"This book has a large ambition—to reorient our thinking about the American middle class" (xi). So begins Robert Johnston's study of petit-bourgeois radicalism in Portland circa 1900 to 1920, and by any measure The Radical Middle Class is indeed a tour de force. Its twenty-two chapters—liberally sprinkled with maps and illustrations and backed up by a statistical appendix and eighty pages of notes—synthesize labor, business, medical, intellectual, and political history. On page after page, Johnston serves up arresting stories about middle-class activism in Portland, provocative extrapolations about the larger political history of the American middle class, and fresh analyses of middle-class mobilizations on a broad range of issues, from protective labor law to tax policies to compulsory vaccination.

     Johnston's central argument is that middle- and working-class alliances embodied by the Knights of Labor and the People's Party in the late nineteenth century did not die out in the age of corporate capitalism. As he presents this argument, Johnston reminds his readers of the frequency with which Americans have moved back and forth between the working and lower middle class, the differences between academic and popular terminology about class, and the legacy of populism's radical distrust and resentment of arbitrary authority. When analyzing the Portland evidence, Johnston presents a persuasive case. When offering a corrective to the literature on class, his claims are less satisfying.