| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon. By Robert D. Johnston. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xxiv, 394 pp. $35.00,ISBN 0-691-09668-6.)
Even if you are inclined to dismiss the concept of a "radical middle class" as an oxymoron, you owe it to yourself to give a careful reading to this meticulously researched and tightly argued study of Progressive Era Portland. Reform in the Rose City, according to Robert D. Johnston, was both cause and effect in the emergence of a viable lower middle class. Understanding that phenomenon, he insists, will force Progressive Era historians to reconceptualize their field of study, provide a blueprint for redemptive democratic politics in the present day, and rescue the lower middle class from the "cosmopolitan condescension" (p. xii) of the intelligentsia, past and present.	1
For Johnston, "class" is essentially a process that evolves over time, "an eclectic mix of occupation and ideology, gender and culture, property and politics" (p. 12) that is always in a state of becoming. Especially among "middling people," class lines are extremely fluid and boundaries highly permeable. Central to this process of class formation is "politics—the mediation of power and inequality" (pp. 12–14).	. . .

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