army departed Oakland in the boxcars at five in the morning, two hours before London and Davis reached the station at the announced departure time. Utilizing some of Eliza’s gift, the two bought fares to Sacramento; arriving there at eight p.m. they discovered that Kelly and his army had already been hustled on to Ogden, Utah. Not surprisingly for an adolescent road trip with only minimal planning, London and Davis became separated, missed each other at the rendezvous they earlier had agreed upon, and wound up chasing each other through isolated whistle-stops across the Great Basin. To London it was a great lark, but to Davis it was a nightmare. By the time they finally reunited in Winnemucca, Nevada, Davis had had quite enough of the confusion and decided to return home. They shook hands and parted, but London committed to the diary he determined to keep of the experience that “though he has dicided [sic] to turn West again I am sure the expearience [sic] has done him good, broadened his thoughts, given a better understanding of the low strata of society & surely will have made him more charitable to the tramps he will meet hereafter when he is in better circumstances.”1

  In four days on the rails, London had come across many who, like himself, were trying to catch up to Kelly’s Army or in the alternative link up with a separate eastbound contingent from Reno, Nevada. The quest led London on a wide circuit through the Great Basin, riding the rails, often in short hops until he was detected and thrown off the train by brakemen. His diary entries show an agile mind fascinated by his surroundings and soaking up every moment, from his surprise at how the high, clear, cold air made distant objects seem closer, to his first experience with what (he assumed) remained of the Wild West. “I went up to a Saloon,” he wrote of Rock Springs, Wyoming, “got a glass of beer & had a fine wash in warm water. I am writing this in the saloon. It seems to be the wild & wooly west with a vengeance. . . . At the present moment a couple of cowboys or cattle punchers are raising cain generally. One is about 6 foot 4, while
the other is a little shorty.”2

  Riding the rails on his own required London to outwit brakemen and conductors constantly. When caught, he was forced to negotiate their graft down to a level he could afford. Just after he crossed from Nevada into Utah, “I got one of the west bound tourists to lock me in a car bound east. Just before the train started the door was thrown open & a brakeman asked me how much I could ‘shake up.’ ‘Fifteen cents’ was my response. I had two dollars & fifteen cents on me & as the dollars were unbroken I did not propose to give them to him. He said he could carry me down the road a ways, but did not take the money. When we had traveled about 50 miles . . . the door was again thrown open, & the conductor & brakeman both appeared. After a long consultation they took my gold ring & left me the fifteen cents. The ring was good gold with a fine cameo setting.”3 Another common place for tramps to hide was on the “rods,” stout struts that connected the trucks beneath the cars. It was a dangerous place to ride, only inches above the rails and ties blurring beneath, and London knew of hoboes who had lost their balance and come to an end in bloody pieces beneath the train’s wheels. Indeed his own literary career almost came to a premature end when, once while he was riding down on the rods, a spark from the wheels caught his coat on fire, and he had to improvise the gymnastics to get out of it without falling onto the tracks.

  Unknown to London, Kelly’s progress eastward was interrupted by Southern Pacific’s decision to strand him and his army in Ogden. The railroads had grown weary of the various contingents of the Industrial Army’s penchant for “capturing” trains—essentially hijacking them, overwhelming them by sheer force of numbers and then forcing the crew to take them to their next destination. The railroads, with the warm editorial approval of the business class, devised an answer for these “captures.” The first line of defense was to engage deputies to prevent marchers from boarding, which was what happened to one group in Denver. When that failed and a train was seized, compelling a railroad line to negotiate, they would agree to transport marchers of the Commonweal of Christ to their next stop. They would begin the trip, then the railroad would uncouple their cars and maroon the marchers in the middle of nowhere. Southern Pacific carried the Los Angeles contingent but then abandoned them at a desert switch eighty miles east of El Paso with no food or water. When Kelly’s own army was similarly stranded in Ogden by the same line, they managed to get on a Union Pacific train to continue.

  The depiction of Coxey’s and Kelly’s armies and the other marchers as bums and slackers gave artful cover to the railroads for such behavior, and served to discredit the marchers. Across America’s heartland, however, where the depression was hitting the hardest, there was no shortage of sympathy for men marching for work. As Kelly’s Army made its way through Colorado and into Nebraska, newspapers in their path took a supportive view. The “good people of Nebraska . . . need fear no violence or disturbance,” according to the Omaha Bee. “These men are nearly all bona-fide workingmen.” Nebraska of course was the home of William Jennings Bryan, the populist political champion of the movement who had staked his career on the unlimited coinage of silver, so Kelly’s Army might well have expected their march to turn into a triumphal procession on that soil.

  Moved, again, by the dual incentives of sympathy and a desire to keep the marchers moving on and not exhaust local resources, the communities through which they passed provisioned Kelly’s Army. There were parades—a large crowd welcomed them at North Platte, seventy miles east of the Colorado line, to where the showman Buffalo Bill Cody had dispatched three beeves to feed them. More than 1,000 greeted them at Lexington, sixty miles farther on, the tracks following the Platte River. Often there were speeches, populist in tone and attacking the economic and social conditions of the day.

