Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography

Chapter 5. Jack London, Jack Johnson, and the "Great White Hope"

FIVE JackLondon,JackJohnson, andthe“GreatWhiteHope” This page intentionally left blank 179 T he morning of July 4, 1910, dawned upon a divided nation. For months, boxing fans, newspapers, magazines, and even preachers had hyped the world heavyweight title boxing match to be held in Reno, Nevada, between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries. This Independence Day match between the most famous—and infamous—black boxer of his day and the man whites rallied behind as their “Great White Hope” was nothing less than a “racial Armageddon,” as Randy Roberts, one of Johnson’s biographers, sets the scene.1 On the day of the fight the liquor flowed and spirits soared. A mob of nearly twenty thousand fans assembled at the stadium on the outskirts of Reno, checking their firearms at the gate as a brass band played “All Coons Look Alike to Me” and similar selections. Shouting crude racial taunts, most of the crowd believed that Jeffries would give them the triumph whites had desired in the two years following Johnson’s defeat of Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia , December 26, 1908, the first time the heavyweight belt had been won by a black man. Reno was wired to many cities around the country and the world, and while the mob sweated in the stands, members of elite New York clubs listened to telegraphic reports. In every major city, crowds followed the action outside newspaper offices on the streets. As Roberts notes, at the Tuskegee Institute Booker T. Washington, who had declined to cover the fight as a reporter, set up a special room to receive telegrams from Reno. White church congregations met to pray for Jeffries, just as black congregations prayed for Johnson.2 Nearly five hundred reporters converged upon Reno, along with boxers, retired boxers, fans, gamblers, pimps, prostitutes, entrepreneurs, high rollers, hobos, and criminals. Reformers around the world delivered diatribes against the brutality of boxing and particularly the danger in this match for the white race, but Reno was a place where a great risk could be undertaken. But what if Johnson beat Jeffries? For most whites the notion was unthinkable. 180 chapter 5 Among the reporters in the stadium were sports writers Rex Beach, Alfred Henry Lewis, and Thomas E. Flynn. Reporter Helen Dare was on hand to give the “woman’s perspective.” There were famous boxers and wrestlers: John L. Sullivan, James J. Corbett, Battling Nelson, and Tommy Burns. And there was the most famous writer in America, Jack London, recently returned from his two-year South Seas voyage. London had covered the Johnson-Burns fight in Sydney in 1908 for the New York Herald, his reports appearing in every major newspaper in the world. Now, in Reno Beach and London were played up as “Two Well-Known War Correspondents Now at the Front” by the Hearst Syndicate. In this “war” London was expected to present “life in the raw” as in his Russo-Japanese War coverage or his Snark reportage. Boasted the San Francisco Chronicle: “He has traveled much in the interest of sociologic and economic study. . . . Not only the principals in the contest, but the spectators gathered by the thousands from everywhere will engage his pen” (3 July 1910). The Ottawa Journal was more direct: “Watch for Jack London’s Story of the ‘White Versus Black’ Fight. . . . The Jeffries-Johnson fight in which $101,000 and the championship of the world is involved—not to speak of the racial supremacy—will be watched by millions. . . . Jack London may be looked to, to write a story that will throb with realism” (18 June 1910). Photos of London often accompanied those of either Johnson or Jeffries; the Portland Oregonian displayed a “Portrait in Sailor Costume of Famous Author Who Will Report Big Fight for Oregonian” (23 June 1910).3 In this fight, nothing less than white American manhood was at stake. As Gail Bederman notes, predictions of Johnson’s defeat were related to the evolutionary millennialism celebrated by the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, for “Johnson implicitly challenged the ways hegemonic discourses of civilization built powerful manhood out of race.”4 Jeffries and Johnson were what Hazel Carby has called “race men”: those who establish race pride through superiority in some field of achievement, so that the success of one member of the race is the success of all.5 London too was positioned as...