“. . . in the stiff, dead fingers, the petition
of his slaves who toiled in Hell's Bottom.”

BEFORE returning to London's socialistic themes, a Yukon tale, "The Passing of Marcus O'Brien" (Reader, January 1908) appears in the chronology, written at some juncture approximately between "Goliah" and "The Unparalleled Invasion."

It is 1887, a decade before the Klondike gold rush, and Marcus O'Brien, a judge at a miner's meeting at Red Cow, sentences Arizona Jack, who has killed a man, to "vamoose the camp" with grub for three days. Red Cow, a mining claim on the Yukon, has three permanent cabins, the rest of the population, forty men, living in tents and brush shacks. There are no women and no jail, minor offences are ignored, theft and murder are punished by banishment in an open boat down the Yukon, the quantity of grub commensurate with the crime (a thief might get two weeks' worth, a murderer none).

Two things happened soon after the Arizona Jack sentence: Marcus O'Brien makes a strike and is offered $10,000 for his claim by Curly Jim, who owns the camp's faro layout. Marcus turns down the offer. Now too, Siskiyou Pearly arrives at Red Cow in a canoe with a half-dozen barrels of whiskey consigned to Curly Jim, and gets the idea of getting Marcus drunk enough to sell his claim.

“...metaphysical seas of sentimentality...”Marcus gets drunk, along with his pals Mucluc Charley and Percy Leclaire, but Marcus manages to resist Curly's entreaties and endless booze supply and dreams of starting an ostrich farm down in God's country, southern California.

At the end of their spree, in which "They crawled and climbed and scrambled over high ethical plateaus and ranges, or drowned themselves in metaphysical seas of sentimentality," Marcus passes out and his friends put him in Siskiyou Pearly's boat and launch it on the Yukon — a practical joke in which Marcus is supposed to have to walk back to Red Cow.

But the camp waits and Marcus does not return. Meantime, the butt of the joke awakes, hung over, his face and body swollen from mosquito bites, only at length remembering who he is. Being in the boat with no grub makes him believe he has killed somebody. It is 2,000 miles to the Bering Sea, the boat is averaging five miles an hour, a hundred miles a day, 20 days to the Bering.

He lives on raw geese and duck eggs, drifts past the St. Paul and Holy Cross missions while asleep, eats seal meat on the Bering Sea until in the fall of the year he is picked up by an American revenue cutter.

The following winter he is a hit as a temperance lecturer in San Francisco and has found his vocation, mentioning the fortune he lost as a result of that ""hell-bait of the devil," booze. "He has made a success of his vocation, and has grown gray and respected in the crusade against strong drink. But on the Yukon the passing of Marcus O'Brien remains tradition. It is a mystery that ranks at par with the disappearance of Sir John Franklin."

NOTE I:   Sir John Franklin (1786-1847) was a British arctic explorer who in 1845 commanded an expedition in a search for the Northwest Passage through the maze of Canadian arctic islands to the Bering Sea. Franklin and all his officers and crewmen died in the attempt.

NOTE II:   London authority Dan Wichlan points out that London wrote an article, "Finds Presumed Descendants of Sir Franklin's Party" (San Francisco Examiner, October 14, 2023) about an explorer who claimed to have found the descendants of Sir John Franklin living on a arctic island.

"The Unparalleled Invasion" (McClure's, July 1910) tells of the rise of China in 1976 as a threat to world peace and of combating this threat through the use of biological warfare.

The China problem began in 1904 when it awoke during the Japanese-Russian War (in which London participated as a Hearst war correspondent) and when Western nations failed to take into account these critical facts: that "between them and China there was no common psychological speech," and that the Western mind and Chinese mind were radically dissimilar.

After the Japanese won the war against Russia, that island nation absorbed Western ideas, digested and applied them, and set about constructing an empire in which she turned to the vast Chinese territory and its 400 million souls whose "mental processes were the same. The Japanese thought with the same thought-symbols as did the Chinese." So, Japan took over the management of China, reorganized her army, whispered in the ears of her statesmen, controlled her newspapers, the result being China awakening and running the Japanese out "bag and baggage." Then, when Japan rashly went to war in 1922, in seven bloody months Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa were taken away by China.

