Stanford university libraries. As bruce was describing, the bill lane center is dedicated to advancing scholarship and Public Education on the past, present and future of Western North america. So this is a very appropriate program for them, and the Stanford University libraries offers access to a comprehensive range of Scholarly Resources both print and digital format in support of research and nstruction here at stanford. Today we inaugurate a new lane Center Initiative called arts west. It is designed to place a spotlight on the rich contributions of the arts and humilities in the american west. Arts west offers the Stanford Community innovative public programming, on the writers, artists and cultural leaders that make the west a Fertile Ground for global creativity and artistic vision. It offers two distinctive series , the great writers of the west focuses on our western literary heritage and the great artists of the west elevates the western visual arts. We begin today with the celebrated western author jack london whose legacy encurious 100 years since his death in 1916 at the tender age of 40. We have gathered our stellar cast of jack london experts and scholars to share with us insights into the mans unique biography, the history of his era and his relationship and influence on western fiction. London also had a deep connection to stanford. Even though he briefly attended u. C. Berkeley. [laughter] he lectured often at stanford about literature, socialism and social justice and involved with the stanford graduate student. Who remain lifelong friends and colleagues. And the Stanford University press publishes letters and complete works just to name a few examples. Our program today will consist of four presenters, followed by audience participation. Our speakers today we begin with sue hudson and gene. Sue is with the huntington library. And gene is the university of texas at san antonio. And both of them will be giving us a presentation today on jack londons photojournalism. And peter will be talking about the era that jack london lived and the gild age of california. And lastly, Donna Campbell from Washington State university. Donna will be talking about jack london, his relationship to western literature and other writers of the era and she says shes going to talk a little about the Bohemian Grove in jack londons involvement there at carmel and other places. So that should be quite interesting. There will be a reception immediately afterwards held in the red lounge, which is the room behind us and out on the patio area. Make sure during the reception tour in the red lounge, a special popup exhibit of jack london memorabilia which was loaned to the university today courtesy of sayera and Darius Anderson of sonoma. The program is being filmed by cspan for National Broadcast and the webcast will appear on the bill lane Center Website in early october and the website address is west. Stanford. Edu. Lastly, i thank my excellent teammate who is help me organize todays wonderful event. Our gifted graduate student, curated the exhibit. We also thank the Stanford University libraries and the Canter Center for the arts for supporting this effort. I please ask you to turn off all mobile devices and cell phones. I now turn the formal program over to my esteemed colleague and friend, bruce kaine and stanford professor of humilitys and sciences will who will be moderating todays symposium. Thank you, marc. We will stick to the order thats in the program. Were on time, which is a good sign. And i think the one minor change is gene is going to go first and then sue. K. Good afternoon. Nd i mean afternoon. Its wonderful to see you all here. There are. At the turn of the century, jack londons radicals new perspectives on americas magazines and newspapers around the world, his addition were demanded by countries numbering up to 100 languages. Achieving lasting global acclaim was the call of the wild in 1903. Londons brief, but remarkably productive career took him to many faraway places in the world and allowed him contact with diverse cultures. Some on the brink of disappearance and others undergoing dramatic change. London sailed aboard a pacific ceiling vessel, joined an army of homeless men, traversed the klondike, documented the poor of london, covered the japanese war in 1904 and the u. S. Invasion in 1914 as a war correspondent. He toured top universities on social speaking engagements, urging the children of harvard and yale to throw off their chains. He covered the San Francisco earthquake and the jack johnson to world heavyweight bouts. He sthailed pacific from 1907 to 1909 where he observed the elpers of molokai. Slave trading and other results of white colonialism. And in his spare times, undertook ranching in Northern California once snubbed by the critical establishment during the cold war, too popular, too socialist, too west coast, too unorthodox. Londons writings have come under new study by scholars, not only for their literary artistry but also for what they teach us about dynamic, cultural and historical issues of the era with the burst of new additions and scholarships in the last 40 years, there has been a renaissance, a critical interest in londons writings, especially on class injustice, race, gender, immigration and u. S. Imperialism. Though nearly any bookstore in the world offers any selection of his title, up until now, the absence of londons photographs was a glaring and somewhat ironic omission. Once viewed around the world on the front pages, his photos up until recently had only been seen by a very few scholars who had access to them at the huntington line arrangement london himself was one of the most photographed of modern celebrities but it is not widely known that he was one of the leading photojournalists of his day. During Certain International news events, a staple of front page news. As biographical note, one of his lovers and collaborators was a stanford graduate and fellow