Contexts

When David Montgomery sat down for an extended interview with editors of the Radical History Review, Mark Naison and Paul Buhle, it was the spring of 1981. His career as an academic historian was on the ascent. He had moved from the University of Pittsburgh to a named chair at Yale. He was editor of what was becoming the foremost journal in the field, International Labor and Working-Class History. His studies of workers and Reconstruction and his explorations of workers' shop floor world had catapulted him to the front rank of practitioners of the “new labor history.” And he was deeply into what would probably rank as his masterwork, The Fall of the House of Labor, published six years later. But much of the interview as published dwelt on his background in the Communist Party USA and on his own shop floor experience as a militant rank and file machinist during the 1950s. His observations on the internal life of the party, as someone who did not hold a leadership position, were perceptive. But perhaps more telling for his own future work as a historian were his comments on the growing gap in the 1950s between the party and lives of workers. Vital as the “connection to the everyday struggles of Americans” may have been, he also recognized the value of “styles of social analysis that were rooted in the hard and complex realities of experience and away from phrase-mongering and dogmatic abstractions.”Footnote ² As the party unraveled in the 1950s and the leadership grew more isolated, he noted, “at my level of activity we continued from day to day doing our thing”:

As a militant rank and filer in the 1950s, Montgomery witnessed a world of shop floor activism that took on new forms. He developed a capacity to decode workers' consciousness even in a period of ostensible reaction. He spoke of the renewal of wildcat strikes in the 1950s and “the revival of all sorts of unofficial struggles among workers” in the 1960s and 1970s. “But notice,” he observed, “how seldom those movements had a political ideology of any coherence. Militancy was there, fighting the boss on the shop level, but the sense of political direction, which would virtually have always been there in any rebel movement down through the 1930s, was lacking.” He rejected “most of what is written in academic literature about the inherent conservatism or passivity of American workers.” He became aware “of the peculiarly opaque character of working-class life. American workers are not going to use a totally different sort of language than everybody else, but they give a very different meaning to that language that they pick up from the television, newspapers, and so forth.”Footnote ⁴

Theory

For all the theoretical significance of his scholarship, Dave Montgomery was not a historian whose inclinations ran toward high theory. His Marxism was empirically grounded, an expression of his own political practice and his capacity to listen to the voices of workers, past and present. His historiographic pronouncements were often guarded and oblique, not frontal assaults. When he chose to generalize, he did so cautiously, for the most part, but with a classic simplicity. In The Fall of the House of Labor, he argued that it was “imperative to analyze American experience … in terms of conflicting social classes.” And those classes were “the human relationships structured by commodity production in large collective enterprises devoted to private gain [that] generated bondings and antagonisms that were, in one form or another, the daily experience of everyone involved.”Footnote ⁵ This perspective echoed a classical Marxist rendering of class but, although Montgomery drew inspiration from Marxism, he did not engage in extended theoretical discussion in his historical work.

But, if class was in his view the irreducible foundation of society, Montgomery consistently saw in the experience of workers—and the ways in which they articulated their understandings—a subtle, pragmatic, but fundamentally mutualist consciousness of class. This mutualist consciousness made workers capable of adaptation and revitalization in the face of ever-changing economic and social conditions fabricated by a capitalist order that enmeshed but never wholly controlled their lives. Again, he captured that understanding in relatively few words in the early pages of The Fall:

Figure 1.

David Montgomery around the time of his retirement as Farnham Professor of History at Yale University. Courtesy Jon Butler.

