James L. Ford’s _Hot Corn Ike_ (1923) deals with political corruption in New York City, at the same time harking back through one of its characters to the Know-Nothing Party and the assassination of Bill Poole. In 1926 Samuel Hopkins Adams’ Revelry moved on to corruption on the national scene. The novel is a roman à clef whose characters have a one-for-one correspondence to the real ones in Sinclair’s _Oil!_ Willis Markham is Warren Harding; Dan Lurcock is Barney Brockway; Anderson Gandy is Senator Crisby. If the reader likes, he can read the latter as a key to the former. Sinclair inundates the reader with a detailed account of the corruption of the Harding era and highlights of the labor movement. He treats the impact of the Russian Revolution upon America and the political implications of American troops fighting the Bolsheviks in Siberia. Following the activities of the I.W.W., he describes the resistance to them which included such measures as California’s Criminal Syndicalism Act. This big book also treats, with the solidity Masters probably meant to achieve, an equally turbulent era in American national development. In Boston Sinclair used even more documentation to relate what he saw as the struggle between capital and labor. Through Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s active career and subsequent struggle for life, the reader meets many of the militant groups in the labor movement in America during the second and third decades of this century. The I.W.W. appears again with anarcho-syndicalists, and anarchists. Sinclair even distinguishes the communisti anarchici from the anarchico individualista. Although the book’s literary merits are submerged by the pamphleteering and passion, it is worth reading for the slice of faintly fictionalized American political history which it presents. =John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell: Communist Infiltration= Like Steinbeck’s _In Dubious Battle_, Dos Passos’ _Adventures of a Young Man_ deals with Communist infiltration of the American labor movement in the thirties. Giving the reader background material on the militant role of the I.W.W., both novels follow Communist labor organizers into the field among migrant agricultural workers, miners, and industrial workers. Through their characters the novelists reveal not only the immediate goals of the organizers in terms of wages and working conditions, but also the place of these struggles in the plan for a socialistic society. Dos Passos goes even farther in showing the international aspect of these efforts--the sensitivity to the Moscow-formed party line, the submergence of local issues in terms of the overall revolutionary policy.