“the fecundity of her loins...”China was not war-like — her strength lay "in the fecundity of her loins" and by 1970 the country's population stood at a half billion and was spilling over its boundaries. In 1970, when France made a stand for Indo-China, China sent down an militia army of a million men and "The French force was brushed aside like a fly," after which France landed a punitive expedition of 250,000 men and watched as it was "swallowed up in China's cavernous maw. . . ." Now Siam fell, Burma, the Malay Peninsula, the southern boundary of Siberia was pressed hard, Nepal and Bhutan overrun, northern India, Bokhara, Afghanistan, Persia, Turkestan, all Central Asia, absorbed.

At last, in 1975 there was a Great Truce in which all countries pledged not to go to war with each other, this followed by a great mobilization of the armies or Russia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, their troop trains headed for the Chinese borders as 58,640 merchant steamers, equipped with searchlights and rapid-fire guns, were dispatched by various nations to the China coast.

On May 1, 1976, an airship appeared over Peking and tubes of fragile glass fell on the city and shattered. One unbroken vial was taken to a magistrate who shattered it. Those near him thought they saw mosquitos fly out. In the event, all China was bombarded with the glass tubes filled with microbes and bacilli and within six weeks most of Peking's 11 million people were dead of plagues and every virulent form of infectious disease: smallpox, scarlet fever, yellow fever, cholera, bubonic plague.

The Chinese government crumbled, farms went unplanted, fleeing Chinese were met at their borders and slaughtered. In the unparalleled invasion of China, pent up in their vast charnel house, "they could do naught but die" and by the summer and fall of 1976 China had became a howling wilderness. When the first expeditions entered the country, all survivors of the biological plagues were put to death after which began the great task, the five-year "sanitation" of the country.

The Great Truce having been dissolved, Germany and France renewed their quarrel over Alsace and Lorraine and war clouds grew. But at least the Convention of Copenhagen was called during which all nations "solemnly pledged themselves never to use against one another the laboratory methods of warfare they had employed in the invasion of China."

The story is presented as "Excerpt from Walt Mervin's 'Certain Essays of History'" and as such is as lifeless and devoid of plot, character, or dialogue as an entry in an encyclopedia. Still, there is a power in it that is notably absent in "Goliah," and a certain weird prescience that an otherwise astute critic, Arthur Calder-Marshall missed. In his Introduction to The Bodley Head Jack London (London: The Bodley Head, 1963; Vol. I), Calder-Marshall wrote that this story was a variation of the "Yellow Peril" theme, "a common nightmare of the first decade of the century." In fact, the story cannot be dismissed so lightly, nor can the "Yellow Peril theme."

In September, 1904, about two months after his return from Japan and his work as correspondent in the Russo-Japanese War, London published in the San Francisco Examiner an essay titled "The Yellow Peril." In it he wrote, "Today, equipped with the finest machines and systems of destruction the Caucasian mind has devised, handling machines and systems with remarkable and deadly accuracy, the rejuvenescent Japanese race had embarked on a course of conquest, the goal of which no man knows."

London foresaw the beginnings of Japan's muscle flexing with its foothold in Manchuria following the war with Russia, following which, in 1910, Japan annexed Korea. The author did not live long enough to witness Japan's securing German interest in China's Shantung province in World War One, its penetration of northern China in the 1930s, nor its strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941, but he had a glimmer of an idea that Japan's course of conquest would lead to the awakening of the "sleeping dragon" of China.

NOTES: Russ Kingman, in his Jack London: A Definitive Chronology (Middletown, Calif.: David Rejl, 1992), gives both March 11, 1906, and March 7, 1907, as the date this story was begun. At either date it pre-dates the work of another China prognosticator, Homer Lea (1876 - 1912), a contemporary of London's.

A Californian, Lea was a hunchback, under five feet in height and weighing barely 100 pounds, who became enamored of Chinese history and culture while studying at Stanford. He ventured out to China in 1899 and became a friend and advisor to Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary and political leader who eventually became the first provisional president when the Republic of China was established in 1912.