In 1989, the journal Labor History assembled a group of labor historians to discuss The Fall, and Montgomery was stunned by the misreading of his book. He wrote with some disbelief that, contrary to the general presumption that new labor historians operated from a common framework, “the sharp criticisms leveled at The Fall of the House of Labor by various authors in this symposium make it clear, however, that we have no common theory of history. We represent no one school of thought. On the contrary, we bring sharply divergent, and often mutually exclusive, conceptions of society to bear on the study of the workers' past.”Footnote ⁷ Most troubling to him were two lines of attack on his work. The first by Sanford Jacoby and Robert Zieger stressed the improvements brought to workers' lives by managerial reform and the liberal state. To this, Montgomery responded in various ways by reiterating “the central topic of the book”—that is, “the agency of workers in the reproduction and transformation of social life.” For him, “class conflict” lay at the heart of the story, not “managerial bureaucracies, and the cost and promise of new technologies” nor workers' supposedly rising standards of living. He saw a different picture in which “qualitative change in American industrial life had been wrought by the interaction of antagonistic groups in a context that had not been chosen by any of them.”Footnote ⁸ His focus remained on what workers saw and felt and how they acted within the constraints they faced.

The second line of attack, most forcefully put forward by Michael Kazin, offered a new consensus reading of labor's history. Kazin argued that “we” (by implication, Montgomery) must “come to grips with the abundant evidence that white wage-earners found more to celebrate than to curse in the achievements of a liberal state.” To which Montgomery could only respond, “What liberal state in 1925?” For Montgomery the most troubling misunderstanding was Kazin's assertion that his book had an “underlying tone” of “pessimism and despair.” He challenged what appeared to be a “deep immersion in Disney World” and a belief “that life for most people has been bright and has become brighter in this century.” Far from despair, he argued, “no matter how many and how serious their defeats, working people have consistently generated new attempts to improve their lives based on the new circumstances in which they have found themselves.”Footnote ⁹

Montgomery's understanding and use of class was fundamentally that of a historian immersed in sources that give voice to workers and that illuminate workers' understandings of the world. Through their agency and their capacity against long odds, they sought repeatedly to reshape their world based on a “changing sense of what was possible.”

But, for those who would see only working-class quiescence in the 1920s, he said simply, “Remember also how short a time labor remained quiescent.”Footnote ¹⁰

Outlining a “new labor history”

Dave Montgomery's work has other claims to originality. They were evident from the outset with the publication of Beyond Equality. In that work he set a course for the “new labor history” that would persist into the 2010s. Montgomery's impatience with the historiographic blockage he confronted when inserting workers into the history of Reconstruction was twofold. He found it relatively easy to dismiss the expiring distraction of the Beard-Beale thesis of Reconstruction as a conspiracy of northern businessmen. The second—the core work of John R. Commons and Selig Perlman—lay more squarely in the path of a new history in which the postwar working-class activists, like William Sylvis and Ira Steward, would be represented as something other than “anti-industrial romantics.” The imprint of Commons/Perlman's “bifurcation of types of labor leaders into wage-conscious trade unionists or anti-monopoly reformers” still colored much of the history being written of working-class activism from Sylvis's National Labor Union (NLU) forward into the era of the Knights of Labor and beyond. Montgomery's new work challenged that dualism and in so doing opened doors to a richer, more subtle rendering of working-class experience that he and others would pursue.Footnote ¹¹

For Montgomery, as for much of the new labor history, the local context was critical. If, as he asserted, “class conflict …was the submerged shoal on which radical dreams foundered,” that reality must be uncovered “in the industrial towns of America, rather than in congressional debates.” The challenge then was to find “the national patterns embedded in a mosaic of local histories.”Footnote ¹² That approach would be one that he pursued in each of his major books, and that others taking up the challenges of working-class history would hone in wide-ranging local studies.Footnote ¹³

Excavating Cultures of Control—The Shop Floor

It should not be surprising that Montgomery's quest to document the formation of working-class consciousness in an American context should focus on the workplace and the role of skilled workers. By his own account, the experience of the “plant floor, in the shop” was where he found solidarity kept alive in the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁴ Driven from that world in Minnesota by the blacklist in the late ‘50s, Montgomery carried with him a profound sense, which would resurface in his workers’ control studies, that shop-floor relations had extraordinary importance “because on-the-job workers must define their own world for themselves.”Footnote ¹⁵ His detailed and, one might almost say, loving reconstruction of nineteenth-century skilled iron workers' rules provided an entrée into the culture of skilled workers. Montgomery underscored the world of conflict that surrounded the assertion of traditional claims to control of production, threatened by employers emboldened to claim their authority. “This glimpse,” as he called it, into the minute books of one iron rollers local in Columbus, Ohio, and other local union records, confirmed a framework that echoed his own experience as a skilled machinist, long after the supposed triumph of “scientific management.” Such evidence provided a key to understanding the resilience of skilled workers' radicalism even in the Age of Gompers:

