Class in a Multicultural Age: Organization of American Historians Meeting

Abstract

The April 1997 conference of Organization of American Historians (OAH) in San Francisco was thematically centered on the meanings of citizenship. Despite relatively expansive body of work by labor histor ians which has directly or indirectly addressed this theme over years, there were relatively few sessions that dealt with labor or working-class history. I attended several of these panels but was most intrigued by a session on Recasting Citizenship: The Uses of Class in a Multicultural Age. The papers and discussion at this panel incorporated both controver sial issues within field of labor history and issues pertinent to future labor and social scholarship?not to mention movements. The panelists represented an impressive cross-section of scholars who have written against grain of a field once centered exclusively on white, male, organized working class. Elizabeth Faue, Robin Kelley, James Horton, Alice Kessler-Harris, and David Roediger have each in their own way challenged and expanded our understanding of class in relation to community, race, and gender. Their observations and comments at this session both sharpened that challenge and generally moved from a schol arly focus to a broader context of academic and social activism. Specifically, issue of uses of class in a multicultural age was approached as a methodological problem, as a political problem within academy, and as a challenge to building a new and vital labor movement. Elizabeth Faue (Wayne State University) opened session with question, What do we do with class in terms of citizenship? She identified a fundamental problem in this relationship by noting that although notions of citizenship have historically been rooted in work and work identities, class and citizenship have been articulated in languages which are both reinforcing and competing. She continued with contention that, gener ally, class has been excluded from national discourse on meaning of citizenship, with a few notable exceptions: rise of American Federa tion of Labor in 1920s, which brought to forefront idea of respectable (white, male) citizen-worker; labor movement of 1930s led by Congress of Industrial Organizations, through which class deter mined scope of claims made on citizenship; and era from 1979 to present, in which class has come into competition with race and gender as a primary determiner of identity. In current era, relationship of class to citizenship and state has remained unclear.