Talk:Jack London

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Race

In the section Race, there are two errors. One is implied, and the other is a misquote.

I am new to Wikipedia editing, and changing around a whole paragraph is more than I am ready for.

The implied error: putting "great white hope" in quotation marks suggests that London himself used this term, but he did not.

The misquote is the line "Jeff, it's up to you. The White Man must be rescued." London never wrote "The White Man must be rescued." The NPR piece cited got that wrong. Here is a link to the original newspaper article being referenced. The line in question is the last line of the article.

[1]https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/10174989

As I said, I'm new to this on Wikipedia. But I'm happy to help with the content if someone is willing to take the lead on the editing itself.

Thanks! A.rihn (talk) 00:20, 31 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi A.rihn. Doing a cursory Google search leads me to a lot of sources that claim that London coined "great white hope" and said that "the white man must be rescued." We will need a better source than one newspaper article (London could have said it in other contexts; Wikipedia prefers secondary sources because original research is not allowed on Wikipedia). Based on a Google books search, I believe that The Cambridge Companion to Boxing addresses the misconception that London coined the phrase "great white hope." I work at an academic library, and I asked to interlibrary loan the book. Hopefully we will be able to correct the information soon (and if you have a secondary, reliable source that would work better, please let me know). Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 20:54, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you - I especially appreciate the help regarding Wikipedia conventions.

And you're correct, there are a number of sources that do say London coined the phrase, but I have not located any that provide a specific reference in London's writing.

I wrote a piece on London's racialized rhetoric, but I didn't get into the "great white hope" angle specifically. Actually, I'm guilty of the same ambiguous implication there, putting "great white hope" in quotation marks near to London's name, which is leading me to write a follow-up parsing out this confusion.

But for a good source, especially since you have academic library access, is "Usually White, But Not Always Great" by Phillip Hutchinson. He traces the misquote back to a Mew York magazine article by Pete Hamill, and eventually to a 1939 book by Nat Fleischer, both which have the quote as "Jeff, it's up to you to save the white race."

I'd love to know what the Cambridge Companion says. I haven't seen that book yet. A.rihn (talk) 21:54, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I love Public Domain Review A.rihn! I was very excited to see that your article is released under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. That means that we could use the text directly (with attribution). I think for this page, we needed more of a summary, so I didn't end up lifting any of the wording from your article. The Hutchinson article was very helpful. I combined some information from it with info from the Cambridge companion to boxing. These are the quotes from it that provided the information: "In his reporting, London favored Burns and Jeffries because they were white and Johnson was black" (246). Then, from a paragraph describing the 1910 post-fight article: "Although here London does not call expressly for a white champion, as scholar Kasia Boddy writes, his opposition to "Johnson as a clown or a minstrel drew upon the myth of black shiftless gaiety peddled by 'coon songs' ... [and] Sambo cartoons" [...] London clearly could not square his sense of racial superiority with the fact that a black man held the heavyweight title" (247). Boxing history is way outside my usual writing topics, so please let me know if we should reword what I added to the main page. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 19:55, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]