But even as he made claims for these practices as a species of workers' control and drew analogies to the phenomenon of the revolutionary shop stewards movement in wartime Britain, he called himself back: “To make that analogy is to run too fast.” Nonetheless, in the 1870s those claims were new, not vestiges of a preindustrial past; they were subject to constant employer attacks; and they were “defended by the craftsmen's own disciplined ethical code.”Footnote ¹⁷

No historian of the working class has had a better feel for and insight into the cultural world of the skilled worker than Montgomery. He took the subject far beyond the Commons/Perlman simplistic notion of skilled labor's “scarcity consciousness” as the foundation for their trade union practice. In their codes of mutualistic behavior, in their work rules, in their self-respect, even in their stylized grand balls and sense of propriety, Montgomery saw the ingredients of an autonomous and assertive working-class movement, one that looked outward more than inward.

These views had been foreshadowed in a paper he never published, “Trade Union Practice and the Origins of Syndicalist Theory in the United States,” one version of which he presented at an informal gathering of his students and those of Herbert Gutman and assorted faculty, including Eugene Genovese, at the University of Rochester in the fall of 1972.Footnote ¹⁸ If he felt he had “run too fast” in elaborating the political implications of skilled workers' control (and therefore did not publish it), the paper nevertheless reflected a reckoning with the complex culture of skilled workers that would resurface in his 1976 “Workers' Control” essay and in The Fall of the House of Labor. It offered an underlying argument about the political significance of skilled workers' control that he would come to qualify but not abandon in those later works. That tension between a culture of workplace control and its political implications would be evident in his 1981 interview as well. When asked about how the “dynamics of class struggle” had changed from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, he talked about the “discoveries” he and others had made about “changes in class struggles.”

But, even so, Montgomery held firm to the revolutionary implications that his nineteenth-century findings might hold. Responding to a question about the New Left's indifference to “proletarian prospects” and its hostility to rules, he argued unqualifiedly,

It was those ethical codes that came through so brilliantly in the unpublished essay and in more qualified ways in his subsequent published studies of “workers' control.”

Although the paper may have had rough edges—the quality of a think piece—it described a world of skilled labor at odds with the reigning portraits in both AFL orthodoxy and IWW caricature. Across wide-ranging sources, Montgomery teased out a perspective that for “labor aristocrats” was commonplace—“the idea of direct workers' control of industry operated through the union . … was a simple, logical extension of their daily trade union practice.” In Montgomery's view, the IWW's syndicalism, or what Bill Haywood called “industrialism,” gave a revolutionary twist to a decades-long culture of control that envisaged the “emancipation of labor” by evolutionary means. “Self-government” through the trade union provided the means for labor to control the rules governing production and the leverage to erode the power of capital and eventually institute a “cooperative commonwealth.” In Montgomery's rendering of this tradition, “the cooperative commonwealth was imagined as the world governed by union meetings … the concept developed without the help of intellectuals, on the basis of the craftsmen's personal experience of controlling the productive process.”Footnote ²⁰ Even here, he acknowledged more radical and conservative strands of this tradition, the undertow of a defensive racism and at times a suffocating sense of respectability and decorum that must have made lodge meetings “dreadfully boring” and grand balls seem to mimic high society. Still with these traditions under fierce assault from capital in the late nineteenth century, many trades turned not to deeper craft exclusiveness but to embrace a more “universal brotherhood of labor.”Footnote ²¹

