At the start of the twentieth century, Portland, Oregon, was among the most rapidly growing cities in the nation. Unusually, this growth did not bring a proportionate expansion of the foreign-born population. Portland was comparatively homogeneous with respect to ethnicity, home to relatively small populations of Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and African Americans. Consequently, as Robert Johnston established in The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland (Princeton University Press, 2003), economic divisions had a particularly strong influence over political mobilization. This was equally true of the politics of the working class. Portland, unlike San Francisco and Seattle, remained a fiercely open-shop bastion. The lumber camps throughout the Pacific Northwest sustained some of the most radical labor movements in the nation. After a series of failed ventures into municipal politics, many unionized workers became “alienated from mainstream civic culture” (35), but remained capable...
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