The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (review)

In a political climate that celebrates individual freedom and the market as natural, it is difficult to imagine the middle class as an agent of a populist, anticapitalist radicalism. During an era characterized by tax cuts for the wealthy, the deregulation of corporations, and huge contracts for administration cronies, the popular image of the middle class is that of the soccer mom in her sports utility vehicle, trying to ignore efforts of the poor to deal with urban blight, inadequate schools, and lack of health care. Robert D. Johnston turns to the early twentieth century to resurrect an engaged, concerned, and mobilized middle class that had not capitulated to the power of corporate capitalism. In Portland, Oregon, he found a petite bourgeoisie leading movements for direct democracy, the single tax, antivaccination, and proportional representation. He uses their story to reevaluate the historical role of the middle class in Progressive Era politics.

Portland was an important city in the West, a city of 250,000 built upon commerce, rather than on large-scale manufacturing. Its work force was located in small firms and mixed with significant numbers of modest proprietors and white-collar workers. Thus, much of the local population maintained a vision emphasizing a republican political economy. Political conflict was just as likely to take place within the business community as it was along strict class divisions between owners and workers. The new middle class of managers and clerks beholden to large corporations, as described by Olivier Zunz, did not dominate Portland. Instead, small-scale employers and the self-employed often battled corporate capitalism with the vigor of radicals. Indeed, the open-shop campaign of big business in 1916 split the Chamber of Commerce.

Johnston is at his best describing the various leaders and manifestations of middle-class radicalism. Harry Lane, for example, was a physician to the poor who served as mayor of Portland and then as aU.S. senator. Lane resolutely opposed both monopoly capitalism and imperialism, casting one of the few votes in the Senate against American entry into World War I. Will Daly was a small printing shop owner and president of the Oregon Federation of Labor who solidified a political alliance of the lower middle-class and skilled workers; Lora Little led the movement against compulsory vaccination that activated Daly's coalition. Most interesting is W. S. U'Ren, son of a Cornish blacksmith, who at one time was a Socialist coalminer. After attending law school at night, U'Ren became a well-known advocate of direct democracy and populist-inspired Progressive reforms. Of note were his campaigns for the single tax and a radical political economy, and his grand reorganization of government under the People's Power League. What becomes apparent is the remarkable vitality and variety of efforts to free politics and society from the control of corporate interests. Even the devolution of this political bloc from populist democracy to the racist campaigns of the 1920s did not completely silence the "staunchly democratic, and at times even anti-capitalist, political worldview" (p. 256) of Portland's middle class.

These stories are interlaced with chapters theorizing and reinterpreting the middle class in historical studies. Johnston complains that historians often have been dismissive of the potential of the petite bourgeoisie to oppose corporate capitalism. He wants scholars of the middle class to take seriously E. P. Thompson's idea that class is a process not a thing and that people are making their own classes. Johnston insists that "we need to be open to the possibility that people might very well construct 'classes' that do not fit into standard academic or political conceptions" (p. 13). Johnston is particularly harsh on labor historians in this regard, although his invective...