What appeared first as sketch and provocation matured into a pathbreaking essay and fully orchestrated book in the grand narrative tradition that reached back in its scope to the multivolume history of American labor by Commons, Perlman, and their contemporaries.Footnote ²² If not reaching for the same chronological comprehensiveness, Montgomery nonetheless presented a richly contextualized working class for the period 1870–1925, in which the skilled workers of the metal trades were now joined by the growing numbers of “common laborers” and “operatives” of multiethnic origins, male and female, and diverse races. Distinctive work rhythms and life courses intersected in burgeoning cities and industrial towns that dotted the landscape. Montgomery demonstrated the importance of such interactions in workplaces transformed by new, labor-displacing technologies and managerial hierarchies. He memorably sketched a transnational “industrial core, throbbing with manufacturing activity at continually rising levels … [and] surrounding that core … a vast agricultural domain in which capitalist development shattered long-established patterns of economic activity.” And almost as an aside, he noted, “[modernization] appeared on the periphery more as an alien, destructive force than as an integrated pattern of growth.”Footnote ²³ Nothing before or since provides as compelling and comprehensive a portrait of the American working class of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as those opening chapters of The Fall of the House of Labor.

The succeeding chapters of his magnum opus put this multistranded working class into motion, as managers mounted a frontal challenge to craft union control, especially through the introduction of scientific management and the parallel development of personnel departments and sociological investigations. Conflict—around work, community, and politics—became the organizing thread of the remainder of the book. His flair for the local settings of that conflict—the Tri-Cities (later Quad Cities in Illinois and Iowa); East Pittsburgh; Ludlow; Schenectady; and Pittsfield, Massachusetts; and for colorful protagonists like the Civic Federation's Ralph Easley; Fabian socialist Herbert Casson; trade union militant Fred Merrick; or the Colorado Fuel and Iron brain truster Mackenzie King and his nemesis Frank Walsh, chair of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, enriched the narrative. These places and characters gave a richness to the text reminiscent of Beyond Equality. Although the working class had become “a formidable fact of American life” by the onset of the Great War, “homogenization,” in Montgomery's account, had not produced unity. Working-class ideologies were not simply diverse but “often bitterly antagonistic toward one another.”Footnote ²⁴ The house of labor's “fall” came in the postwar period after the collapse of mass strikes in 1922, the extinguishing of debate and experimentation around competing notions of “industrial democracy,” and political conflict between a newly energized but still anemic Left and a broader coalition of labor progressives. But, in classic Montgomery fashion, he saw in this disarray the outlines of a new era of insurgency. “No historical resolution of the conflict between wage labor and capital … has enjoyed a permanent lease on life,” he wrote, and the 1920s were no exception.Footnote ²⁵

Class Formation—Preindustrial Explorations

Because the scope and impact of Montgomery's books have possessed such lasting significance, historians often overlook or underestimate the value of his published essays, which, with the exception of some of his early writing on workers' control, are not directly related to the major books. Indeed, when examined as a collection in their own right, they sketched wider frontiers for labor history and new directions that others would explore. I can only examine a handful here, but each in its own way reflects the capacious understanding of class and the centrality of conflict to the historically contingent processes of class formation and re-formation.

As a case in point: just a year after the publication of Beyond Equality, Montgomery moved back in time—no doubt influenced by his direct exposure to E. P. Thompson and his own sojourn at Warwick—to examine the “working-classes” in early American cities from the Revolution to the Jacksonian era.Footnote ²⁶ Impatient with the state of analysis of class relations before the Civil War and of preindustrial culture, distracted as it was by “a fixation on the clash of ‘agrarian’ and ‘industrial’ values,” Montgomery offered a set of hypotheses and questions to shape future research.Footnote ²⁷ Focusing on the changing labor supply, and in particular the migration of rural peoples from the hinterland and skilled artificers from Great Britain to U.S. cities after the Revolution, he called attention to the early appearance of urban manufacturing alongside commerce in the coastal ports. He also drew attention to the myth of “harmonious personal relationships among masters, journeymen, and apprentices” in the face of early formation of journeymen's societies and “chronic disputes over wages.” He found the presence of conflict in urban areas compatible with a degree of upward mobility and significant wage/price disparities between cities and the countryside in the new world and in Britain. The growing armies of casual and laboring workers alongside artificers of different grades gave the urban labor market a striking fluidity in a preindustrial economy marked by declining per capita income. And he highlighted the appearance of a factory workforce of women and children in both mill villages and cities that was a byproduct of the shifting dynamics in preindustrial rural and urban economies.Footnote ²⁸ These insights both reflected and anticipated major works by younger scholars who would test, revise, and bring to life antebellum worlds of labor that lay largely undeveloped in the existing literature.Footnote ²⁹

