Poole worked as a journalist where he campaigned for social reforms including an end to child labor. On the outbreak of the First World War he worked as a war correspondent for The Saturday Evening Post. The Harbor is his novel about trade unions. The book begins: 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 is was that aroused my contempt for the man will be fore fully understood if I tell first of the grudge I bore him.