Harbor (9781101565681) (4 page)

The paradigm for muckraking novels takes for granted the subject's eventual adoption of a revolutionary stance, and for most of
The Harbor
this seems to be exactly where Billy is headed. The actual outcome of his struggle, however, is not a conversion to political certainty but to a state of inquiry, posing a series of unresolved questions about class relationships. Even when the strike is crushed and the voice of the workers ceases, Billy wonders, “Would that crowd spirit rise again? Could it be that the time was near?” Whatever conversion these thoughts imply remains incomplete because Billy's judgment is intruded upon by a new factor. Before his leftism can fully crystallize, the “first low grumble of war” is heard, and the cause of labor is superseded by what may only be called a more immediate historical concern: the “crashing down” of civilization itself.

Poole's novel closes with an analysis of the incipient war—one of the first in an American novel and one of the most prescient. Months before trench warfare and machine-driven death were generally known horrors, Billy describes efficient, modernized slaughter.

And five years before F. Scott Fitzgerald's first hero, Amory Blaine, would famously describe the spiritual effects of the war's end in
This Side of Paradise
—“all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken”—Poole offers a valedictory to the “gods of civilization and peace” that were shattered in the war's beginning. While Billy remains hopeful but uncertain that the class struggle can be won, he does know that on the battlefields of Europe the god of his mother's church, the god of corporate efficiency, and the god of the working masses were being plunged into a “furnace of war” from which each would emerge in radically altered form.

Largely because Poole's rise as a writer was so closely tied to the shifting fortunes of history and politics, the national celebrity that he achieved with
The Harbor
did not last. With American entry into the European conflict in 1917, the desire for patriotic unity gave license to the severe curtailment of civil liberties and touched off strong antileft persecutions. Strikes and labor actions of the type depicted by Poole in
The Harbor
were not only no longer front-page news; they soon became illegal under the Sedition Act of 1918. Though Poole initially supported American war aims, after the November 1918 Armistice he was severely disillusioned by reactionary trends in the United States. Events of 1919—the first Red scare, the lynching of Wobblies, the sentencing of socialists to long prison terms—made it clear that his brand of liberalism was out of step with postwar “normalcy.” Though he continued to produce fiction and journalism, the 1920s and 1930s saw Poole's gradual fall from prominence as a cultural figure.

When he died in 1950, Poole's
New York Times
obituary stated correctly that he had won the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction ever awarded, and that he was best known for his acclaimed novel of 1915. But the
Times
did scant justice to Poole's most influential book, blandly misdescribing
The Harbor
only as an “intimate picture of this city.” Someone must have realized that the novel's importance had been slighted, for the
Times
immediately prepared an addendum. Published two days later, “The Days of Ernest Poole” better served the historical record by relating the real subject matter of
The Harbor
and placing it in distinguished literary company. The book, it was now acknowledged, stood up to comparisons with Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle
, Frank Norris's
The Octopus
, and the novels of the great naturalist Theodore Dreiser. It was a work that helped define the muckraking era, a “golden age” of American fiction in which powerful “cries of indignation” from American writers registered stark economic injustice and explosive political tensions.
¹⁷

Even this assessment, however, fails to account for all aspects of the novel's contemporary significance. Reading
The Harbor
today, we recognize among its many modern attributes an early warning about the destruction of an ecosystem by corporate greed and consumerism. Almost a century before the Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010, Poole's central character wonders whether he should be impressed by the “hundreds of millions of dollars that are being spent on engineering to make the harbor like it should be”—or appalled by the “loathsome blotches and streaks of oil” in the East River, the “foul, sluggish columns of smoke on the Jersey shore,” and the hideous miles of acrid-smelling black water poisoned by Standard Oil. Dillon the engineer, one of the earliest depictions in our literature of a corporate talking head, claims despite appalling evidence to the contrary that CEOs know best. His assurances that the pollution problem is being “worked on” call to mind the early twenty-first-century assurances from oil industry executives about the safety of deep-water drilling in environmentally sensitive areas.

In his autobiography, Poole found it interesting that three hundred copies of
The Harbor
, bound for British readers in Liverpool, went down with the RMS
Lusitania
on May 7, 1915. Compared to the nearly twelve hundred lives lost in the sinking of the British liner by a German U-boat, the copies of Poole's book mean nothing materially. But they do make a good symbol, a reminder of the political conditions that often decide the fate of artistic efforts. And the fact that a chain of events beginning with the sinking of the
Lusitania
ended with U.S. entry into a war that throttled socialism at home and ultimately marginalized Ernest Poole as a writer is telling. While the war explains the short-lived viability of American radicalism, making it easy for historians to minimize its importance, it also explains why
The Harbor
was forgotten for much of the twentieth century, and why a new edition of the novel is so necessary. Reissuing this book doesn't change history, but it repairs a loss to our literary history by ensuring that the quintessential story of prewar radicalism did not, in the end, go down with the
Lusitania
.

 

PATRICK CHURA

1
Rideout, 56; Keefer, 54; Golin, 235.

2
“Current Fiction.”
New York Times
, February 7, 1915.

3
Keefer considers it possible that the Pulitzer Poole received for
His Family
just after the success of
The Harbor
was “in part recognition of the importance of its predecessor” (55). In
The Pulitzer Prizes
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), John Hohenberg analyzed the prize committee's deliberations and noted that
His Family
“had not made anything like the impression of Poole's earlier and more successful work,
The Harbor
” (57).

