Chapter XIII: Jimmie Higgins

I.

After a winter in the South, at Gulfport, Miss., Sinclair went to California in 1915, and made his home at Pasadena, where he continued to reside.

In the meantime there was a war going on in Europe, toward which Sinclair as a Socialist had to orient his views. The international Socialist movement had been traditionally and on principle anti-militaristic; but in all the European countries involved, the conservative elements of the party had found reasons for abandoning these principles and supporting the war. In America the intellectual leadership of the party was almost entirely in favor of declaring war on Germany. Sinclair had written pacifist articles in the past; but he regarded German militarism as a menace to the Socialist hope of revolution, and he joined with a group of Socialist intellectuals, including W. J. Ghent, Charles Edward Russell, J. G. Phelps Stokes, and William English Walling, in issuing a _Practical Program for Socialists_, in which it was urged that Socialists should “adjust themselves to events”, and further recommended a large war budget, universal military training, and conscription of both male and female citizens. After the announcement of the resumption of unlimited submarine warfare by Germany, Sinclair telegraphed to President Wilson, on February 3, 1917:

“As one who has devoted his life to a passionate struggle for
Democracy, I cannot remain silent in this hour of Democracy’s
greatest peril. To delay naval action in this crisis is to give
Germany all she wants and to risk the existence of everything for
which a lover of freedom cares to live. On the other hand you
have a chance to take the greatest forward step in history if in
offering the American fleet to keep open the sea lanes to England,
you obtain agreement by allied nations that all territory taken
from Central powers in this war shall be neutralized and made
forever independent under international guarantee.”

The rank and file of the American Socialist party were, however, still anti-militarist, and on April 11, five days after the declaration of war, the party in special convention at St. Louis, adopted by a three-fourths vote a platform denouncing war and national patriotism and opposing enlistment by the workers in this war. The familiar theoretic Socialist position on war was thus reaffirmed: “The only struggle which would justify the workers in taking up arms is the great struggle of the working class of the world to free itself from economic exploitation and political oppression. As against the false doctrine of national patriotism, we uphold the ideal of international working-class solidarity. In support of capitalism we will not willingly give a single life or a single dollar; in support of the struggle of the workers we pledge our all.... We brand the declaration of war by our government as a crime against the people of the United States and against the nations of the world.”

Such was the majority report. A minority report sponsored by John Spargo, held it “our Socialist duty” to help “our nation and our allies to win the war as speedily as possible”, and another minority report proposed to “recognize the war as a fact” and to promote an early and democratic peace. The action of the convention was not final, and the platform as adopted was submitted to a referendum of the whole membership. Though the party was afterward considerably demoralized by the defection of so many of its intellectual leaders, their counsels were in this crisis unhesitatingly rejected, and the anti-war platform was ratified by a 12 to 1 vote. Sinclair was one of a number of prominent Socialists who then resigned from the party. He issued an address to his former comrades, in which he said:

I cannot but believe, Comrades, that the difference between our
opinions comes from the fact that I have lived in Germany and know
its language and literature, and the spirit and ideals of its
rulers. Having given many years to a study of American capitalism,
as it exists in the domain of the beef trust, the steel trust,
and the coal trust, I am not apt to be blind to the defects of my
own country; but, in spite of these defects, I assert that the
difference between the ruling class of Germany and that of America
is the difference between the seventeenth century and the twentieth.

I find those with whom I talk here in the West utterly unable
to conceive what the Prussian ruling class is. They cite its
modernness, its use of science; failing to realize that this is
precisely the thing which makes it dangerous--a beast with the
brains of an engineer....

“I intend,” he said in conclusion, “to go on working for Socialism as hard as I can....”

From April 1918 to February 1919 he published _Upton Sinclair’s_, a monthly magazine with the subtitle “for a clean peace and the internation”. It was devoted to what its editor believed to be President Wilson’s war and peace policies. He took the Wilsonian idealism at its face value, and not unnaturally believed that the President had secured the proper pledges from the allied governments. And so, having identified himself for the time being with this idealistic and eloquent administration, he was doing his bit, by propaganda among recalcitrant radicals, to help win the war that was to make the world safe for democracy.

II.

In 1918 he commenced publication, first in his own magazine, and after its discontinuance in the _Appeal to Reason_, of a war novel called _Jimmie Higgins_.

“Jimmie Higgins” was the name popularly applied to the humbler and less articulate members of the party--those who carried the soap-box and set up the gasoline torch at street meetings, not those who made the speeches. The book was to begin with an affectionate and faithful picture of the type; and it went on to show Jimmie’s bewilderment in this war situation, and the arguments by which he was kept out of the war and urged into it. Presently, however, in accordance with the author’s pro-war animus, Jimmie succumbs to the example of several good Socialists, including a German comrade who is anxious to help overthrow the Kaiser, and enlists in the army. Here the story begins to take on sweetly fabulous outlines. Being torpedoed on his transport, Jimmie is waited upon in hospital by the Honorable Beatrice Clendenning, a member of the British aristocracy, and is genially indulged in Socialist argument by His Majesty the King of England.