Montgomery's other major foray into the world of antebellum labor came in a very different form—a case study of the nativist riot in Philadelphia in 1844 that revealed deep cultural divisions within an urban working class at the end of a severe economic downturn and in a period of intensive Protestant evangelizing.Footnote ³⁰ But for him the key to understanding these tumultuous events was not the economic impact of the depression per se, but in workers' divided “reactions to the political demands made by evangelical Protestantism: the moral content of education, liquor licensing and prohibition, Sabbath closing and the suppression of popular ‘lewd and tumultuous’ conduct.” The destruction of the weavers' trade unions may have been a precondition, but it was the “[magnified] importance to artisans of the temperance and public education movements that determined the collision course that pitted Protestant and Catholic working people against each other.Footnote ³¹ The article signaled to other labor historians the importance of cultural (and ethnic) conflict as a crucial feature of working class life, while at the same time affirming the underlying nature of class relations in antebellum society. “By their very nature, evangelical demands fragmented the working class as a political force in ante-bellum Philadelphia and thereby created for historians the illusion of a society lacking in class conflict.” Other historians would indeed take up the challenges to consider seriously the cultural and religious tensions that animated working-class life and complicated the homogenizing processes of industrialization.Footnote ³²

Synthesizing from Below: Strikes and Class Consciousness

By 1980, just a year before his interview with the MARHO editors, Montgomery had achieved such a level of visibility and influence in the field he had done so much to inspire that he felt able to cast a synthesizing eye across the literature and define new directions, albeit within a framework of his own construction.Footnote ³³ Two essays, published in 1980, reflect most powerfully his efforts at a large overview—though he shied away from the then-fashionable term synthesis.Footnote ³⁴ They both build on his own work and that of his students and others, but also prefigure the breadth of Fall of the House of Labor.Footnote ³⁵

Montgomery saw strikes as collective actions that “tear the tissue of ‘normal life’” and provide “revealing glimpses of class relations and attitudes, which arise from but are disguised by the daily production and distribution of commodities.” They were occasions in which workers had to “reorder relationships among themselves” and in accord with “their own social code.”Footnote ³⁶ But analyzed over time, he argued, they revealed significant changes in behavior and consciousness. Strike studies were numerous, as were theories to explain their incidence. As in other work, Montgomery contested the notions of modernization theorists, who saw a progressive transformation and a gradual accommodation to the existing social and industrial order reflected in more rational and orderly industrial relations. With Eric Hobsbawm and Michelle Perrot, he saw a different “natural history of the strike” that witnessed increasingly sophisticated tactics (“learning the rules of the game”) and mass mobilization to challenge the existing order.Footnote ³⁷

Strikes, in his view, evolved as a form of collective action out of popular protest and crowd actions of the preindustrial era, through a period of transition in the United States between 1845 and 1865 that involved new types of workers, to more mature if nonetheless destabilizing forms of strike activity in the later nineteenth century. They involved increasingly organized workers, frequently in large enterprises, and with a growing ability to coordinate local and national struggles. Their demands for uniform wage scales were also accompanied by the rising importance of strikes over nonwage issues such as work rules, the right to organize, and what he termed the “ethical standards [that] should govern the workplace.”Footnote ³⁸ And, in his view, most tellingly, sympathetic strikes rose dramatically as the period progressed, reaching a crescendo in the 1890s.

