Ernest Cook Poole (January 23, 1880 – January 10, 1950) was an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. Poole is best remembered for his sympathetic first-hand reportage of revolutionary Russia during and immediately after the Revolution of 1905 and Revolution of 1917 and as a popular writer of proletarian-tinged fiction during the era of World War I and the 1920s.
Poole was the winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded in 1918 for his book, His Family.
Biography
Early years
Poole was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 23, 1880, to Abram Poole and Mary Howe Poole.Edd Applegate, Muckrackers: A Biographical Dictionary of Writers and Editors. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008; pg. 142. His Wisconsin-born father was a successful commodities trader at the Chicago Board of Trade,Some sources have his father's occupation as a "stockbroker." He was not. By the time he was 35 Abram Poole had built a business as a commissions-only commodities trader with offices in Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, New Orleans, and New York City. See Pool, The Bridge, pg. 36. his mother hailed from a well-established Chicago family; together they raised 7 children.Ernest Poole, The Bridge: My Own Story. New York: Macmillan, 1940; pp. 8, 31.
Poole was educated at home until he was almost 7 years old, at which time he was enrolled in Chicago's University School for Boys.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 15. There he first showed a proclivity for the written word, working briefly on the staff of the school newspaper. His was a privileged youth, spending summers at the family's seasonal home at Lake Forest, on the shores of Lake Michigan.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 24. The family's Michigan Avenue home in Chicago was populated with servants, including gardeners and governesses, and he grew up in proximity of the scions of the city elite, including young relatives of Cyrus McCormick and Abraham Lincoln.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 10, 15-16, 26 and passim.
Following high school graduation, Poole, an accomplished violinist, took a year off to study music, with a view to becoming a professional composer.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 51. He found the process of writing music difficult, however, and — inspired by his literary-oriented and story-telling father — turned his attention to the written word as a possible profession.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 53.
After his year-long escape from formal education, Poole moved to Princeton, New Jersey, to attend Princeton University, where he attended courses in political science taught by Woodrow Wilson.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 65-66. There he continued to demonstrate an interest in journalism and fiction writing, working on the staff of the school's daily newspaper, The Prince — before finding straight journalism tedious.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 56. He moved from nuts-and-bolts journalism to the arts, contributing material to the campus literary magazine, The Lit, and penning two librettos for the illustrious Princeton Triangle Club, although both were rejected.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 65.
It was at Princeton that Poole was influenced to the ideas of progressive reform associated with the burgeoning muckraker movement, with the book How The Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis playing a particularly pivotal role in the evolution of Poole's worldview. He also read translations of Russian classics by Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, which deeply impressed Poole for their realistic style and aroused what would become a lifelong interest in him in the authors' native land.
Settlement worker
Poole graduated from Princeton cum laude in 1902 and immediately moved to New York City to live in the University Settlement House on the city's impoverished Lower East Side. During his stint as a settlement worker, Poole gained the notice of editors at McClure's Magazine for an article he wrote on the social situation in New York's Chinatown district and authored a report for the New York Child Labor Committee on the continuing child labor problem.
Pushed by the Child Labor Committee to seek publicity by rewriting some of his lurid anecdotes of the life of street urchins, Poole wrote an article that early in 1903 found its way into the fledgling muckraking magazine, McClure's. Payment for the freelance effort was received and confidence boosted.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 69-70. The next phase of Poole's life, that of a professional writer, had begun.
Headstrong and confident, Poole immersed himself in his passion, fiction, while still ensconced as a settlement worker. Three short stories were immediately penned and sent out to various New York magazines — only to be returned with letters of rejection.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 70. Poole retreated to writing short works of investigative journalism on the boys of the city streets and met with better success, seeing print for one piece in Collier's and two others in the New York Evening Post.
Poole's settlement house was active teaching classes and housing club groups during the day.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 72. In the evenings it hosted a steady stream of guests, including some of the most famous progressive activists of the day, including social worker Jane Addams, journalist Lincoln Steffens, British author H. G. Wells and left wing politicians Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, as well as renowned attorney Clarence Darrow. Acquaintances were made and ideas absorbed by Poole, who increased in commitment to attempt to the wrongs of society through intelligent social reform.
Because he wanted to understand the Lower East Side community better, Poole started learning Yiddish and secretly listened to conversations, writing down pieces of dialogue to use later in his creative writing.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 73-74. He befriended Abraham Cahan, the publisher of the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward (Der Forverts) and through him developed an appreciation for the revolutionary struggle of oppressed Jews and others against the Tsarist regime in Russia.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 74.
