Montgomery, David

MONTGOMERY, DAVID (1927-2011). The leading Marxist scholar of US labor history, David Montgomery, was also a key figure in the introduction of Black history and women’s history into labor scholarship.

Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the son of an insurance executive, Montgomery was educated at Harverford School before entering the Army Corps of Engineers. On his discharge, he entered Swarthmore College, graduating in 1950 with highest honors in political science. Montgomery likely joined the Communist Party shortly after college. He attended an International Youth Festival in 1950, where he met the future wife, an African-American activist who would be a major force within his ongoing political life.

Montgomery first chose to “industrialize” and became a machinist at a small Greenwich Village factory. He was elected a shop chairman to one section of a large amalgamated UE local. Despite the increasing pressure of McCarthyism, he took part in many leftwing activities and campaigns and most definitely in the interracial cultural life of the fading Popular Front milieu. He and his wife Marty (Martel) became friends with playwright Lorraine Hansberry, among other figures of the time.

Facing the worsening political pressures of the times, Montgomery moved his family to St. Paul, Minnesota, in the middle 1950s. Living in the historically Black neighborhood of Rondo, he worked as a machinist at Honeywell’s huge Minneapolis plant, at the time still a UE shop. There, he earned a reputation as a militant shop steward. As the Cold War deepened, UE lost its foothold and he was fired. He found various work in St. Paul and became a respected activist within the Machinists’ union and the Teamsters. He extended his activism into electoral politics by working in Joe Karth’s remarkable 1958 congressional campaign (as president of an OCAW local, Karth ran on an anti-nuclear platform). Becoming fast friends with the famed “proletarian writer” of the 1930s, Meridel LeSueur, who by this time guided the local Communist Party-related bookstore, he assisted her in the production of the book, The People Together (1958). The unique commemoration of Minnesota’s centennial, which placed working people in the center of the story, it was his first inkling of becoming a historian.

The Cold War climate made it impossible for Montgomery to continue playing a visible role in the labor movement. He later explained to an interviewer: “I was driven out of the factory; I was blacklisted. Becoming a historian was not my first choice. I had to do something, so I took the second-best choice that was around then.” His shop floor and political experiences informed his approach to labor history: “Being in factories…involved in struggles along with other workers persuaded me that most of what was written in academic literature about the inherent passivity or conservatism of American workers in fighting to change anything was simply untrue.” In his own work and that of his students, the workplace was a site of struggle, whether workers belonged to unions or not, and communities and local politics bore the marks of the struggles of working people for a better life. Preparing for a PhD at the University of Minnesota, he left the Communist Party around 1957-1958.

The merger of scholarship and activism would be evident in Montgomery’s writing and his teaching, first at the University of Pittsburgh (1963-1978) and then at Yale University (1979-1997). He insisted that workers’ struggles, if never fully successful, nevertheless changed the course of American history. His first book, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (1967), suggested that the failure of Reconstruction was driven by the responses of Northern manufacturers to the challenges they faced in the organizations and demands of their workers. In Workers’ Control in America (1979), he analyzed struggles by skilled workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for control over the nature and pace of work. The Fall of the House of Labor (1987), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, examined the defeat of craft unionism by employers, the state, and the reorganization of work in the years after World War I. Citizen Worker (1993) explored how the contradictions between political democracy and market-driven economics generated grassroots movements of political discontent, from northern workers seeking the eight-hour day and Midwestern farmers challenging banks and railroads to southern African Americans confronting Jim Crow.

Through his integration of activism and scholarship, David Montgomery offered a compelling role model for hundreds of his students. During a major United Mineworkers’ strike in 1975, he served as co-chair of a Support Committee that bridged the labor movement and the University of Pittsburgh community. At Yale, he led faculty and student support for university unions among clerical, dining hall, and maintenance workers. Dana Frank, one of his doctoral students, wrote: “We routinely tromped out to picket lines at local factories at five in the morning in the snow. That was what you did if you were a labor historian, he taught us, without saying a word.” In an appreciation of his life, a journalist in the UE News wrote: “During their long struggle for a first contract, UE members at Circuit-Wise near New Haven staged a demonstration outside the 1989 Yale class reunion of the company president and vice president. The action included a guerilla theater skit, with David Montgomery playing the role of one of the bosses.”

The list of his students includes many noted labor history scholars, through whose careers a second generation of labor historians took shape. He was elected President of the Organization of American Historians in 2000, and following his death, an annual prize in Labor History was established by the OAH in conjunction with the International Labor and Working Class History organization.

“Once Upon a Shop Floor: An Interview with David Montgomery,” by Paul Buhle and Mark Naison. Radical History Review. 23 (1980), pp. 37-53.

Stromquist, Sheldon, “David Montgomery: A Labor Historian's Legacies." Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. 13(January 2014).

Wiener, Jon, “David Montgomery, 1927-2011.” The Nation. December 2, 2001

David Montgomery Papers. Finding Aid. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_446/