Montgomery stressed repeatedly that patterns did not follow a simple linear trajectory. Strikes could acquire an insurrectionary quality, as they did in different ways in 1863 and 1877. They could pose a challenge to state power, or seek to “redefine the polity,” or on occasion attempt to coerce employers to obey existing laws. Strikes for the eight-hour day, through the “habit of solidarity” they engendered, posed a threat not only to the culture of “acquisitive individualism” unleashed in the Gilded Age but on occasion to the “wages system” itself. Most dramatic were the mass strikes of the period in which a new spirit of audacity animated collective action on an unprecedented scale—in 1877, in 1886, and in the coal and railroad strikes of 1894. Such actions disordered not only statistical trend lines that modernizers might impose on strike activity, but also their theories that prescribed orderly progress toward stable and quiescent industrial relations. As in so much of Montgomery's other writing, workers' actions and the consciousness that underlay them could only be understood by close attention to changes in the fabric of workers' lives on the job, in the community, in the union hall, and “in the context of the changing totality of class conflicts, of which they are a part.”Footnote ³⁹ The essay provided a template for analyzing the evolution of collective action in relation to workers' own understandings of their world and the strategies available to enforce their own ethical codes.

If Montgomery's attempt to provide a new synthesis for understanding workers' collective action was fundamentally rooted in nineteenth-century evidence, the other 1980 essay, “Labor and the Republic in Industrial America,” sought to conceptualize the discontinuities between that nineteenth-century world and developments in the early decades of the twentieth. Like the work on strikes, this effort built on burgeoning research that reinterpreted the place of the Knights of Labor within nineteenth-century labor, a key project in defining the new labor history. The essay also foreshadowed a more complex understanding of the conflicts that would precipitate “the fall,” however temporary, in the 1920s.Footnote ⁴⁰

The project he undertook, then, was nothing less than the reconstruction of the “articulated ideology (ideologies) of the workers' movement” or “the making and remaking of class consciousness” between the Civil War and the end of the Great War. The “sketch” in the essay he provided would give form and even language to the conceptual framework for The Fall of the House of Labor.Footnote ⁴¹

Three factors, according to Montgomery, had “shaped the outlook of the labour movement”: the triumph of a northern bourgeoisie in the aftermath of the Civil War, the prolonged deflationary cycle that sent workers' incomes and employment plunging periodically, and the national integration of a capitalist order. What was most noteworthy about Montgomery's conceptualization was not just the diverse impact of these developments on different “ethnic, racial, sexual, and age groupings” with their comparably diverse “forms and objectives of struggle,” but what he termed the “moral universality” that infused workers' efforts “to impose economic order on deflationary, competitive capitalism.” This “mutualistic ethic” may have had roots in pre-capitalist, republican values, but it reached beyond those traditional trappings to repudiate the “egotism” and acquisitive individualism that marked the Gilded Age, and it animated an alternative movement culture of producers in cooperatives, boycotts, social gatherings, labor temples, songs, and poetry. The scope of that culture—at whose center stood the more than 15,000 local and district assemblies of the KOL—was without precedent. Abolition of the wages system seemed to entail a strategic contradiction. It could not be done without “redemption of the state,” but “neither could it be accomplished by the state.” The result was a dual emphasis on self-organization and political mobilization.Footnote ⁴² Montgomery did not neglect “two important variations,” a socialist political movement (SLP) with strong German immigrant influences committed to government control of the economy, and an anarchist movement (IWPA), itself internally divided, whose “mission was not to capture the state, but smash it.”

