Progress and Populism

Robert D. Johnston. The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xxiii + 394 pp. Photos, tables, maps, appendices, notes, and index. $35.00 (cloth).

On the American left, the resemblance of the current era to the Gilded Age is usually cause for grief. The decline of American welfare liberalism and European social democracy (along with Soviet Communism) appears to many to mark the waning of the most powerful twentieth-century challenges to unbridled capitalism. With the reappearance of a kind of uncompromising pursuit of profit long attributed to an earlier stage of industrial evolution, the confidence of Progressive reformers and their progeny that history was on their side has been newly called into question. But if manifest destiny, social Darwinism, and other Victorian skeletons seem recently revived, what about the defense of the yeoman farm and the craft workshop in the name of the "cooperative commonwealth"? If twentieth-century obituaries for plutocracy have proven premature, might populism have outlasted its supposed successors in the annals of American reform as well? In this magnificent work of political and historical reconstruction, Robert D. Johnston makes the case for the enduring vitality of left-wing populism, challenging its leading admirers and critics to reconsider their common assumption that the smallholder republic is dead. ¹

The fate of populism, broadly construed as a tradition of democratic radicalism dating to the Revolutionary Era, is closely bound up with that of the wide stratum of family farmers, shopkeepers, and craftsmen to whom it originally appealed. Styling themselves the "middling sorts," such petty proprietors formed the social basis and core constituency for the eighteenth-century ideals of independence and self-rule. With the advent of the industrial revolution, smallholders' struggle for survival against the dual incursions of wage labor and finance capital fueled the incendiary critique of monopoly, speculation, and absentee ownership advanced by agrarian theorists in the nineteenth century. By 1900, historians generally have agreed, the outcome of the conflict was clear. Like the aristocracy a century earlier, the petite bourgeoisie was doomed for political obsolescence if not actual extinction along with its individualistic ideal of propertied autonomy. For better or worse, progressive politics in the new century would be joined to the fortunes of propertyless workers and their corporate employers, building upon rather than resisting the socialization of economic life effected by the triumph of big business over small-scale production and commerce. By the time that William McKinley beat William Jennings Bryan, progress had parted ways with populism and the premodern folk it represented. Or so we thought.

Johnston's study issues an inspired rebuke to this conventional view of the transformation of class relations and oppositional politics around the turn of the twentieth century. In the solidly but not stolidly bourgeois metropolis of Portland, Oregon, Johnston finds a parable of progress for the "radical middle class" in the Progressive Era and beyond. If Portland saw little of the seismic struggle that divided owners and workers elsewhere in this period, he argues that it formed the epicenter of a kind of class conflict more familiar to historians of the previous century. The "social fault line" of the city ran between moneyed elites increasingly tied to regional and national corporate interests, on one side, and an older alliance of skilled workers and small business owners, on the other (p. 51). In its basic values, plebeian Portland remained true to its republican heritage, revering the rights to free enterprise, home ownership, and the fruits of honest industry while railing against class privilege and usurious greed. Like the early American yeomanry described by scholars of the transition to capitalism, Johnston's protagonists limited their embrace of market relations to trading in agricultural and manufactured goods, regarding property in farmland or its equivalent for manufacturing, no less than property in labor, as an inalienable human right rather than a commodity like any other. ² But as the arsenal of their opponents grew...