Harbor (9781101565681) (2 page)

 

Though Poole's success came suddenly, it had a long foreground in the study of serious social issues. Born in 1880 into a securely middle-class Chicago family, he probably imbibed his interest in reform movements from his mother, Mary Howe Poole, who taught tolerance and generosity toward the underprivileged as an extension of her Christian ethics. In
The Bridge
, the author recalled childhood friendships with indigent boys who played in the city dumps, experiences he would recycle as part of his main character's background in
The Harbor
. Poole's reformist sympathies were further inspired in his teenage years by reading Jacob Riis's
How the Other Half Lives
. From 1898 to 1902 he attended Princeton, where he was a mediocre student during his first two years. By the time he graduated he was ranked in the top quarter of his class and had earned As from Woodrow Wilson in history and political science.

Influenced by his study of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Balzac, and Kipling, Poole set out to become a fiction writer after graduation. Like many well-educated children of middle-class political progressives at the turn of the century, he chose a settlement house in the slums as a setting for his research into the lives of the poor. As he explained in
The Bridge
, “Tenement life appealed to me as a tremendous new field, scarcely touched by American writers as yet.”
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In September 1902 Poole took up residence at the University Settlement house on New York's Lower East Side. His arrival coincided with the rise of social exposé literature—what was later known as muckraking journalism for its focus on urban squalor and the victims of poverty. His first writing project was a report on child labor that appeared in the April 1903
McClure's
under the title “Waifs of the Street.”

While living in University Settlement off and on from 1902 to early 1905, Poole wrote dozens of articles and pamphlets about slum perils ranging from rampant tuberculosis to venereal disease. In 1904 he returned to Chicago for six weeks to research a packinghouse strike. He lived in a tenement near the stockyards and produced articles that Upton Sinclair later drew from in writing
The Jungle
. Poole's memoir describes meeting Sinclair while
The Jungle
was in progress and giving his fellow muckraker “the inside dope on conditions in the Yards,” along with “some tips on where to get more.” On the same trip, Poole visited Jane Addams at Hull House and enlisted her aid in raising money for starving strikers.
⁹

A year later Poole traveled to Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine for
Outlook
magazine to investigate the aftermath of the failed socialist uprising of January 1905, making him one of the earliest American writers to study European socialism firsthand. He interviewed party leaders in St. Petersburg and Moscow before venturing into the rural villages, where he lived with peasant families and recorded their stories of recent czarist atrocities. The vivid and perceptive local descriptions Poole produced on this assignment are often considered his best journalism. During a stopover in London on the way home, the young author traded political insights and discussed socialist theory with George Bernard Shaw.

In the years between his Russian trip and the writing of
The Harbor
Poole pursued a literary career in New York, selling an occasional work of fiction to
The Saturday Evening Post
and publishing more articles on slum conditions that won the praise of Theodore Roosevelt. Friends and influences in this phase of apprenticeship included liberal journalist Lincoln Steffens, immigrant newspaper editor Abraham Cahan, and writer-activist Mary Heaton Vorse. Before he turned thirty Poole had written a somewhat amateurish first novel, sold a handful of stories, and written perhaps a dozen full-length plays, three of which had been produced. In October 1908, impressed by the political success of moderate socialist leader and state congressional candidate Morris Hillquit, Poole joined the Socialist Party and began contributing regular articles to New York's socialist organ, the
Call
.

When Big Bill Haywood's aggressive labor organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, came east from Colorado in 1912 to take the lead in a major strike in the textile mills of Lowell and Lawrence, Poole naturally became involved. He organized a well-attended mass meeting in New York's Carnegie Hall to raise funds for the jailed Italian strike leaders Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti. Poole not only followed the strike closely, in the process learning valuable political lessons; he played a tangential role in the IWW's greatest victory, an event then widely viewed as the first battle in the coming class war. The Lawrence strike opened up the eastern states to agitation through the preaching and practice of the controversial IWW doctrine of “direct action.” By all accounts it was this strike that prompted Poole to begin the novel he had been contemplating for years—a work that would transmit to a wide audience the dynamic of a radical labor conflict and offer a vision of a world run by workers.

