Harbor (9781101565681)

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

ERNEST POOLE was born in 1880 in Chicago, where he grew up in a politically progressive middle-class family. After graduating from Princeton in 1902 he set out to be become a writer, working initially as a muckraking journalist in New York City. In 1905 he traveled to Russia for
Outlook
magazine to report on the aftermath of a failed anticzarist uprising and investigate European socialism firsthand. Over the next decade he wrote numerous short stories, an undistinguished first novel, and a dozen plays, three of which were produced. Poole's greatest success came in 1915 with the publication of
The Harbor
, a bestselling and controversial socialist novel that described the political conversion of a middle-class young man to active sympathy with the labor movement during a violent waterfront strike. After
The Harbor
made him famous, Poole's literary reputation reached its peak when his next novel,
His Family
, won the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1918, an award that some saw as belated recognition for
The Harbor
. Poole published several moderately successful novels in the 1920s, but his work gradually fell out of favor with critics. During the Depression he largely gave up fiction to write class-conscious journalism about economic conditions in the United States and Europe. His autobiography,
The Bridge
, appeared in 1940. He died in 1950 having published twenty-four books, including fiction, history, and reform-oriented journalism.

 

PATRICK CHURA is associate professor of English at the University of Akron, where he teaches courses in American literature. He is the author of two books—
Vital Contact
in 2005 and
Thoreau the Land Surveyor
in 2010—and has published articles on a variety of literary-historical topics. He is a former Peace Corps volunteer and Fulbright lecturer in the Republic of Lithuania, and has received research grants from the European Union, the Fulbright Foundation, and the University of Akron.

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First published in the United States of America by The Macmillan Company 1915
This edition with an introduction by Patrick Chura published in Penguin Books 2011

 

Introduction copyright © Patrick Chura, 2011 All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Poole, Ernest, 1880–1950.
The harbor / Ernest Poole ; introduction and notes by Patrick Chura.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN : 978-1-101-56568-1

1. Labor unions—Fiction. 2. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Chura, Patrick, 1964–II. Title.
PS3531.O53H37 2011
813'.52—dc23 2011033847

 

 

 

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To M.A.

Critics from several eras have described
The Harbor
as “the best Socialist novel of all,” the “best radical novel written in the 1910s,” and “the best fictional account of the Paterson strike by a participant.”
¹
Like a number of muckraking classics, the book both recorded history and made history. It was the highly controversial eighth bestseller of 1915, going through seventy-eight thousand copies and twenty-two printings in a matter of months. The
New York Times
reviewer called it “the best American novel that has appeared in many a long day” and added, “It is difficult to give more than the faintest hint of the scope and power of this very unusual book within the limits of a review. Here in this vision of the harbor is focused much of our modern world.”
²
After
The Harbor
made him famous, Ernest Poole's career reached its zenith when his next novel,
His Family
, won the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1918, an award that some saw as belated recognition for Poole's more celebrated earlier book.
³
The Harbor
had a strong influence on the generation of radicals and progressives that came of age during World War I, and its significance was not lost on major writers with leftist leanings, including John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, and Eugene O'Neill.

For the class-conscious writer of the early 1910s, evidence was all around the United States that the labor-capital conflict was reaching a critical stage. In 1912, Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs won over nine hundred thousand votes for president, and a successful textile workers' strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, brought “Big Bill” Haywood and his labor organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), to their peak of influence and power. Dues-paying membership in the Socialist Party reached an all-time high of 120,000. Nationwide, at least 435 socialists held public office, including 21 state legislators and the mayor of Milwaukee.
⁴
Beginning in 1913, a long, ugly coal strike in the Trinidad-Ludlow area of southern Colorado drew public attention to appalling conditions in the western mines. Headlines in the national press described increasingly violent attempts of industrial “combinations” to break strikes and destroy unions—along with the increasing political effectiveness of the labor movement itself. What newspaper editors referred to with interest and trepidation as “The Rising Tide of Socialism” was a real phenomenon. At no previous time in U.S. history did a turn toward a collectivist economic future seem quite so possible.

The year 1913 is often cited as a watershed in both labor history and art history, a moment in which the contradictions of capitalism determined multiple aesthetic forms and filtered into popular culture. In February, the epoch-making New York Armory Show ushered in modernism in the visual and plastic arts, and in June, a silk workers' strike in Paterson, New Jersey, brought Greenwich Village intellectuals and the working class together to create the spectacular Paterson Strike Pageant, an unprecedented example of revolutionary élan that is now understood as a turning point in the evolution of public art and radical self-consciousness.
⁵
“Looking back on it now,” wrote the millionaire labor sympathizer Mabel Dodge Luhan, “it seems as though everywhere, in that year of 1913, barriers went down and people reached each other who had never been in touch before; there were all sorts of new ways to communicate, as well as new communications.”
⁶

Among the most admired and evocative new communications in this period was Poole's
The Harbor
, a culturally revealing, politically embedded novel that Poole began writing in 1912, completed in 1914, and published in the spring of 1915 to instant acclaim. The making of
The Harbor
was directly influenced by concurrent events, some of which are now forgotten. Poole's initial impulse for a story about the rise of labor came from the Lawrence strike. The fierce political tensions he described were the product of his contact with Bill Haywood and IWW organizers. The author gained further impetus, along with fresh insights about the class system, from his direct participation in the Paterson strike and Paterson pageant. The Colorado coal strikes added material that heightened the violence and shock value of the book's main labor action.

Finally, in a direct convergence of literature and world events, the novel's conclusion was shaped by the outbreak of World War I. When
The Harbor
was accepted by the Macmillan Company in early 1914, Poole believed the book finished, but after European hostilities broke out in July of that year, he asked the publisher to return the manuscript and then spent a month rewriting the final chapters. As he explained in his autobiography,
The Bridge
, the new ending incorporated the onset of the Great War by “showing the whole world in chaos.”
⁷