The second half of the essay portrayed a very different world of working-class activity, shaped by a new, concerted collectivism among employers, the growth of monopoly capitalism, a capitalist “octopus” that “extended its reach from a continental to a global scale,” and working-class recomposition through expanded immigration from new corners of the world. In phrasing that anticipated a similar discussion in The Fall, Montgomery wrote, “In short, southeastern Europe had become part of the American industrial economy.”Footnote ⁴³ With racism and patriotism on the ascent, workers were hardly immune. And socialist and syndicalist activism vied more openly and contentiously with an AFL now more dedicated to craft conservatism and political accommodation. But the intensity of class conflict hardly subsided. Indeed, during the critical years 1909–22—before, during, and after the Great War—that conflict “involved more people than ever and often met more violent resistance from employers and the state than ever before.” Reaching for the contrast that pivoted around the crisis years of the 1890s, he argued:

These two essays, then, mark off the parameters of the massive, synthetic work that would follow. They affirmed the fundamental insights that guided his scholarship from the outset: an affirmation of workers' self-activity and experience as the starting point for understanding class and class consciousness; a focus on the workplace as the crucible of class formation, though with increasing attention to community, neighborhood, and family; and an unwillingness to isolate politics from economic collective action or radicalism from reform. But they also signaled, however subtly, a new effort to situate the story of the U.S. working class in a global, transnational context. That effort would come to fruition, though as yet not fully realized, in the final published essay of his life. The direction was, however, unmistakable.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Global

When graduate students worked with Montgomery—at least in Pittsburgh—they routinely did a required field in what he termed “Comparative Labor History.” The readings waded deeply into the social and labor history of Britain—Thompson and Hobsbawm, of course, but also the Webbs and the Hammonds and a host of younger scholars. Germany, France, and Russia/Soviet Union were well represented on the menu, as were, to a lesser degree, Spain and Italy. At this stage—in the early to mid-1970s—absent were Latin America, China, India, Africa, and the Middle East.

Montgomery's commitment to transnational and comparative history was not a new, fashionable undertaking for him.Footnote ⁴⁶ He had edited the journal International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) during a critical period. He had engaged with historians worldwide from his early sojourn at Warwick with Thompson to later stints in Italy, Brazil, France, The Netherlands, and back in England. He had been intimately involved in assorted projects with Marcel van der Linden and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.Footnote ⁴⁷ A number of his students had embarked on transnational and comparative projects of their own, as the new labor history itself developed a more international focus.Footnote ⁴⁸ And imperialism, particularly its American version, had been a growing presence in his scholarship and teaching. His last essay, in this very journal, charted the shifting currents of the American labor movement‘s internationalism and the AFL's own transition from vocal anti-imperialism to a quiescent and ultimately more aggressive handmaiden of American expansionism, particularly in Latin America and Canada, before and during World War I. But Montgomery offered not an Olympian view of these developments—though the broad implications were clearly delineated—but a characteristically gritty account of local engagement between the AFL and national and local labor movements in Puerto Rico, Canada, and Mexico.Footnote ⁴⁹

Like so many new turns in his scholarship, the transnational grew from a deeply rooted and conceptually capacious grasp of the development of capitalism in local, national, and transnational contexts. In the 1980 MARHO interview, he had stepped back to consider the trajectory of his own work. “Although my specialty is working-class history, the subject I am trying to get at is the history of capitalism. From this vantage point I have as much respect and esteem for the study of the economy or of foreign relations as for that of working people.”Footnote ⁵⁰ His powerful presidential address at the St. Louis OAH convention in 2000, framed as it was by the principled struggle he led against the discriminatory practices of the Adams Mark hotel chain, outlined a global capitalism whose roots lay in the African slave trade and an insatiable search for cheap, dependent labor. But, even as he called for historians “to incorporate slavery into our histories of immigration and labor,” he also cautioned that we “exercise care when we do so,” by not conflating slave “migration” with a history of immigration based on European or even Asian models.Footnote ⁵¹

Montgomery took the occasion to sketch, as he had done so often in the past, the outlines of a new history of capitalism in which workers—enslaved and free, people of color and white, male and female—remained in some fashion agents of their own lives and destinies. However constrained they were, workers of all sorts constructed solidarities from below, often fragile and conflicted; and played a role, at times decisive, in shaping politics and economic institutions far beyond the local worlds in which they most often acted.

This was quintessential Montgomery, gathering material from the widest imaginable range of sources, integrating the pathbreaking work of other historians, but giving the larger story the stamp of his own understanding and experience. No one said or lived it better than David Montgomery.