Ernest
Poole was born in Chicago in 1880.
After graduating from Princeton University in 1902 he worked as a
journalist where he campaigned for social reforms including an end
to child labour. Poole's first novel, The
Voice of the Street, was published in 1906.
On the
outbreak of the First World War Poole worked
as a war correspondent for The Saturday
Evening Post. His novel about trade unions,
The Harbour, was published in 1915. Two years later
His Family won the Pulitzer
Prize.
In 1917
The New Republic magazine sent
him to Russia. His experiences during the
Russian Revolution were described in The
Village: Russian Impressions (1918) and The
Dark People: Russia's Crisis (1919).
Other books
by Poole include Russian Sketches
(1925), an autobiography, The Bridge
(1940), Giants Gone: Men Who Made Chicago
(1943) and Great White Hills of New Hampshire
(1946). Ernest Poole died in 1950.
(1)
In the summer of 1917 Ernest Poole visited the rural areas of Russia.
This included an interview with a farmer who was a member of a village
cooperative.
Our cooperative
store has still quite a stock of goods, and the steadier peasants
all belong. We have eighteen hundred members now. Each paid five roubles
to buy a share. There were six thousand purchasers last year; and
because we charge higher prices to outsiders than to members, so many
more peasants wish to join that we are almost ready to announce a
second issue of stock.
Of course,
our progress has been blocked by the war and the revolution. Goods
have gone up to ruinous rates. Already we are nearly out of horseshoes,
axes, harrows, ploughs. Last spring we had not ploughs enough to do
the needed ploughing, and that is why our crop is short. There is
not enough rye in the district to take us through the winter, let
alone to feed the towns. And so the town people will starve for awhile
- and sooner or later, I suppose, they will finish with their wrangling,
start their mills and factories, and turn out the ploughs and tools
we need.
(2)
Ernest Poole, The Village: Russian Impressions (1918)
While she
moved about her kitchen she talked of the high prices. In Petrograd
the price of stove wood rose each week; and this, she said, was partly
because the peasant boys and women here demanded such big wages for
loading the wood onto barges.
"They
hardly know what to ask," she laughed. "It is like a game.
Every week they keep asking more, and always they get it, and so we
go on. And so long as things are in such a state, why should not or
people get all they can? Petrograd got all the profits once, and always
it was at our expense. Now our turn has come. Why shouldn't we take
it."
"Yes,
we are living pretty well," she continued quietly, "in spite
of the disorders in towns. We have plenty to eat, for we catch our
own fish, raise our own chickens, our wheat and rye and vegetables.
As for clothes, in almost every hut we have old looms and spinning
wheels that we have not used for years - but now all the old grannies
are fixing them up. We grew flax in our fields this summer; there
are still enough sheep to give us some wool; and so this winter we'll
make our own clothes."
(3)
Russian peasant interviewed by Ernest Poole for his book, The Village:
Russian Impressions (1918)
Just take
a trip to Petrograd. Go to any railroad siding there and you will
see perfect hills of scrap iron. Why can't they melt it up again and
out it to use? Soon we shall have no axles left, no tyres for our
wagon wheels, no chains for the logs, no ploughs for the fields, no
horseshoes for our horses! But still they do nothing! The blind fools!
The trouble with those people is that they think all the best things
are made in the cities. It is not so. Here we grow the flax and grain;
here we raise the meat they eat, and the wool to keep them warm; we
cut trees to build their houses and firewood to heat their stoves.
Thy could not even cook without us! Other country districts turn out
the coal and the iron ore. All the real things in Russia are done
in the villages. What kind of crops do they raise in the towns? Only
Grand Dukes, Bolsheviks and drunkards!
(4)
Ernest Poole, The Village: Russian Impressions (1918)
"These
Bolsheviks," growled a man with a square head and a short heavy
beard already half grey. "Bolsheviks, Bolsheviks - how they shout
about being free men. What do they know about being free? They know
nothing but books, they sit indoors and scribble and read and talk
like clerks - and they are so busy making us free that they have no
time to be free themselves! Let them come and find what freedom is!
We'll show them!"
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