James attended Pawtucket High School, and put himself through Brown University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1898.

(Popular election of U.S. senators eventually came to pass through the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1914.)

[1] After a campaign which seized on public discontent with the influence of lobbyist and Rhode Island Republican Party Central Committee chairman, General Charles R. Brayton, Higgins was elected over Utter by a margin of 1,238 votes, becoming Rhode Island's youngest governor, and its first Catholic governor.

In his inaugural speech, he built upon the themes of his campaign, warning that "the evils of lobbying" had compromised the state government to "a disgraceful extent," and that the power of lobbying had become "an exclusive and oppressive monopoly" in the hand of Brayton, a "coarse and venal boss" who was operating out of the Rhode Island State House offices of High Sheriff of Providence County, General Hunter C.

[5][6] In November 1907, Higgins won a second one-year term over a challenge by Republican Lieutenant Governor of Rhode Island, Frederick H. Jackson.