But
The Harbor
could not have taken final shape without the stimulus of the silk workers' strike in Paterson, New Jersey, that began in February 1913. During this strike, Ernest Poole came to Paterson more than any other prominent Socialist and took more away with him. He often accompanied Bill Haywood and feminist labor leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to Turn Hall in New York, where strike rallies were held, and gave speeches to the workers at the weekly Sunday striker gatherings at the New Jersey town of Haledon. Poole was also deeply involved in the Paterson Strike Pageant, a moving reenactment of the events of the strike before an audience of twenty thousand in Madison Square Garden. This groundbreaking performance used several hundred real strikers as actors portraying themselves in dramatized scenes from the Paterson conflict, including the initial walkout, picket lines at the mills, mass meetings and speeches by Haywood, police violence, the funeral of a murdered striker, and the singing of the
Internationale
as a finale. Working with future Communist revolutionary John Reed and set designer Robert Edmond Jones, Poole drew on his stage experience to help plan the logistics of the production. In newspaper accounts on the morning after the pageant, he was named as one of the “bright lights who worked up the show” and one of the four writers of the pageant script.
¹⁰

Over the years, pageant witnesses, participants, and historians have outdone themselves in their attempts to adequately extol the emotive power of the event. Flynn called the pageant “the most beautiful and realistic example of art that has been put on stage in the last half century.” Upton Sinclair, who advertised his latest novel in the event program, was moved to tears by the show, which he avowed “would never pass from [his] memory.” Theater scholars now generally agree that the pageant sparked the development of American drama, preparing the way for the labor plays of the Provincetown Players.
¹¹
A number of the founding members of the players—including George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, and John Reed—were involved in or present at the pageant. Cook referred to it as “the first labor play” and praised the “feeling of oneness” with the strikers that Poole and the other pageant organizers had conveyed.
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Ultimately, perhaps, nothing better expresses the event's power than an artifact that actually predated it—Robert Edmond Jones's compelling publicity illustration, which doubled as the cover of the pageant program and now serves as the cover of this book. In Jones's sketch, an intent, confident young worker emerges from the factory, surging upward under a boldly emblazoned “
I.W.W.
” as if in answer to the organization's call to action. This image—championing anticapitalist revolution and forcefully asserting the rising might of the working class—has become the strike's chief symbol and an icon of labor history.

While Jones and the Provincetowners expressed their feeling of “oneness” with workers through visual art and drama, Poole found a way to put this sentiment into fiction. One evening during the Paterson strike, while Haywood was having dinner at Poole's home in New York, the Wobbly leader mentioned that he planned “to strike New York Harbor and shut it up tight” the following spring. When Poole replied that he knew of this plan and had learned of it from a young IWW organizer he'd been interviewing on the waterfront, the surprised Haywood asked the purpose of his research. “I'm writing a book called
The Harbor
,” Poole replied.
¹³

The book Poole alluded to, a largely forgotten landmark in American literary history, offers a detailed treatment of economic and social conditions in New York from the 1880s to the outbreak of the Great War. While Poole's novel spans decades, one of its chief merits is that it preserves in literary form a brilliant but short-lived episode in the history of the radical labor movement. In book III of
The Harbor
, when a militant organizer leads the middle-class main character into the hold of an ocean liner to view the working conditions of stevedores and stokers and declares, “[T]hey're waking up fast—all over the world,” he is putting on display the kind of energy captured visually by Jones and harnessed in the Lawrence and Paterson strikes. This energy, glimpsed by Poole at Paterson, is reconstituted in the closing chapters of his novel when the “great spirit of the crowd” is born in a violent dockworkers' action.