  Some 3,000 people cheered Kelly’s Army at Kearney, thirty miles east of Lexington, where the town Journal agreed that the march focused attention on “the desperation to which honest labor is being driven.”4 The twenty-seven boxcars, hung with American flags and banners proclaiming WEALTH PRODUCED ONLY BY LABOR and GOVERNMENT EMPLOYMENT FOR THE UNEMPLOYED were nowhere near sufficient to carry the 1,200 men, who rode in, on, under, and between them.

  Jack London finally joined Kelly’s Army at Grand Island, fifty miles downstream from Kearney, and his own recollection confirmed the carnival atmosphere. During the last several days of their approach to Des Moines, Iowa, townspeople would trek out to visit Kelly’s Army where they camped. “The camp was thronged with citizens all day,” he wrote on April 25. “ . . . A game of baseball was also in progress between the Army & Town boys.” The latter won, 16-12. “Every body expresses a good opinion of the army, & a great many were surprised at the gentlemanly bearing & honest appearance of the boys.”5 For these visits the more talented of London’s fellow tramps sang or danced or vended little craft pieces for small change. Not to be outdone, London would seat himself alone by a fire, writing, looking as forlorn as he could. Upon making eye contact with a sympathetic-looking individual, he would volunteer, “If I had a postage stamp I would write a letter to my mother.” He more than held his own, occasionally pocketing a dollar and a half for a day of wistfully bumming money for stamps.6 It was as much as he made in fifteen hours of shoveling coal in Oakland.

  On at least one occasion, May 16, he did use a stamp to write home. He must have told his mother that he was intending to leave Kelly’s Army soon, because she knew to address her reply to general delivery in Chicago. It had been six months since, with Flora’s encouragement, he had debuted in publication, and while her letter of May 22 has a tone of motherly care (“When we did not get a letter for three weeks I worried so that I could neither eat nor sleep”) it was also apparent that she had an investment to protect. “Remember that you are all that I have and both papa and I are growing old and you are all that we have to look to in our old age.” Almost prophetically she continued, “John under no circumstances place yourself in a position to be imprisoned, you have gone to see the country and not to spend your time behind the bars.” She indicated that she had sent eight or ten letters to him in care of Chicago general delivery, each letter with stationery and stamps, and two with cash, a total of $5, “which you must stand very much in need of. John just as soon as we know whether you have got what we have already sent, we will try and send you some more.” It is a wonder that, amid all the chase and confusion of riding the rails and dodging capture, London managed to save her letter.7

  Crossing the Missouri River to Council Bluffs, Iowa, London had actually been with Kelly’s Army less than 150 miles before he began to sour on the experience. To London’s perception, Kelly was putting on airs, riding a handsome black horse, giving orders, and enforcing discipline that seemed excessive, even cruel. All his life, nothing crossed London like hypocrisy, and his retribution was not long in finding expression. London’s own shoes had given out, and departing now from the railroad, he found himself marching, barefoot, and also having to help a sick man along the road. He was finally able to cadge a pair of boots by the time, at Des Moines, the army was provided flatboats to float them down the Des Moines River to Keokuk and the Mississippi. London made sure to station himself on the first one, knowing that being the first to dock in the evenings, they would receive the choice handouts from the locals, even though all such fare was required to be passed on to the army’s commissary. At one point he noted in his diary, “We were overtaken by a round bottomed boat manned by two Commissary bucks. . . . They had orders to take possession of us but it was no go so they ordered us to wait for the main bunch while they proceeded to Harvey. I guess we will have to run past the town to night.”8 Some stretches along the river were so lined by well-wishers that they couldn’t land on the bank in privacy to relieve themselves, but the army had also begun to be followed and harassed by Pinkerton detectives intent on disrupting their progress, and there had been violent clashes. “If any Pinkertons are captured,” wrote London in his diary, “woe unto them.”

/>   By the time they reached Hannibal, Missouri, hard pulls on the river, thinning charity, skulking Pinkertons, and cheating the commissary had taken their toll. “Am going to pull out in the morning,” he wrote. “I can’t stand starvation.” Striking out on his own to rendezvous with his mail in Chicago, London rode the rails alone again, braving the cat-and-mouse game with conductors and brakemen ever on the alert to throw tramps unceremoniously from the train. The chase was constant; one experience of jumping on a train with two fellow tramps he had fallen in with was not atypical:We waited till the train had almost run by when two of us jumped the palace cars & decked them [scaled up to the roofs] while the third went underneath on the rods. I climbed forward two cars to the other fellow & told him to come along the decks to the blind [an out-of-sight space between two cars whose doors were only on the sides] but he said it was too risky. I went forward about five cars & as the brakeman was on that platform I could proceed no further. . . . I waited & when the train stopped I climbed down & ran ahead to the blind. The brakeman . . . jumped off to catch me [but] I ran ahead & took the platform he had vacated. The fellow on the roof with me got ditched but I made her into Wells. . . . The brakeman was after us like a bloodhound so I climbed on the engine.

  At the engine London persuaded the engineer to allow him to shovel coal into the boiler—one thing he knew how to do—and earn his fare to the end of the division. All in all, it was a harrowing way to travel.9