The middle class is not as well represented as other groups in the political novel. Of course, definition is a problem. In terms of economics, Glenn Spotswood and Robert Jordan are members of the middle class. In terms of politics, however, they are not bourgeois but intellectuals, Jordan a liberal and Spotswood a radical. Perhaps the true middle class does not provide enough drama for the novelist who deals with politics. Most of the people in _It Can’t Happen Here_ are middle class citizens, but they do not move and act in their normal environment. Their apathy has permitted the rise of a dictatorship, forcing them into the role of the persecuted or the underground fighter. Most often a novelist using a middle class hero will work a transformation upon him in which he changes his class identity. He will, like Glenn Spotswood, cast his lot with the class economically below his. Or, like Harvey Sayler in _The Plum Tree_, he will rise above it through political advancement which brings him power and wealth. In rare cases, the hero will manage to ride both horses at once. Peter Stirling, in Ford’s novel, will obviously be a successful candidate for the governorship of New York. But his stepping stone has been nearly twenty years of work in New York City’s tenement-ridden Sixth Ward. Ford’s style virtually guarantees that Stirling will be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl by the end of the book, but his career too makes it impossible to label him a member of the middle class from which he started. In _The Grand Design_ Dos Passos sometimes shows the middle class Washington office worker. Throughout _District of Columbia_, particularly in his prose poems, he refers to or quotes members of this class along with the executives and laborers. But there is such diversity that it is difficult to draw conclusions. Perhaps this difficulty in discerning pronounced patterns is in itself an indication of the nature of this class. Midway between the economic and political extremes, it has a leavening of the characteristics of both. But the political figure who comes from the middle class most often leaves it. If he does not, he apparently has less interest for the political novelist. =The Rich and Well Born=