Lea's book, The Valor of Ignorance, published in 1909, predicted the fall of Manchuria, Hong Kong, Indochina, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, to the Japanese, and ventured an eerily accurate warning of Japan's surprise attack on the United States. Gen. Douglas MacArthur became a Lea admirer and said Lea (who died at age 35 after a stroke forced his return to the U.S.) was clairvoyant.

At the writing of "An Unparalleled Invasion," London wrote of the "fecundity of her [China's] loins" that by 1970 had produced a half-billion in population. As of June, 2007, China's population stands at 1.35 billion.

"The Unparalleled Invasion" was submitted to twelve outlets (Collier's, Success, Cosmopolitan, Black Cat, Bookman, Red Book, American, Century, Hampton's, Popular, Saturday Evening Post, and Town Topics) before McClure's accepted it in February, 1910.

Among London's string of futuristic tales, "The Enemy of All the World" (Red Book, October 1908) has a plot, characters, ironic theme, and one of the best inventions in all science fiction.

The story, "Culled from Mr. A.G. Burnside's 'Eccentricities of Crime,' by kind permission of the publishers, Messrs. Holiday and Whitsund," concerns the "unfortunate, malformed, and maltreated genius" Emil Gluck, how he was brought to bay and went to the electric chair for crimes he committed between 1933 and 1941.

Born in Syracuse, New York, in 1895, at age six, after the death of his parents, Gluck went to live with an aunt, Mrs. Ann Bartell, his mother's sister, a vain, shallow and heartless subhuman cursed with poverty and a lazy husband. She hated Emil "And it can well be understood, in such environment, how there was generated in the lonely, neglected boy much of the bitterness and hostility for his kind that later was to express itself in deeds so frightful as to terrify the world."

After Bartell's husband made a strike in the Nevada gold-fields, Emil was sent away to school and in 1909, at age 14, he entered Bowdoin College and in 1913 graduated with highest honors. After his undergraduate work he took a job as instructor in chemistry at UC, taking a half dozen degrees in sociology, philosophy and science, and at age 17 became prominent for his book, Sex and Progress. The book, which "remains today a milestone in the history and philosophy of marriage," got Gluck into trouble when he devoted three lines out of 700 pages to "the hypothetical desirability of trial marriages." He was besieged by reporters, condemned by women's clubs, persecuted by the state legislature. Then, in 1927, after he gave a learned paper before the Human Interest Society of Emeryville and mentioned "the industrial and social revolution that is taking place in society," he was branded an anarchist.

“his awful and monstrous scheme of revenge.”In 1928 he opened an electroplating shop in Oakland and there perfected an improved ignition device for gas engines, "the royalties from which ultimately made him wealthy." In the meantime he fell in love with a woman named Irene Tackley who worked in a candy store across from Gluck's shop. He gave her expensive presents until her lover, a gross character named William Sherbourne, gave Gluck a beating that required hospitalization.

When Tackley was murdered, Gluck underwent a trial and conviction for the crime, the jury sentencing him in 1929 to life at San Quentin. He wrote books in prison and there "worked out his awful and monstrous scheme of revenge."

After a death-bed confession in 1932 by the man who actually killed Tackley, Gluck was released but the San Francisco Intelligencer opined through its editor, John Hartwell, that Gluck was responsible for the Tackley murder, no matter who confessed to it. Later, Hartwell died after bullets exploded in his desk drawer and Sherbourne died by shots from his own revolver and was ruled a suicide.

Gluck had invented a portable device which caused gunpowder to explode and for eight years he roamed the world causing havoc with his device, financed by the wealth from his royalties. He precipitated the killings of the King and Queen of Portugal on their wedding day by causing the rifles of troopers and infantrymen to fire and explode. He triggered the German-American war and its subsequent cost of 800,000 lives. In 1939 he caused the detonation of seven German battleships which were on a friendly visit on the Hudson River opposite New York City. Among other havoc-causing incidents attributed to Gluck were an epidemic of leg-shootings of New York policemen, the destruction of the Mare Island naval yard, and the destruction of forts, mines, coastal defenses, torpedo stations, and magazines on the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida.

