Written and chiefly set during the final year of World War I (1914-1918), Upton Beall Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins: A Story (1919) chronicles the improbable adventures of its titular working-class hero, who turns from a staunch opponent of US intervention into a pro-war Socialist and highly decorated war hero, only to be drawn into the ill-fated American military expedition to Archangel, Russia, where he is eventually “water cured” into insanity by his superiors for agitating on behalf of the Bolshevik revolution.
A rank-and-file member of the Socialist Party in fictional Leesville, Jimmie initially toes the official party line by opposing American interventionism abroad and instead focusing on organizing …
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