Can a Hobo Share a Box-Car?: Jack London, the Industrial Army, and the Politics of (In)visibility

Mostly known for his adventure stories such as The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, as well as his heavily anthologized short story, "To Build a Fire," Jack London was a prolific writer whose published books (50) exceeded the number of years that he lived (40). Experimenting with numerous literary forms ranging from proletarian fiction to one-act plays, London's work addressed a wide-range of subjects, and he never shyed away from placing himself or his own adventures at the center of his narratives. His willingness to tell and retell his personal struggles with, and conquest over, cultural and economic poverty and his penchant for writing stories of man-versus-nature in strong, no-nonsense prose endeared him to the reading public at the turn of the twentieth century. From his first success at age seventeen when the San Francisco Call published "Story of a Typhoon off the Coast of Japan" in 1893 to playing a role in a film adaptation of The Sea-Wolf in 1913, London was a celebrity superstar who became the first literary millionaire in the United States.¹ A savvy public-relations entrepreneur, he closely studied the literary market, learned what techniques and forms were selling, and, undeterred by rejection letters, flooded the market with his writings. London's prose and personality were a perfect fit for the last decade of the nineteenth century, when weekly and monthly newspaper and magazine circulations were at never-before-seen highs. Specifically, his adventure stories, filled with hard-living men who both weather and are bested by forces of nature outside of their control, found a substantial readership among many working-class people who saw parallels in their own struggles to survive in a labor market that was significantly and quickly changing.² As an autodidact who had an immense larger-than-life personality (he was, for example, one of the first literary celebrities hired to endorse products ranging from fruit juice to designer suits), London, the person, became larger than London, the author, resulting in more than double the number of biographies being written on the man than book-length examinations of his texts.³

Biographies of London have both created and helped sustain myths that have always shadowed his life and texts—myths concerning his physical adventures, his tempestuous love life, his heavy drinking, and his racialist views.⁴ As Jeanne Campbell Reesman has noted, there is a need for a less sensational look at London's biography and a more definitive treatment of the author and his politics.⁵ This article will discuss one of these intersections of his life and ideologies that has been mostly overlooked by scholars: the period from April to September, 1894, when Jack London was a hobo. During these turbulent six months, London hopped freightcars, spent time sightseeing on both U.S. coasts, joined Kelley's Industrial Army, watched a public whipping of a small boy, befriended socialists and anarchists, traveled illegally across state and national lines, worked on a steamer, begged for food, committed petty thievery, and was arrested and sentenced to thirty days for vagrancy in the Erie, Pennsylvania, County Penitentiary.⁶ As he did with many of his other traveling experiences, he recycled this journey in various periodicals, eventually publishing nine essays in Cosmopolitan Magazine that were later collected in The Road (1907).

But what effect did his hobo travels have on his understanding of the world? London himself indicated that these six months were a turning point in his life, a juncture that forced him to rethink his lifestyle and turn toward socialism. In two of his most famous essays about why he embraced socialism, London specifically mentioned these hobo experiences. In his essay "How I Became a Socialist" (1903), London described the road as a place of degradation, where honest, strong men were powerless against the economic forces designed to keep them in a continual state of poverty and subservience. In "What Life Means to Me" (1905), London again stated that the road gave him a...