Silas Bannerman, an American secret service agent, leaped to world-wide fame by arresting Gluck after connecting the evil genius to the Mare Island incident, to explosive incidents in the Atlantic states and the Mediterranean.

The secret of his scientific device died with him when Gluck was executed on December 4, 1941, at age 46, "one of the world's most unfortunate geniuses."

The "Debs" of "The Dream of Debs" (International Socialist Review, January 9, 2024) is, of course Eugene Debs (1855-1926) of Terre Haute, Indiana, one of the founders (in 1901) of the Socialist Party of America and (in 1905) the Industrial Workers of the World. He became the beloved "apostle of industrial unionism" and the five-time Socialist Party candidate (1900-1920) for the presidency of the United States.

The "general strike" was a concentrated shut-down of services, sometimes in a specific field of work (as textiles or coal mining), sometimes in specific geographical areas (as in San Francisco or Paris), sometimes both. Such strikes were "wake-up calls," drawing attention to the needs of workers and the consequences of ignoring their demands.

A wealthy man named Corf tells of the great general strike in San Francisco in the 1940s after the AFL has been destroyed and replaced by the "ILW," said to be "the biggest and solidest organization of labor the United States has ever seen." Coincidentally, as a college student Corf had written a magazine article titled "The Dream of Debs," about a national strike that would take a government to break.

Corf compares the beginning days of the strike to the earthquake and fire of 1906 but as to the strike, said it was the silence that he noticed at first — no rattle and jar of wagons, no horse hooves on the cobblestones. Then, his servant brings in his breakfast but with no cream for the coffee and only graham bread since nothing from the bakery has arrived. Even the newspaper is on its last day of delivery. Harmmed, Corf's butler, says the electricity is off, only small shops remain open, and the chauffeur has departed, on strike with the Chauffeur's Union.

At his downtown club, Corf's friend, the handsome young millionaire Bertie Messner, who "had never done a tap of work in his life," finds a cause in the strike. To his fellow club idlers he berates the "open shop men" responsible for killing the graduated income tax and the eight-hour-day work bill, destroying the closed-shop, and driving labor into the I.L.W. which has called the general strike. "How many strikes have you won by starving labor into submission? Well, labor's worked out a scheme whereby to starve you into submission," Messner says.

“A general strike is a cruel and immoral thing...”At his club Corf sees General Folsom who says he has ordered troops in from the Presidio to guard the banks, mint, post office and other public buildings. But meantime garages and ferries close; longshoremen go on strike; food becomes scarce, then unavailable; telegraph wires are cut; the military takes possession of flour, grain and food warehouses; law and order breaks down with people resorting to savagery, wielding whips and clubs as millionaires and paupers fight side-by-side for food.

Panic ensues, servants flee, taking the silver with them (a problem only to Corf and his wealthy, clubbish friends), horses are confiscated for food and as stray dogs begin to disappear from the streets, corpses began to appear in them and in the by-ways and countrysides.

Corf returns to San Francisco after a tour of neighboring towns to learn that the strike is over. "It was worse than a war," he says. "A general strike is a cruel and immoral thing, the brain of man should be capable of running industry in a more rational way . . . . The tyranny of organized labor is getting beyond human endurance. Something must be done."

NOTES: Labor historian Philip Foner says "The Dream of Debs" predicted the San Francisco general strike of 1934, that it is a small classic of working class propaganda and that it was reprinted in pamphlet form and had a huge circulation in labor circles. See Foner's Jack London, American Rebel (New York: Citadel, 1964), 106-107.

"A Curious Fragment" (New York Town Topics, December 10, 2023), the best of London's futuristic socialistic tales, derives from an imaginary literary work, Historical Fragments and Sketches, "first published in fifty volumes in 4427, and now, after two hundred years, because of it accuracy and value, edited and republished by the National Committee on Historical Research." (Assuming Historical Fragments was republished in 4627 Anno Domini, it is comforting to printed word devotees to imagine that books will still be published so far in the future.)

