The Pervasiveness of Class

Despite the obvious importance of the workplace in his research, the defining thrust of Montgomery’s influence extended far more broadly in these essays and in his students’ work. For Montgomery, the social relations of production may have been central, but class experience goes well beyond that. “Although the modern experience of class had its origin in the encounter with wage labor,” he writes,

class consciousness permeated social discourse outside the workplace as well as within it. Married women caring for their children in bleak congested neighborhoods . . . were reminded of their class as regularly as their husbands, daughters, and sons in the factories. Children learned early the differences between their parents’ attire, bearing, and patterns of speech and those of the gentlemen and ladies who seemed to move with such grace and ease through the corridors of power and the emporiums of abundance.

For Montgomery, as the editors of Labor Histories, a collection of essays published in his honor, noted,

Class pervades all aspects of social experience — family and gender relations, neighborhood politics, race relations, and associational life; it infuses the realms of production and consumption, the work experience, family and community life, politics, social life, ideology, and culture in all its forms. Class and class consciousness in turn bear the imprint of the social relations of the workplace, the character of state policy, and gender, race, ethnicity, and region.

It is not simply the study of work but rather this capacious understanding of the diversity of class experience that may constitute Montgomery’s most important and durable legacy to the field of labor history.

Labor activists of all stripes animate Montgomery’s evocation of this working-class milieu and play a central role in shaping historical change. He stressed that “class consciousness was more than the unmediated product of daily experience.” It was a “project,” and the key figures in this story are the “militant minority,” those socialists, syndicalists, and union “progressives” in the early twentieth century and beyond who sought to “weld their work mates and neighbors into a self-aware and purposeful working class.”

The significance of these activists had been obscured, Montgomery believed, as much by “history from the bottom up” as by any “fixation on great leaders.” Though clearly fascinated with the rank-and-file movements and the strike wave of the 1970s, he was more skeptical of the notion that working-class militancy arose spontaneously from the daily experience of work and other aspects of working-class life. While he was certainly influenced by the labor activism he saw around him, he emphasized the role of a militant minority on the shop floor and in the neighborhood, perhaps a reflection of his own experiences as a Communist union militant in the postwar era.

The US Working Class in a Global Context

Montgomery’s determination to place workers at the center of US history led him to integrate his rich evocation of working-class life into a broader political context. His juxtaposition of common peoples’ experiences with the sweeping social, economic, and political changes that remake societies and the struggle to define the causal relationship between these experiences and those changes lends his work a compelling quality. No one who has read Montgomery’s work or heard him construct such a narrative is likely to soon forget it.

Montgomery’s final essays, including “Empire, Race, and Working-Class Mobilizations” and “Workers’ Movements in the United States Confront Imperialism: The Progressive Era Experience,” are in some ways his most ambitious, prefiguring the “global turn” in some of the most recent writing in the field. Working within a Marxist framework, Montgomery’s approach has always been transnational. One legacy of his years at the University of Warwick was a lasting involvement with the Social History Roundtable, which connected him to a range of European and American colleagues, including Joan Scott, Charles Tilly, Dorothy and Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Michelle Perrot.

These discussions were explicitly comparative in nature. Having projected working-class life onto the broad canvas of the evolving American nation-state, he now demonstrated that workers were far more than cogs in the American and other empires. Their labor and activism shaped capitalism as it entered a new phase in its development and extended its reach around the world. As historian Julie Greene notes:

His intellectual vision was always shaped profoundly by the notion that global capitalism was the central context through which workers struggled, lived, resisted, and sometimes rebelled. . . . In his later work he turned sharply toward a more rigorous exploration of global labor history and the ways that empire and global capitalism intersected with US labor and working-class history.

For Montgomery, as for many who were inspired by his work, the past is also present. The crucible of workplace activism and political engagement that shaped his scholarship in the beginning continued to animate his work throughout his career. He spoke regularly to union conventions, especially the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE); he organized picket line support for miners; and he was an outspoken public advocate for dining hall workers, clerical and technical workers, and teaching assistants in their organizing campaigns and their strikes at Yale. He was a regular commentator on developments in the labor movement.

David Montgomery’s legacy, then, represents much more than the evolution of a remarkably rich research field. His work opened a new vantage point, from the bottom up, on American history writ large, illuminating in profoundly new ways aspects of industry and economy, law and politics, immigration and race relations, and the democratic traditions of the United States. These essays, along with his books, guided a generation of scholars to carry forward his insights into new territories, and they continue to provide such inspiration.

In the process, his critical perspective on this history raised fundamental questions about the class nature of life in America. For him the challenge was always to look with a critical eye at “the propelling forces of historical change” and “to make the dynamics of our movement public knowledge once again.” In his view, rigorous historical analysis could never be divorced from engagement with the working class. As he said, “It’s got to be shared with them.” This was for him both a “personal commitment” and “crucial to any organized form of activity.” Engaged scholarship “keeps us committed to our neighbors, to our fellow working people, and to others around the world in working-class struggles,” and it is they who ultimately drive forward the promise of social and political transformation.