socialist. The artistic merit of londons photographs makes him an accomplish for any photographer but they are of considerable biographical interest. Readers of london will find them full of insights into the author and his works. London has long been described as one of the most visual to have injuries and he photographed people upon whom he modeled characters. His subject matter, the british court, japanese soldiers, Korean Refugees and tent cities in the aftermath of earthquakes, troops, sailing crew rounding the horn, field workers in hawaii, and the disappearing societies of the South Islands he visited make his photos a Great Central the historian. Londons word pictures describe new worlds, bringing into focus for the American Public new places and people. They were not used to seeing and knew virtually nothing about. In the south seas, londons photos displayed scenes of health, disease, tropical medicine and race. But his versions of tropical islanders challenged the views of accepted views of the tropical other. I want to pause just for a moment so that you note how lets see. How his camera is held down like that. You look down into a crystal. And this will be important later when we discuss the perspective from which he photographed the people he did. Now the next two slides are not, i repeat, not londons photographs. These are postcards collected by charm yan and in the typical way that south seas people were portrayed, women generally had their shirts off and were engaged in some sort of service activity. There was also a rage for looking at profiles of heads issues of measuring skulls, things like that. And also collecting images of tropical diseases such as elephantitis in this postcard. 50 years earlier in brazil, london did not use the accepted scientific views of natives. Where his post his brazilians in rigid forms dictated by the british society, london used his new portable kodak a4 camera. There you see it. One of the first roll of film cameras eliminating the need for sand cameras and glass plate which is normally would have not worked in the tropics. He used his camera to give us closeups of old mens face, children begging in the streets, helpers celebrating the fourth of july, rodeo and parade, young samoan mother and their children, and the womens market in the Solomon Islands, the sneering lips of white slave traders. Before the snark trip, londons view of Indigenous People and their cultures would have been tainted by racialist views he learned in his student days from leading scholars from berkeley and stanford. After the voyage, his ideas developed to resemble more than agassys. As we well know, the turn of the century was a type of racial issues such as race and immigration. Londons sense of the potential for human drama comes through in his photos, especially those which focus on the human face. Bodies at work, children and the elderly, the ill and the disenfranchised. He rarely diminished his subjects. Their dignity and selfhood predominate. Most have captioned with names and other personal information. The natives are not types in his work nor aliens. In his frames in the many expressive face he is captured from people all over, struggling as they confronted ofty, homeness, suppression, war, natural disaster, cultural and ethnic conflict, invasion, colization, racism, slave rick, disease, etc. London documented issues of lasting, global scans. People as history significance. People as history he was there with his notepad and camera at a time and in places most people had rarely seen anyone that different. There to witness so much the most breaking News International developments of the turn of the century. These photos with a treasure trove of images that almost no one living had seen until today. But have much to tell us about the people who lived them, lived then at home and abroad, pictured by one of the times most intrepid cultural adventurers. I will turn it over to sue hudson. [applause] were going to play a little tag team. So jean will be back. On this slide projector, you can see jack london as he was dressed to be in the east end, the poverty zone in the city of london and that was in 1902. London was engaged by the American Press association to travel to england and then to south africa to report on the aftermath of the war. He got as far as new york before the association called him back. They said cancel that. Theres no more story to tell. So come home. Well in londons character fashion, he said nuts to that. He wasnt going to turn and go home. He went on to england. He had always wanted to spend time living in the poorest areas of a major world city like new york or london. And he had read jacob reese in his classic studies of poverty. London wanted to see for himself. He always wanted to see everything for himself to understand exactly what was going on and the situation. So he spent seven weeks live neegs end of london. The first thing he did is going go to a pawn scommop buy a set of used sailors clothing and thats you see jack on the right. To his right, to our left, is a man that we on know as burt. And burt went with london for much of those seven weeks. And about his change in clothing and status, london wrote this. No sooner was i out on the streets that i was impressed by the difference in status affected by my clothes. All civility vanished with whom i came in contact. Presto in the twinkle of an eye, so to say i had become one of them. My elbows jacket was the badge and advertisement of my class which was their class. It made me a like kind and in places of fawning and too respectful affection, i share with them a comradeship. The man in corduroy and dirty necker chef no longer address me as sir or governor. It was mate now. And a fine and hearty word with a tingle to it and with a warmth and gladness which the other term does not possess. So london ventured out on of the streets of london and began experiencing and witnessing all of the rigors and the deprecation