Bolshevism and world revolution

Bolshevism and world revolution are both a political hope voiced by characters and a pressure running through the novel’s wartime and postwar scenes. Don Stevens interprets mutiny and the Russian upheaval as the opening of an international workers’ revolt; strikes, radical meetings, and state repression make that possibility tangible, while the narrative’s news fragments and financial details expose the unequal forces that shape it. The revolution appears not as a completed transformation but as a contested forecast, repeatedly tested against the persistence of war and established power.

Don Stevens’s revolutionary forecast

Don Stevens brings his confidence in Bolshevism to Eveline Hutchins during a leave in Paris. Excited by the Bolsheviks’ success in Russia, he eats voraciously, drinks the household wine, and speaks of underground forces with which he claims contact. He predicts that armies are mutinous: what happened at the Battle of Caporetto, he says, will spread across the front, and German soldiers are also ready to revolt. He recalls mutinies at Verdun and trains of soldiers going toward an attack while denouncing the war and firing at gendarmes. For him, these incidents are not isolated breakdowns of discipline but signs that the military order may be turning against itself.

His argument joins class politics to the possibility of making meaning from mass suffering. Don tells Eveline that the working classes will no longer accept the war, and that its devastation might almost be justified if it produced a new socialist civilization. The statement is both an expression of hope and a measure of how extreme the surrounding violence has become: a world transformed by workers’ power is offered as the only conceivable recompense for a conflict that otherwise appears senseless. He kisses Eveline in front of Yvonne, then addresses her with a joking promise about after the war. The gesture brings his grand political expectation into the intimate domestic scene without resolving the gap between revolutionary prophecy and ordinary life.

The following spring and summer seem, to Eveline, to lend Don’s forecast some credibility. Gunfire continues along the front, and rumors of military reversals, mutinies, and sabotage fill the office. Red Cross staff are repeatedly told to prepare to evacuate Paris. Yet the same city fills with American personnel and supplies, and Major Moorehouse returns with a confident prediction that the war will end within a year. The sequence sets revolutionary uncertainty beside institutional reassurance: neither the rumors nor the official optimism can reliably determine what comes next.

Don’s politics also collide with his position in the wartime relief establishment. When he encounters Eveline with J. Ward Moorehouse, he reacts angrily to Moorehouse’s Red Cross rank; Eveline answers by accusing Don of being a false Quaker. Their exchange does not settle the political dispute, but it makes visible the tensions between radical commitment, wartime service, and the authority attached to respectable organizations. The revolutionary horizon is present in personal conflicts as well as in public declarations.

From international hope to labor action

The novel gives revolutionary politics a material setting in the lives of workers and organizers. Webb Cruthers carries socialist and syndicalist pamphlets while taking Anne Elizabeth Trent through working-class districts and introducing her to political discussion. When he becomes involved in a New Jersey textile strike, the mills, police, special deputies, and strike headquarters reveal the concrete contest behind abstract arguments about class. The organizers’ crowded office, with its handbills and hurried publicity work, is one of the practical infrastructures through which labor opposition tries to reach people.

At a strike meeting held outside the mill town, the workers cannot secure a hall because the mills dominate local life. A large crowd gathers in sleet after police prevent entry to the meeting. Ben Compton speaks from a lamppost, describing the closure as an insult to workers; police drag him away, and the crowd is pressed back toward the trolley tracks. Webb then climbs onto a hydrant to protest the denial of the meeting. The scene shows collective action taking shape in public space, but also the speed with which legal assembly becomes confrontation with police power.

Anne Elizabeth later joins the picket line before dawn. She sees underdressed women and young workers shivering in the cold, hears some singing and others taunting strikebreakers, and then finds herself isolated when the crowd breaks and runs. When a police officer kicks a fallen young woman in the face, Anne Elizabeth attacks him and is struck from behind before being pushed into a police wagon. The episode gives the labor conflict an embodied consequence: repression is not a theoretical objection to organizing but a blow delivered to the people who stand in its path.

Other episodes widen the frame from local strikes to radical organization and its surveillance. Police find an anteroom containing pamphlets in Yiddish, Russian, and English, as well as membership cards for the Industrial Workers of the World. At a later meeting at the Empire Casino in The Bronx, Federal agents sit in front with a stenographer, police close the doors after the hall begins to fill, and soldiers and sailors watch from the gallery. Ben Compton addresses the audience under observation, condemning a war that he presents as serving bankers and munitions makers rather than workers. The meeting ends in arrests; men of draft age must show their registration cards before leaving. Political speech is thus surrounded by both organized solidarity and the machinery of state monitoring.

Revolution, war, and the structures of power

The novel repeatedly places revolutionary language against the economic arrangements of war. In a newsreel-like passage, the promise of making the world safe for democracy is bitterly recast as making it safe for cost-plus contracts, while opposition is associated with imprisonment alongside Debs. Elsewhere, a brief headline reports that hundreds of fighting men cheer the Bolsheviks, placing military allegiance and revolutionary sympathy in the same public field. Such fragments do not provide a continuous account of political change; they make competing claims appear side by side, as headlines, slogans, and state actions jostle for attention.

Financial power supplies another counterweight to the idea that political transformation can follow automatically from popular anger. The narrative describes the reach of J. P. Morgan & Co. across banks, insurance companies, railroads, and other enterprises, then connects wartime Allied borrowing through the House of Morgan to the immense financial authority attributed to the phrase “J. P. Morgan suggests.” The contrast matters to the revolutionary theme: workers’ sacrifice and antiwar protest occur within a world where credit and corporate influence cross national borders and help shape the settlement after fighting ends. The book does not claim that these financial structures alone explain every political conflict; it places them beside the language of democracy and the costs borne by those with less power.

That contrast also informs the novel’s treatment of peace. The war’s end does not make the prospect of revolution disappear, nor does the language of a new international order erase coercion and economic rivalry. A newsreel fragment asks how to deal with Bolsheviks and answers with a demand to shoot them. Set against Don’s hopes and the labor meetings, the hostile slogan marks the difference between revolutionary possibility as imagined by workers and revolution as represented by its opponents: a threat to be suppressed. The book’s juxtaposition leaves that conflict unresolved rather than granting either side a clean victory.

Narrative form and significance

Bolshevism enters the narrative through sharply different forms: Don’s animated political conversation, reports of mutiny, strike scenes, arrests, and abrupt news fragments. This variation prevents the idea of world revolution from belonging to a single speech or character. Don gives it an expansive forecast; labor organizers make it a demand for collective power and public rights; news headlines turn it into a sign of upheaval or a target of repression. The shifts in scale—from soldiers on trains and armies at the front to a hall denied to strikers—connect international crisis with local struggles over who may speak and assemble.

The novel also distinguishes the hope of revolution from proof that revolution will prevail. Don’s predictions gain plausibility from the mutinies and uncertainties around him, but the narrative offers no confirmation that these events will produce the socialist civilization he anticipates. Arrests, police violence, surveillance, and financial influence show how organized power can contain dissent even when discontent is widespread. Bolshevism and world revolution therefore name a genuine historical possibility within the book, but also a contested horizon: a promise measured against the structures that keep war, capital, and political authority in motion.