Fittingly, the basic tension in Poole's representation of the prewar national mood involves the question of political conversion to socialism. The novel's protagonist, Billy (he is not given a surname), is an aspiring writer who struggles to reconcile his sympathy for oppressed workers with his middle-class loyalties and basic faith in capitalist progress. The other central characters in the novel—Dillon and Joe Kramer—are aligned on opposite sides of the class war, with Billy in a complicated position between them. Dillon, an acclaimed engineer, city planner, and “priest of big business,” urges Billy to use his literary talents to write politically conservative “glory stories,” thinly disguised paeans to the “great men” at the top of the industrial system. Kramer, a radical activist whose character is based on the organizer Poole met at Paterson, renounces his ties to the respectable classes to go among slum dwellers and stokers, preach syndicalism, and lead strikes. He introduces Billy to working-class misery, warns him against the brutality of business interests, and insists that Billy use his literary talents to further the international labor movement.

While the socialist “conversion novel”—exemplified in works by Sinclair, Jack London, Isaac Friedman, Arthur Bullard, and others—had already become a known genre by 1915, Poole's work depicts the process with distinctive intensity. At a moment when labor activism and the Industrial Workers of the World were, as Poole claimed, “spreading with amazing speed all over the land,” the author quotes and paraphrases from actual IWW speeches, giving voice to the proponents of industrial sabotage and anticapitalist violence in an unusually direct way.
¹⁴
Before Poole, perhaps only Friedman's
By Bread Alone
, a much lesser novel, had taken the conflict of the middle-class sympathizer to the level of civil war in which neutrality was impossible and the necessity to “decide which side you're on” was mandated by both conscience and historical circumstance.
¹⁵
And in
The Harbor
the pull toward the left is felt not only by the protagonist but by a credible group of secondary characters who also afford legitimacy to radicalism and are also from the middle class. The root conflicts they embody go deeper than politics, involving ties of blood and marriage. Billy's family, for example, is split down the middle, a condition that forces the main character to weigh loyalties to his leisure-class wife, his labor-leader sister, his businessman father, and the anarchist who may become his brother-in-law. Within this network of relations all choices carry tragic potential, and yet a choice must be made; as the book's ending suggests, 1914 is “no year for compromise.”

What follows from this material is a realistic consideration of questions that self-conscious liberals, then and now, cannot avoid: Is calculated violence against corporations justified by the calculated violence they do every day to people and to the planet? What actually can and should be done about poverty by members of the middle class? How practical is the idea of political union between destitute workers and sympathetic bourgeois intellectuals? Can a middle-class writer truly understand workers' hardships or interpret their lives without condescension and in ways that aid them in the class struggle? What are the real and intended effects—for both socially aware writers and their working-class subjects—of politically engaged literature? Viable questions today, as they were for the educated men and women who were famously active for reform causes during the novel's historical present.

In
The Harbor
, Poole follows the progress of an autobiographical main character from a genteel childhood to the advent of his career as a serious novelist. By tracing the struggles of the artist toward maturity, the author works in the fixed and familiar vein of the Künstlerroman. The book's twist on this traditional genre is that in Billy's case political growth is the single factor that precedes and enables artistic growth. For twenty-first-century readers, however, Billy's development as an artist will probably be overshadowed by the book's inspired setting: the vast harbor itself, which Poole calls “the world's first port.” New York Harbor, in all of its magnificence and ugliness, gives Poole a comprehensive metaphor for the implacable creative-destructive forces behind what we now think of as the American century. Teeming with men and machines, raw industry and abundant consumer goods, the place is a magnet for Billy's imagination and a catalyst to his development. From the opening pages, when the seven-year-old boy attends a sermon by the great preacher Henry Ward Beecher and hears Beecher refer lyrically to “the harbor of life” as a place of safety and rest, Billy is fixated on the waterfront as a source of vital knowledge. His direct experience on the docks, where he befriends gang toughs, “micks,” and ragged street urchins, tells him that Beecher is wrong about the harbor—it is not a refuge from the world's cares. As he already senses, it is a place “close to the deep rough tides of life,” where immigrants, stokers, deckhands, and prostitutes struggle for survival. Later in the novel Billy comes to a more complex appreciation of the harbor as “a symbol of the changing world that I had seen with my changing eyes.”
¹⁶