and the degradations of life of the poor and the homeness. Homelessness. He wrote back home in california ive read his misery and seen of it but this beats anything i could even have imagined. Actually, i have seen things and looked the second time in order to convince myself that it was really so. This, i know. The stuff im turning out that is his writing, will have to be ex per investigated or it will never see magazine publication. I am in the thick of the east end. You will read so much my feeble efforts to depict someday. Well his feeble efforts were far from feeble. He wrote in rather short order a nonfiction study of poverty in at least end of london called the people of the abyss. And years later after he written most of his 50 books in just 40 years of life, he commented that that was the book that meant the most to him and took the most out of him as a young man. And one can see why. To read it is to experience the life that the people experienced n a daily level. One of the aspects of the poor that london particularly felt was the sad and tragic is the plight of the children. And youll see it recurring theme of childhood and child likeness throughout all of the pictures that we show you today. London loved children and he loved promise. The innocence of children. So in the east end of london, he looked at the energy, the innocence, the high spirits of the children and knew that in a life of hardship and poverty, those qualitys and the purity of the children would never last. That all too soon, they would be degrade bade life of deprivation and want. This grieved him deeply and there was nothing he could do but he wished that zphote political culture would change to allow those children to grow p, to have a future. At another part of the people of the abyss, he wrote this. On the benches on either side was a raid amassed with miserable and distorted humanity. The sight of which would have impeled doer to a more diabolical flights of fancy than he ever achieved. It was a welter of sexrags filth of all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrositys and beastle faces. A chill raw wind was blowing and these creatures huddled there in their ration, sleeping for the most part or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, huddled there in their ration, sleeping for the most part or trying to sleep. It was this sleeping that puzzled me. Why were nine out of 10 of them asleep or trying to sleep . But it was not till afterwards that i learned it is the law of the powers that be that the homeless shall not sleep by night. This is a view of the line of homeless men waiting outside the Salvation Army shelter for a dinner and a place to sleep overnight. London experienced this as well. He stood in line. You had to get there as early in the day as you could and ill might be on a day when you had nothing to eat all day. But you went and stood in line. And you might have to wait for four, five, six hours to get a place in the Salvation Army or other shelter. And if you were lucky enough to get in you would get dinner and a bed but before dinner even, you had to listen to an hour long sermon. And london makes no bones about it in his book. He was appalled by that that people who were weak from lack of sleep and lack of food were made to sit on a hard bench through a long sermon before they could get any food. He was very critical of all of the charitable groups including the Salvation Army. So it was with some enjoyment, actually, that i found in our collection of jack londons papers years later. I found a receipt for a check he had written, donating to the sal croatian army. Im pleased that he got past their disapproval of their action at that time. London was a great admirer of oscar wilde, especially a pamphlet that he wrote called the soul of man under socialism. Even though i can hardly feature two different figures as oscar wilde and jack london, they agreed completely on socialism and its scommopes dreams. Wildest writes the poor are grateful for charity. The best among the never grateful. They run grateful, discontend, disobedient and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution or a sentimental dole. Usually accompanied by some attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannize over theyre private lives. London shared this view completely. In one of his notebooks that we have at the huntington library, he wrote a note thats healthy headed the rebels. He write the joy is meaningless. They are entities this which cockney girl who slanged or spoke in slang, the criminal who is shamelessly applied their trades. While i was really puffed by that word entity, i read it again and thought its entities. So i checked it out in the Oxford English dictionary and i found one of the meanings of the word entity is a person who is a real person to reckon with. Someone who is secure in his or her own being and comfortable with him or herself and able to meet the world open faced, full forward. And so london was admiring the poor who stood up for themselves, who didnt bow their heads and deferential treatment of the people who had the money. And so he admired the people who stood up for themselves and he lways did. For london, the city like london, and other large cities, london, new york, the city was a source of poverty and a polluted place that starved both the soul and the body. He looked to the soil, to the rural life, as a place that would restore physical health and psychological wellbeing. When he found the land he wanted in 1905 in the Sonoma Valley he wrote to his editor to describe 130 acres of the most beautiful primitive land to be found anywhere in california. Like so many immigrants before him who had traveled over land or around the horn to reach the land of golden dreams, london recognized the special meaning and opportunity of california. His dream was to create a ranch that would operate according to modern ecological principles. He believed that his ranch