The story is stalled by the abundance of "front matter," like a book with too long an introduction or prologue. The Editor's Note introducing the story states that the "industrial oligarch, Roger Vanderwater" has been identified as the ninth in the line that for hundreds of years controlled the cotton factories of the South. He flourished in the "last decades of the twenty-sixth century after Christ, which was the fifth century of the terrible industrial oligarchy that was reared upon the ruins of the early Republic."

From internal evidence the narrative was not reduced to writing until the 29th century because, the eponymous editor says, in the "age of the overman" all literacy was stamped out in a time when it was a capital offense "for any man, no matter of what class, to teach even the alphabet to a member of the working-class."

From this frightful age arose the "story-tellers," paid by the oligarchy to tell mythical, romantic, harmless tales — "But the spirit of freedom never quite died out, and agitators, under the guise of story-tellers, preached revolt to the slave class."

The story of Tom Dixon, the editor states, "was banned by the oligarchs," the proof to be found "in the records of the criminal police court of Ashbury, wherein, on January 27, 2734, one John Tourney, found guilty of telling the tale in a boozing-ken [a low tavern] of laborers, was sentenced to five years' penal servitude in the borax mines of the Arizona desert."

The story tells of Tom Dixon, a weaver of the first class in the factory in Kingsbury, Alabama, called "Hell's Bottom," owned by "that hell-hound and master, Roger Vanderwater," a line that began 300 years past with the Vange family, notably Bill "Sly" Vange of the government's secret service. In 2255, the year of the Great Mutiny when 17 million slaves strove to overthrow their masters in a region west of the Rocky Mountains, Vange was given command of military forces and after eight months of fighting, 1,350,000 slaves were killed and the Great Mutiny broken.

Roger Vanderwater of the Vange - Vanderwater line, uses men, women and children in his factories, their "slave rights" rejected by Vanderwater's two overseers, Joseph Clancy and Adolph Munster, who steal funds intended for use in cases of injured workers and punish those who object. Once, when the slaves complained to Vanderwater in a round-robin letter written by a rare slave who could write, Vanderwater turned over the letter to the two overseers. The worker who wrote the letter was beaten so badly he survived only three months.

A few weeks after this incident Tom Dixon had his arm torn off in a machine in Hell's Bottom. His fellow workers attempted to make a grant to him from their fund but Munster and Clancy refused to pay it. The slave who could write, and who was dying, wrote a recital of the grievance and this document was placed in the hand of Dixon's severed arm.

Meantime, Roger Vanderwater fell ill and lay abed in his palace. He was interested in scientific farming, had managed to grow a new type of strawberry, and had ordered a farm slave to bring him a box of the berries.

“the arm of Tom Dixon...”The slave who could write, and who was dying, took the farm slave's place and brought the berries to Vanderwater on a silver tray, kneeling before the oligarch's bed. The top of the tray was covered by large green leaves and when these were whisked away by a servant, Vanderwater, propped on his elbow, saw the wonderful fruit "lying there like precious jewels, and in the midst of it the arm of Tom Dixon as it had been torn from his body, well-washed, of course, my brothers, and very white against the blood-red fruit. And also he saw, clutched in the stiff, dead fingers, the petition of his slaves who toiled in Hell's Bottom."

Vanderwater read the document, was satisfied with the truth of it and, for all his rapaciousness and cruelty, actually conducted an investigation. As a result, the two overseers were branded upon the forehead, had their right hands cut off, and were turned loose "to wander and beg until they died."

For a time the fund was rightfully managed until Roger Vanderwater's son Albert, "who was a cruel master and half mad," came along.

The narrator reveals that the slave who could write, and who was dying, was his father, who taught the narrator to read as his mother had taught him to read.

After his father's death, the narrator was freed from the slave pen and became a story-teller ,wandering over the land.

NOTES: As curious as the fragment is the periodical that published it. Town Topics was a scandal sheet that combined social gossip and extortion under the editorship of Colonel William d'Alton Mann, an Ohioan who fought with Custer at Gettysburg and became one of the Gilded Age's great rascals. By 1908, when "A Curious Fragment" appeared, however, Mann's hey-day of scuttlebutt and blackmail was over and he had reverted to fiction and journalism.