The turning point in Poole's work as a settlement worker happened when he was chosen to investigate tuberculosis in the tenement slums of New York City's Lower East Side.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 78, 82. Poole spent weeks going from room to room observing and surveying residents and taking testimony about the fate of previous inhabitants.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 78-79. Poole's report, "The Plague in Its Stronghold" attracted media attention. He guided reporters and photographers through the tenement districts, and the resulting coverage led the New York State Legislature in Albany to hold hearings.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 82-83. The task placed a strain on Poole's mental and physical health. He became feverish and was sent home to the family summer home in Lake Forest to recuperate.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 83.
Magazine correspondent
Poole's time as a settlement worker at an end, he threw himself into investigative journalism. In 1904 the popular illustrated news weekly The Outlook dispatched Poole to live for six weeks in the packinghouse district of Chicago to report on the ongoing stockyards' strike, which prominently featured a melange of striking new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe against thousands of African-American strikebreakers brought for the purpose to the city.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 92-93.
When his Outlook piece was completed, Poole stayed on the scene as the volunteer press agent for the union of the striking slaughterhouse workers.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 94-95. The job put him in touch with the young Upton Sinclair, who was on the scene to do research for what he hoped would become the "Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Labor Movement," published in 1906 as The Jungle.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 95-96. Poole's close friends in New York included two others who would travel to Imperial Russia as correspondents in 1905 — the socialists Arthur Bullard and William English Walling.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 171.
Back in New York, Poole met the émigré Russian revolutionary Yekaterina Breshkovskaya, the so-called "Little Grandmother of the Revolution."Poole, The Bridge, pg. 103. Together with an interpreter and a stenographer, Poole sat for eight hours listening to Breshkovskaya's personal story and the history of the revolutionary movement fighting for the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty of Imperial Russia.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 104. Poole's interview would ultimately result in a pamphlet issued by the Chicago socialist publishing house Charles H. Kerr & Co., For Russia's Freedom.
Fascinated by the tumultuous Russian political situation, Poole successfully convinced The Outlook to send him to Russia as the magazine's correspondent and a contract was drawn up.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 113. Poole sailed for England, then proceeded to France before traveling by train to Berlin and on to Russia, bringing with him communications and money entrusted to him in Paris for underground Russian constitutionalists.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 114-115. Together with a translator, Poole traveled Russia extensively in the early days of the 1905 Revolution, ultimately turning in 14 pieces to The Outlook detailing his experiences and observations.Rosecrans Baldwin, "Poole's Prize," Fine Books and Collections, August 2009, www.finebooksmagazine.com/
After his return from Russia, Poole continued to produce feature short stories depicting urban working class life for the periodical press, all the while gathering anecdotes for future novels. Poole split his output between The Saturday Evening Post and Everybody's Magazine, as a successful freelance writer.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 182.
Poole married the former Margaret Ann Witherbotham in 1907 and the couple established a household in the Greenwich Village section of New York City.Applegate, Muckrackers, pg. 144. The couple would raise three children.
For several years after his marriage, Poole found himself to writing of plays for the stage, an offshoot of the writing profession that pitted low probability of success against potentially immense financial rewards if a piece was successfully staged.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 192. His first effort, revolving around life in a steel mill, failed to find a producer but his second, a drama about the construction of a bridge in the Rocky Mountains, led to six weeks of rehearsals and a grand New York opening — followed by poor reviews and a quick close.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 190-192.
Poole would ultimately write 11 plays for the New York stage, two of these in conjunction with Harriet Ford. A total of three of Poole's efforts would be staged, with the two successful dramas running for 6 weeks and 3 months, respectively. His urge to write for the stage whetted, Poole would return to more secure forms of writing.
Political activism
Poole was slow to join the growing Socialist Party of America (SPA), initially resisting joining because, as he later recalled, he had "got free from one church and I didn't propose to get into this other and write propaganda all my life, instead of the truth as I saw it and felt it."Poole, The Bridge, pg. 89. Around 1908 he made the acquaintance of party leader Morris Hillquit, however, who became a "lovable friend" and persuaded the non-Marxist Poole that his views fell within the "very broad and liberal" ideological umbrella of the Socialist Party.Poole, The Bridge, pp. 194-195. Poole joined a branch of Local New York and maintained his red card in the organization at least through the years of World War I.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 195.
From 1908 Poole began writing for the New York Call, a socialist daily closely associated with the Socialist Party of America (SPA). Poole was also among those left wing intellectuals who helped to found the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS), joining in the task with his friends Arthur Bullard and Charles Edward Russell.Poole, The Bridge, pg. 196.
Novelist