The middle-class condition, seen during the twentieth century as both the symbol of progress and order and the means to achieve it, has largely evaded historical analysis. Blending historical methods and anthropological sensibilities, relates the everyday lives of an emergent white-collar middle class to Brazilian national politics in the twentieth century. Focusing on the period between 1920 and 1950, the author looks beyond ideologies to reveal how, amidst the turmoil of modernization, middle-class men and women strained to wrest order from the ordeal of change.