|
|
|
Reviews
The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon
|
By Robert D. Johnston
|
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2003. Photographs, maps, tables, notes, index. 418 pages. $35.00 cloth
|
Reviewed by Carl Abbott
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
|
|
|
| Robert Johnston is a passionately engaged scholar. He has discovered things about the history of early twentieth-century Portland that have not had their due in standard histories of the city and state, and he thinks that we will be better off as citizens if we share his knowledge. After reading his book, I think he's right. |
1
|
|
Johnston's argument, in its simplest terms, is that Portland's image as a conservative and staid city that avoided the social and political extremes of places like Seattle and San Francisco is inaccurate, less a reflection of actual experience than a myth that has served the interests of big business and property owners. For the first two decades of the twentieth century, he details a deeply rooted populism that was based among small-business proprietors, small homeowners, and skilled workers, most of whom were residents of the young and fast-developing neighborhoods east of the Willamette River. Like the pieces in a kaleidoscope, different leaders, interest groups, and voters came together in a disparate set of political efforts that were linked by their defense of the right of ordinary citizens to determine their own future. |
2
|
|
The Radical Middle Class centers on four individuals. Two of them have been reasonably well represented in previous city and state histories — mayor and U.S. senator Harry Lane and William S. U'Ren, the great advocate of the "Oregon system" of direct democracy through the initiative and referendum processes. Two others are more obscure — Lora Little, an east-sider who led a fierce grassroots campaign against compulsory smallpox vaccination in the schools, and Will Daly, a onetime Socialist and small businessman who served on the Portland City Council and nearly defeated George Baker in the mayoral election of 1917. Readers of this journal have already been introduced to these latter figures in Johnston's article in the Fall 1998 issue, "The Myth of the Harmonious City: Will Daly, Lora Little, and the Hidden Face of Progressive-Era Portland." He clearly explains a wide range of issues: Why Portlanders pushed so hard for the adoption of the "single tax" on land associated with Henry George; why resistance to vaccination might have made scientific sense; and how the compulsory public education initiative of 1922 (which banned private schools of all types) was an echo of this same populism. |
3
|
|
Johnston also is engaged in a vigorous debate with other historians and social theorists about the best way to understand the divisions and dynamics of social and economic class in the United States. As an engaged scholar, it seems to me, he wants to provide an intellectual basis for reconstructing the old New Deal coalition that united AFL union members, small-business owners, and the lower ranks of salaried professionals (nurses, schoolteachers) in opposition to big business. Such folks, he thinks, are best understood as a distinct "lower middle class" or "petite bourgeoisie." The discussion is quite interesting and challenging to American history scholars. It is divided between the text and the eighty pages of endnotes in very fine print and buttressed by voting maps and statistics on Portland's occupational structure. There is a good reason why the book has received a prize from the Social Science History Association. |
4
|
|
Johnston clearly wants to delineate a usable past for a new era of middle-class opposition to overweening bureaucracies and uncontrolled corporations (one of the blurbs on the back cover is from Ralph Nader). In an era when the Enron scandals are still reverberating through Oregon and the federal government's recent smallpox vaccination program fell flat, people like Lora Little and William U'Ren can seem quite up to date. They also stand, Johnston writes, as additions to a "pantheon of hope" that stretches from Tom Paine to Susan B. Anthony to Cesar Chavez — pretty good company for some largely forgotten reformers from a middling city in the far corner of the nation. |
5
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|