Ernest Poole: Novelist as Propagandist, 1917–1918: A Note

ERNEST POOLE: NOVELIST AS PROPAGANDIST, 1917-1918: A NOTE Robert Cuff The Committee on Public Information, (CPI), Woodrow Wilson's propaganda instrument during World War I, attracted a remarkable number of prewar social critics to its side. It was not true, as some conservatives charged, that with CPI "Greenwich Village is moving to Washington." It was true, however, that the Committee's staff did read like "a roll call of the muckrakers." 1 It could not have been otherwise under George Creel, the chief of CPI from its inception in April 1917. Wilsonian loyalist, Democratic partisan, crusading journalist, Creel had fought in a variety of progressive causes before the war, from municipal reform in Colorado to women's suffrage in New York, and once in Washington he, like other wartime administrators, turned to pre-war associates for volunteer staff. Reform journalists Edward Sisson and Will Irwin found a place in CPI; so did political radicals, among them Charles Edward Russell, John Spargo, William English Walling, Ernest Poole and others who had broken with the Socialist Party over the war issue.2 Ernest Poole is probably the least remembered of this latter group. His reputation as a novelist languished in the nineteen twenties and the general postwar disillusionment with liberal ideals obscured further his prewar reputation among contemporaries. It was easy then to forget that Poole's first novel, The Harbor, the story of a young writer's growing identification with oppressed workers published in 1915, had won widespread acclaim; that His Family, a work of progressive convictions published two years later, had received the first Pulitzer Prize awarded for fiction; and that as head of CPI's Foreign Press Bureau 184 Robert Cuff he had contributed significantly to the administrative development and intellectual content of CPI' s overseas propaganda. The wartime activity of this forgotten progressive deserves notice, however: it can provide some insight into the kinds of images of wartime America that a cultural critic-turned-propagandist sought to project abroad; it can also illustrate the profound confusion between fact and fiction that befell so many American liberals during their passionate romance with Woodrow Wilson's Great Crusade.3 As a Princeton undergraduate from 1898 to 1902, Poole had already encountered an early version of the Wilsonian message that would so captivate liberal intellectuals as America drifted towards war in 1917. Like many of his classmates , Poole admired Wilson the sympathetic college teacher, even if his youthful revolt against Victorian constraints led him to more radical sources of cultural inspiration. Tolstoy, Turgeniev and other Russian realist writers held great appeal; so did the emerging American literature of exposure-Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives made a deep impression, for example. After graduation, Poole yielded to the '' settlement house impulse'' then current among upper-class college students and moved to Lillian Wald's University Settlement House on New York's Lower East Side. He learned his politics and the writer's craft from such settlement habitues as William English Walling, J.G. Phelp Stokes, Robert Hunter, Ray Stannard Baker, Walter B. Weyl, a founding member of the New Republic who married Poole's sister, and Arthur Bullard, a journalist and novelist who became a particularly close friend. They were exciting days. With Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish-language socialist newspaper Forward, Poole and the Henry Street crowd explored the Jewish ghetto, and they eagerly sought news of H.G. Wells, the Webbs, Kropotkin and the British and Russian radicals to whom Henry Street and other settlements paid warm tribute. As a fledgling reporter, Poole covered the Chicago packing strike of 1904(he became a press agent for the strikers); he chronicled the urban immigrant experience for liberal journals; and he contributed funds and reportage to the socialist newspaper Call. The cause of Russian freedom also meant a good deal to Poole in those days, and he eagerly publicized the American fund-raising campaigns for such Russiandissidents as Catherine Breshkovsky and Maxim Gorki. Poole and his radical friends from both the United States and abroad talked incessantly of ''the plans and dreams we shared for the freedom of the whole human race from tyranny of every kind, from...