| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Robert D. Johnston. The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon. (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003. Pp. xxiii, 394. $35.00.

This book deserved the 2002 President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association. Robert D. Johnston's examination of populist democracy and capitalism in Progressive-era Portland, Oregon, arguably the most democratic and radical locus in that age of reform insurgency, is an engaged and often brilliant exploration of the implications and convergences of race, class, and gender. The greatest of the many important contributions of the study may be its revitalization of the trinitarian cliché of contemporary scholarship. Johnston imparts to what has become a recurrent mantra a vivid renewal. Not the least of the many ironies that surface in the book is Johnston's rediscovery that history's most radical social stratum is the "middling" enclave of artisans, unionized workers, clerks, managers, professionals, politicians, tradesmen, and women that comprise the petty bourgeoisie. After numerous and exhaustive scholarly examinations of the Puritan, American, and French Revolutions, and of subsequent Third World anticolonialist movements, it would seem that this rediscovery would be routine. Such, however, is not the case for three reasons. First, using Progressive-era Portland as an empirical locus, Johnston's abundant research shows that these groups often united for democratic reform and redistribution of political and economic initiatives and resources. Johnston presents an integrated "working middle class" that fought for Progressive reforms, including feminism, and against the rule of monopoly capitalism. Second, Johnston focuses on this class rather than, as is the current preoccupation, on the most oppressed and deprived groups. While sociologists and political scientists have surveyed this stratum, historians have largely neglected it. Finally, it is mystifying, given the historical impetus of the "middling sort" in social change, that historians, who mostly come from this stratum, have so consistently ignored it.

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