Jimmie Higgins is the Forrest Gump of the "parlor pink" socialist propaganda put out by Upton Sinclair at the turn of the century. A down-on-his-luck, illiterate working stiff who gets caught up in the idealism of the socialist tide that had begun to well up in Europe and the United States in the early 1900s, Jimmie Higgins quickly gets caught up in a whirlwind of events that serve as a morality play for readers of the period. Jimmie meets Eugene Debbs, thinly disguised here as "The Candidate", the perennial plugger of the movement in America. He gets caught up in the party machinery, is hired by German "socialists" to blow up an ammunitions work only to find out that the men actually represented the Kaiser, joins the army to fight European imperialism, and finally ends up in Archangel in the Siberian Arctic to be introduced to Bolsheviks during the little known U.S. attempt to restore the czarists to power. The book is a thinly veiled work of propaganda and Upton Sinclair would never apologize for this. The novel was turned into a movie by the Soviets and was squashed by overwhelming anti-socialist sentiment here. For Upton Sinclair fanatics only. My copy was obtained from the University of Kentucky Press and has been out of print since the 1960s. Good luck in finding it.