4
Rideout, 48. For a synopsis of Socialist political gains in the period, see Rideout, 47–48.

5
For detailed accounts of the Paterson Pageant, see Anne Huber Tripp, Steve Golin, and Linda Nochlin.

6
Mabel Dodge Luhan,
Intimate Memories
, v. 3,
Movers and Shakers
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), 39.

7
The Bridge
, 216.

8
Ibid., 66.

9
Ibid., 95, 97.

10
Reed, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Thompson Buchanan were the other three (New York
Tribune
, June 8, 1913).

11
Leona Rust Egan,
Provincetown as a Stage
(Orleans, MA: Parnassus, 1994), 106.

12
Susan Glaspell,
The Road to the Temple
(New York: Stokes, 1941), 250.

13
The Bridge
, 199.

14
Ibid., 199.

15
In Friedman's novel, the central character is wounded attempting to stop fighting between Pinkertons and strikers. The protagonist's love interest is the wealthy daughter of a steel mill owner.

16
The Bridge
, 200.

17
“Ernest Poole, 69, Novelist, Is Dead.”
New York Times
, January 11, 1950; “The Days of Ernest Poole.”
New York Times,
January 13, 1950.

Boylan, James.
The Rise of Ernest Poole: The Making of a Social Muckraker
. Kansas City, MO: Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 1993.

Chura, Patrick.
Vital Contact: Downclassing Journeys in American Literature from Herman Melville to Richard Wright
. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.

Cuff, Robert. “Ernest Poole: Novelist as Propagandist, 1917–1918: A Note.”
Canadian Review of American Studies
. 19, 2 (1995): 183–94.

Dowling, Robert.
Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Dubofsky, Melvin.
We Shall Be All.
Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969.

Flynn, Elizabeth G. “The Truth About the Paterson Pageant,” in
I Speak My Peace
. New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1955.

Freeman, Joseph.
An American Testament, a Narrative of Rebels and Romantics
. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936.

Golin, Steve.
The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913
. Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1988.

Hapgood, Hutchins.
A Victorian in the Modern World
. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939.

Hapke, Laura.
Labor's Text: The Worker in American Fiction
. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Hart, John E. “Heroism Through Social Awareness: Ernest Poole's
The Harbor
.”
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
. 9, 3 (1967): 84–94.

Keefer, Truman Frederick.
Ernest Poole
. New York: Twayne, 1966.

Kornbluh, Joyce.
Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology
. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964.

Nochlin, Linda. “The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913.”
Art in America
62 (May 1974): 64–68.

Poole, Ernest.
The Bridge: My Own Story
. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940.

_____.
His Family.
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917.

Rideout, Walter Bates.
The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956.

Sinclair, Upton,
American Outpost
. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1932.

Tripp, Anne Huber.
The IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

“You chump,” I thought contemptuously. I was seven years old at the time, and the gentleman to whom I referred was Henry Ward Beecher. What it was that aroused my contempt for the man will be more fully understood if I tell first of the grudge that I bore him.

I was sitting in my mother's pew in the old church in Brooklyn. I was altogether too small for the pew, it was much too wide for the bend at my knees; and my legs which were very short and fat, stuck straight out before me. I was not allowed to move, I was most uncomfortable, and for this Sabbath torture I laid all the blame on the preacher. For my mother had once told me that I was brought to church so small in order that when I grew up I could say I had heard the great man preach before he died. Hence the deep grudge that I bore him. Sitting here this morning, it seemed to me for hours and hours, I had been meditating upon my hard lot. From time to time, as was my habit when thinking or feeling deeply, one hand would unconsciously go to my head and slowly stroke my bang. My hair was short and had no curls, its only glory was this bang, which was deliciously soft to my hand and shone like a mirror from much reflective stroking. Presently my mother would notice and with a smile she would put down my hand, but a few moments later up it would come and would continue its stroking. For I felt both abused and puzzled. What was there in the talk of the large white-haired old man in the pulpit to make my mother's eyes so queer, to make her sit so stiff and still? What good would it do me when I grew up to say that I had heard him?

“I don't believe I will ever say it,” I reasoned doggedly to myself. “And even if I do, I don't believe any other man will care whether I say it to him or not.” I felt sure my father wouldn't. He never even came to church.

At the thought of my strange silent father, my mind leaped to his warehouse, his dock, the ships and the harbor. Like him, they were all so strange. And my hands grew a little cold and moist as I thought of the terribly risky thing I had planned to do all by myself that very afternoon. I thought about it for a long time with my eyes tight shut. Then the voice of the minister brought me back, I found myself sitting here in church and went on with this less shivery thinking.

“I wouldn't care myself,” I decided. “If I were a man and another man met me on the street and said, ‘Look here. When I was a boy I heard Henry Ward Beecher before he died,' I guess I would just say to him, ‘You mind your business and I'll mind mine.' ” This phrase I had heard from the corner grocer, and I liked the sound of it. I repeated it now with an added zest.

Again I opened my eyes and again I found myself here in church. Still here. I heaved a weary sigh.

“If you were dead already,” I thought as I looked up at the preacher, “my mother wouldn't bring me here.” I found this an exceedingly cheering thought. I had once overheard our cook Anny describe how her old father had dropped dead. I eyed the old minister hopefully.