Harbor (9781101565681) (3 page)

Understanding the harbor this way—as a measure of both inner psychological and outward material change—actually works generally, offering a means of gauging the sympathies of each major character. Billy's mother, his first influence, tries to keep her son away from the sordid life on the docks. She fails, but she gives Billy the desire to be a writer along with a value system—a broad-minded Christian ethos resembling that of the nineteenth-century social gospelers—that ultimately draws him toward the labor movement. Billy's father, the owner of a waterfront warehouse, is subjected to wrenching economic transformations. Unprepared for the era of big companies and Standard Oil, he watches his harbor become “clouded in the smoke and soot of an age of steam and iron” and longs nostalgically for the bygone age of towering sails and Yankee clippers. He fails to understand or adapt to the crude industrial forces that have destroyed the old harbor and “crushed the life out of” his commercial hopes and stable worldview.

Poole's younger characters are less static—they change with the harbor, sometimes painfully, and reflect fascinating stages in the evolution of American class and gender attitudes. Raised in an atmosphere of progressive optimism, Billy initially yearns to escape the waterfront and avoid his father's business by writing novels. Since Art is Billy's first godlike principle, his youthful religion is style, technique, and form. The problem, however, is that Billy has nothing to say, no idea of what view of reality his writing should espouse or what social meaning, if any, his novels should have. The notion that it is enough to simply create beauty, an idea derived from his elite education, buoys his fantasy that a sojourn in Paris after college graduation will make him a genuine writer, free of all loyalties except to his romanticized aesthetic ideal. But when Billy returns to the harbor following the death of his mother, his politically indeterminate creativity is exposed as naive when measured against the more dynamic lives of Dillon and Kramer.

Dillon, who helps build global capitalism while promising to “cure” its endemic side effects—massive human suffering and environmental destruction—exemplifies “the real strength of Wall Street.” He embodies what Poole calls the “new god . . . of Efficiency,” and his great dream in the novel is to organize the harbor according to the theory of scientific management. This principle is described in terms reminiscent of Taylorism: “[A]rmed with Science, its feet stood firm on mechanical laws and in its head were all the brains of all the strong men at the top.” Dillon's efficiency becomes a second godlike principle to Billy, who gives up his attempts at abstruse fiction to follow the urban engineer's political lead and write articles in praise of corporate power. As Billy acknowledges, “The first social vision of my life I had through Dillon's field glass.”

While this is happening, however, Kramer relentlessly assails Billy's conservatism, reminding him of the “millions of people . . . getting a raw deal and getting mad about it” and warning against the hypocrisy of the “damned respectable upper class.” Kramer's impassioned pleas for economic reforms derive directly from the IWW lexicon and carry significant weight in the novel. His declarations of an imminent “age of force”—in which violent exploits by “prodigious masses of men” will tear down the institutional order through “direct action”—challenge the belief models of Poole's main character and struck a powerful chord with Poole's 1915 readership. As Billy's social awareness develops he comes variously under the sway of two formidable personalities at ideological war with each other, with Dillon initially more credible and compelling.

Eleanore Dillon, a childhood playmate of Billy's and the daughter of the great industrial engineer, enters the novel as an urbane moderate and vicarious participant in her father's work of remaking New York's maritime infrastructure. An adherent to her father's views, she explores the harbor in her personal motorboat, sometimes with Billy aboard, running business errands and occasionally putting her own engineering knowledge to use in geographic studies that further exploitation of the waterfront. After marrying Billy, however, her sensibilities broaden, less from Billy's urging than from her conversations with Kramer, who forces her to think about class war. She also bonds with Billy's sister, Sue, a nascent feminist who introduces her to the women's movement. Under these two influences, Eleanore evolves politically from suffrage marcher to settlement worker to intrepid relief worker in the novel's great harbor strike. Like the well-dressed Chicago settlement worker that Upton Sinclair had briefly sketched in
The Jungle
, Eleanore is not above using her influence with corporate bosses to help relieve misery in the slums created by those same corporate bosses. At the novel's end her visits to the poorest dockside tenements with a female strike leader tip the balance, pulling her away from conventional identification with the leisure class and toward a life lived in closer contact with poverty. “I've changed,” she announces, “I saw the worst of it, things so wrong in the tenements that big reforms are needed.”

