Bolshevik revolutionary upheaval

Bolshevik revolutionary upheaval appears in the novel not as a single Russian episode but as news that travels outward, intensifies existing labor conflicts, and tests what political speech can survive. Revolutionary expectation enters private conversation, newspaper-like fragments, and street-level organizing; against it, police, military authorities, and federal agents impose arrests and restraints. The gap between the promise of international workers’ solidarity and the local power of institutions gives the upheaval its recurring tension.

Reports and Revolutionary Expectation

During a leave with Eveline Hutchins, Don Stevens is exhilarated by the Bolsheviks’ success in Russia. He describes armies as mutinous, predicts that the upheaval associated with the Italian retreat at Caporetto will spread across the front, and says German soldiers are also ready to revolt. His account includes mutinies at Verdun and soldiers resisting as they are sent toward battle. These reports reach Eveline as more than distant military news: Don interprets them as signs that workers across national borders may refuse to continue the war.

Don makes that political hope explicit in conversation. He imagines the war giving way to a new socialist civilization and argues that the working classes will no longer tolerate the existing order. His confidence is personal as well as political: he kisses Eveline during the conversation, while Yvonne is serving pancakes, and ends with a playful reference to the postwar future. The scene brings revolutionary expectation into domestic space, setting Don’s expansive certainty against the ordinary work of the household rather than presenting it only as public rhetoric.

The surrounding narrative neither confirms Don’s predictions nor leaves them isolated. Eveline hears the guns from the front and encounters rumors in her office of military reversals, mutinies, and imminent danger. Red Cross staff are repeatedly told to prepare to move from Paris, even as American personnel and supplies continue arriving. The uncertain reports make Don’s vision seem possible without establishing that the anticipated general revolt has occurred: upheaval is registered as a mixture of real political change, rumor, and expectation.

News, Crowds, and Labor Action

Brief newsreel-like fragments widen the scale beyond Don’s account. One headline announces that the red flag flies on the Baltic; another reports that eight hundred fighting men cheer the Bolsheviks. These compressed announcements do not explain the events in detail. Their force lies in placing revolutionary signs within the same stream of public information as war news, so that Russia’s upheaval appears to be part of a larger crisis of military and political authority.

In the United States, revolutionary language meets the organization of workers in concrete disputes. After Christmas, Webb Cruthers takes Anne Elizabeth Trent to observe a New Jersey textile strike. At the mills, police and special deputies guard the premises; at a meeting in a neighboring town, a crowd of strikers is kept out of a hall despite having gathered to hear speakers. Ben Compton addresses the people from a lamppost and frames the exclusion as an insult to the working class. Police remove him, and the crowd disperses under pressure. Webb then climbs onto a hydrant to protest the denial of the meeting. The episode shows collective action forming in public while the authorities control access to space and attempt to break up assembly.

Anne Elizabeth returns with Webb to the picket line. The strikers include men, women, and young people; some sing Solidarity Forever while others jeer at strikebreakers. As police move against the line, a young woman falls and Anne Elizabeth tries to help her. Police violence and Anne Elizabeth’s intervention end with her being taken away in a police wagon. Her experience shifts the strike from something she has come to observe into an encounter with coercive force. The solidarity expressed in song and the dispersal of the crowd occupy the same scene, without resolving the conflict between workers’ claims and the power arrayed against them.

Revolutionary Organizing and Repression

Ben Compton’s later political activity makes the connection between international revolution and American organizing explicit. At a meeting in the Bronx’s Empire Casino, organizers seek to send greetings to Russia’s workers’ and peasants’ government. Federal agents sit among the audience and record the speeches; police close the doors after the first few hundred people enter, while soldiers and sailors watch from the gallery. The chairman presents the gathering as a message from oppressed American workers to the victorious workers of Russia. The ceremony of solidarity is therefore already surrounded by surveillance and restriction.

Ben speaks against a war that he says benefits bankers and munitions makers rather than workers. He presents the arms and violence of the war as instruction that may one day be turned against the profiteers. Police arrest him and other speakers; men of conscription age must show registration cards before leaving. Ben is then held for three days in a disused federal office, questioned by successive groups of detectives, and threatened with violence. The authorities offer to quash the charges if he agrees to report for military training after his draft number is called. Ben refuses to abandon his opposition to the war, and is released on bail after Morris Stein assures the authorities he will not agitate before trial. His release is thus conditional and political: it suspends imprisonment while constraining the organizing that brought him under scrutiny.

The novel also places such activism beside other procedures of wartime control without making every case a Bolshevik prosecution. In Liverpool, Joe Williams is taken from his ship by a policeman, searched, questioned, and threatened under the Defence of the Realm Act. In New York, he is caught in a roundup of men without draft registration cards, though he says his merchant-seaman status exempts him. These episodes show how suspicion and official classification can govern a person’s movement even when the evidence does not establish a connection to revolutionary activity. A separate first-person passage marks a soldier’s discharge and change back into civilian clothes, offering a brief counter-image to the machinery of enlistment and control.

The Limits of the Revolutionary Moment

The novel’s revolutionary atmosphere is built from contrasts rather than a single account of political victory. Don’s prediction of a worldwide workers’ revolt coexists with the uncertain rumors heard in Paris; international headlines coexist with strikes that can be dispersed locally; a meeting that sends greetings to Russia is monitored, closed, and followed by arrest. The recurring movement is from news and hope into organized action, then into the practical limits imposed by police and state power.

The upheaval consequently remains both an idea of transformation and a lived test of political freedom. Its language gives workers a way to interpret the war and their own exploitation as parts of a common struggle. But the people who act on that understanding face restricted assembly, arrest, surveillance, detention, and conditions placed on release. The novel records the persistence of solidarity in songs, speeches, and meetings while withholding any assurance that revolutionary expectation will, by itself, overcome the institutions arrayed against it.