“We’ve had some terrible poverty,” admitted His Majesty. “We shall
have to find some way of getting rid of it.”

“There ain’t no way but Socialism!” cried Jimmie....

Jimmie then, by single-handed heroism, stops the German army with a machine-gun, winning the battle of “Chatty Terry” and in fact the war. “The whole course of the world’s history might have been different”, it is playfully related, “if one little Socialist machinist from Leesville, U. S. A., had not chanced ...” etc. Wounded and sent to base hospital, he there fraternizes across the social chasm with a rich and formerly sinful young man: one who had actually seduced other men’s wives, and had got properly punished for it earlier in the story in the manner of Abelard; the war has made him democratic and thoughtful, and Jimmie learns from him that even the rich are unhappy.... It was a piece of fiction calculated to break down the anti-war morale of Socialist readers.

There is an important difference, however, to be noted between him and the other intellectual Socialist leaders who had left the Party. Most of these became bitter and venomous opponents of the revolutionary movement, and used every opportunity to denounce it, particularly in its newest form of Russian Bolshevism, in what they had been accustomed to call “the capitalist press”. The same opportunities were offered to him. Here, indeed, was his opportunity, such as more than one “leader of revolt” has not failed to take advantage of, to endear himself to those rich and powerful classes whose hatred had driven him into poverty and neglect. He might have become a fashionable and prosperous war-time renegade. But when he, too, was offered large sums of money for speeches or articles to help in defeating certain anti-war Socialists in important municipal elections, he was astonished and hurt. “What do they think I am?” he asked. “When this is all over, I shall be back in the ranks again.”

And he was presently back in the ranks again.

It was the intervention of the United States against the Socialist government of Russia, and the private anti-Soviet war conducted by the Administration after the armistice with Germany, which ruthlessly disillusioned him as to President Wilson’s idealism.

History was kind to him. The intervention of American arms in Siberia came in time for him to let Jimmie Higgins share in his disillusion. The final chapters of that novel show Jimmie Higgins sent with the American forces to Siberia, to fight against the new Socialist Republic. Jimmie fraternizes with the Bolsheviks, and learns the truth from them. “He”--like his creator--“had swallowed their propaganda, he had filled himself up on their patriotism, he had dropped everything to come and fight for Democracy.... And now they had broken their bargain with him....” He distributes Bolshevik propaganda among his fellow soldiers--as happened at Archangel in actuality, when American regiments mutinied and refused to fight. Jimmie is caught at it, and tortured to make him betray his comrades. But the thumbscrews and the water-cure fail to break his spirit. That chapter is called “Jimmie Higgins Discovers His Soul”. In the next and final chapter--“Jimmie Higgins Votes for Democracy”--he escapes from his tormentors by going insane. The effect is to give the previous naïvely pro-war chapters an effect of fine irony. A sympathetic American critic, Carl Van Doren, finds that the novel “showed traces of a romantic pulse, settling down, however, toward the end, to a colder beat”. It was the late and necessary disillusionment of a too hopeful and generous mind.

III.

In 1920 came _100%: The Story of a Patriot_, published in England under the title of _The Spy_. Let Mr. Van Doren continue: “It is the colder beat which throbs in _100%_, with a temperature which suggests both ice and fire. Hardly since _Jonathan Wild_ has such irony been maintained in an entire volume, as that which traces the evolution of Peter Gudge from sharper to patriot through the foul career of spying and incitement and persecution opened to his kind of talents by the frenzy of non-combatants during the war. To this has that patriotism come which on the red fields of Virginia poured itself out in such unstinting sacrifice; and, though the sacrifice went on in France and Flanders, was it worth while, Mr. Sinclair implicitly inquires, when the conflict, at no matter what distance, could breed such vermin as Peter Gudge? Explicitly he does not answer his question; his art has gone, at least for the moment, beyond avowed arguments, merely marshaling the evidence with irresistible ironic skill and dispensing with the chorus. _100%_ is a document which honest Americans must remember and point out when orators exclaim, in the accents of official idealism, over the great days and deeds of the great war.”

A less sympathetic critic might find this book somewhat too hard, somewhat too relentless--might protest that even “such vermin” as a labor-spy might be credited with an occasional and irrelevant impulse of kindness, of human decency, or of shame. It might perhaps be said that in this book the realist has labored to repay to grim truth the immense debt which the illusioned poet had so splendiferously incurred during the war.[14]