By pursuing deep involvements in social causes, Billy's younger sister, Sue, takes advantage of one of the few career options available to unmarried middle-class women in the early twentieth century. Like the altruistic Gertie Ferish in Edith Wharton's 1905 novel
The House of Mirth
, Sue volunteers at the working girls' clubs that were active in New York around the turn of the century. She does not merely march in suffrage parades but helps organize them. She hosts radical gatherings and makes speeches at both women's meetings and workers' rallies. Finally, Sue falls in love with the revolutionary Joe Kramer and becomes what he calls “a regular organizer.” Sue is the real revolutionary in Billy's family, a woman who does not shy away even from the idea of direct industrial sabotage. She, as much as any of the book's core personalities, inhabits and expresses what Poole calls “this glorious age of deep radical changes going on.” As her relationship with Kramer develops, the question becomes whether it is actually possible for her to sunder all class ties to accept a bitter, hand-to-mouth existence as the wife of an outlaw labor agitator. Perhaps more seriously than Billy, she contemplates the permanent sacrifice of bourgeois privilege.

In creating the character of Billy's sister, Poole did not need a specific historical model; rather, Sue is a much advanced composite of the independent-minded New Woman who was already making waves on the American social scene. Poole's fictional strike heroine Nora Ganey, however, seems an interesting composite of two historical figures. She resembles both Elizabeth Gurley Flynn—the fearless IWW Rebel Girl who was often called the Joan of Arc of the labor movement—and seventeen-year-old millworker Hannah Silverman, the “Paterson firebrand” whom Flynn came to admire as one of the leading figures of the strike. Through their courage and effectiveness as speakers and protesters, these women defied gender stereotypes and showed what female activists could do during strikes if given the chance. Flynn agitated for both the IWW and an early but potent form of feminism. She built confidence among the women strikers and broke down the resistance of male strikers toward female leadership. Silverman was repeatedly arrested at Paterson but always quickly rejoined picket lines to lift morale. She was given the honor of leading the parade of workers to Madison Square Garden on the day of the Paterson Pageant. In Poole's novel, Nora Ganey speaks to an audience of twenty thousand at the Garden, an event that Billy calls “the one great miracle of the strike.” Ganey, Sue, and to some extent Eleanore Dillon reflect the emergence of the female labor leader, a phenomenon that was one of the most exciting developments at Paterson and Lawrence.

Considering Poole's evident responsiveness to current social history in
The Harbor
, it would have been surprising if he hadn't reserved a prominent role for the arch-revolutionist and prime force of American syndicalism, Bill Haywood. In labor leader Jim Marsh, Poole paints an accurate portrait of Haywood, one that captures the man's magnetism at the height of his power. When Billy meets Marsh, described as “the great mob agitator and notorious leader of strikes,” he feels an “electric shock” with effects less physical than ideological. While still a skeptic of radical change, Billy gets a quick education from Marsh, who shares appalling statistics about workplace conditions, worker death rates, and other indices of lower-class misery. Billy had been introduced to Marsh for the purpose of “writing up” the labor leader in a large circulation journal, something he had already done for Marsh's businessmen enemies. Approaching Marsh with conventionally shaped ideas, Billy is promptly overwhelmed by the other side of the story: “I could feel him taking my harbor to pieces, transforming each piece into something grim and so building a harbor of his own.”

Aside from the Paterson-inspired presentation of Billy's involvements, many of the structural details of
The Harbor
have direct analogues in the 1913 silk workers' strike. The Farm in Poole's novel, an outdoor site near the harbor where strikers meet for rallies, is a version of Haledon, where the Paterson silk workers held peaceful Sunday afternoon mass gatherings, listened to talks by Poole, Haywood, Flynn, and Carlo Tresca, and sang football songs led by former Harvard cheerleader John Reed. Described in Poole's novel as the open shore space in front of a dock, the Farm is where thirty thousand “intensely alive” workers gather and where Ganey, Marsh, and Kramer use rousing speeches to unify the ethnically diverse strikers.

At one particularly stirring meeting the trio of agitators takes turns exhorting the crowd. Ganey mourns the thousands of deaths caused by big companies, urging the workers to “strike and strike and strike again—till you make these tenements own the ships—and a life won't be thrown away for a dollar.” Marsh makes his class-based point by alluding to press accounts of the wealthy women who had recently died in the sinking of the
Titanic
. “We heard a lot about their screams,” Marsh recalls, but the “millions more” killed in “mines and mills and stinking slums” have yet to be heard. Kramer, whose health has been ruined by two years spent shoveling coal in a ship's engine room, speaks directly to the “men who work in the stokeholes naked” and asks for a moment of silence as “a tribute to all the dead stokers.” The chapter closes with prophecies from Marsh that could well have been uttered by Haywood and repeated as Wobbly policy: “Until we get our share, this labor war will have no end! . . . You will rise—and the world will be free.”

In the next chapter, a version of the Paterson Pageant takes place; even the process by which the pageant was reportedly initiated by Haywood is re-created: “Marsh proposed a parade, and the Farm took it up with prompt acclaim.” The entire polyglot “strike family” marches down Fifth Avenue, causing the shutting down of the retail stores and displacing the well-dressed shoppers, suggesting the antagonism between the labor movement and middle-class consumerism. The event actually resembles a pageant much more than a parade, with dirgelike funeral music and banners announcing OUR WOUNDED and OUR DEAD, followed by a procession of coffins that recasts the most moving scene of the Paterson Pageant: the funeral of striker Modestino Valentino. Mirroring the basic dynamic of the original pageant, this mass action prompts Billy, who is marching with the workers, to recognize the dissonance of his own loyalties. Though he is deeply moved by a spontaneous expression of joy among the strikers, he reflects, “You can't join in a laugh like that—you're no real member of this crowd––their world is not where you belong.”

As Billy considers this class-based limitation, the theme of
The Harbor
becomes his own relationship—and the relationship of his writing—to the labor struggle. For a time after he fell in love with Eleanore Dillon, he had submitted wholly to the worldview of capitalist efficiency and written in praise of its power. But a key stage in the reversal of his worldview comes when Kramer leads Billy into the stokehole of an ocean liner for a shocking glimpse of bestial half-naked workers shoveling coal into the ship's furnace. Poole's rendering of the hellish scene—where there is “no day and no night, only steel walls and electric light”—recalls the working conditions described in several of Eugene O'Neill's early sea plays, most notably
The Hairy Ape
. As in O'Neill's play, which was almost certainly thematically influenced by
The Harbor
, a visit to the stokehole by the slumming adventurer has profound psychological effects: Billy is traumatized by his intrusion into workers' lives. Noticing his distress, Kramer remarks, “That look at a stokehole got hold of you hard.” Billy's insistent questions about industrial conditions at his next meeting with Dillon signal a change in attitude—his faith in efficiency has weakened. Essentially, Billy realizes that his picture of the class struggle had been woefully incomplete. He now decides to forgo the glory stories, write what he sees and feels during his excursions into the labor movement, and present his perceptions to the public with all the realism he can marshal.

When Billy becomes personally involved in a massive strike of stokers and longshoremen, his conversion to socialism accelerates. While attending a worker rally, he is overwhelmed by police, beaten to unconsciousness, and taken to prison with the strikers. Poole describes the various nationalities of the imprisoned workers, their spirited singing, and Billy's newfound solidarity with the poor: “At last with a deep warm certainty I felt myself where I belonged.” In his prison cell Poole's alter ego poses the profound questions that are on trial for the rest of the novel and are still on trial for anyone concerned with social justice: “What has all this to do with me? What is it going to mean in my life?”