David Montgomery: Labor Historian Larger Than Life
For several generations, David Montgomery has had the legendary status of a labor historian who transformed the field, at least the labor history of the USA. Close observers would be likely to say that Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans 1862-1872 (1967), the expanded and revised version of his dissertation, might very well be the most thoroughly Marxist history of working class life ever written in this country—even, arguably, almost sixty years later. Making no such claims for the book (or for himself), Montgomery captured the post Civil War economy, race, working class institutions and so much else in the book’s dense pages. He had already, by that publication, begun a distinguished career as an almost maniacally hard-working university lecturer and mentor, and would be remembered not only for his many later books but also how diligently he supported the hard-pressed unionists at Yale University.
A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance
Edited by Shelton Stromquist and James R. Barrett
University of Illinois Press; 445 pages
July 9, 2024
Paperback: $35.00; E-book: $19.95
The David Montgomery Reader is a whopper in every sense. It contains sixteen published essays and four that remained unpublished at Montgomery’s death. Not absent are photos of the historian through much of his active life, beginning with him picketing HUAC in New Jersey, where he worked as a machinist, in 1955. The Introduction, a fine essay in itself, includes a reminder that he served as a founding editor of the book series (at University of Illinois, its office a ten minute bike ride from my boyhood family home) that made the biggest single contribution to labor studies, and for long years, editor of the journal International Labor and Working-Class History. He had an imprint even larger than the campus and classroom.
The editors explain, helpfully, that the sheer originality of Montgomery’s writing can be found in the various studies about workers’ struggle for control at the factory floor, or perhaps more properly, their loss of control, generation by generation. The craft workers of the nineteenth century were aristocrats in their own domain, but not the narrow-minded, conservative unionists of the AFL as epitomized in their leaders, Sam Gompers and his successors. The best of the old timers fought back against the emerging monopolies and offered a helping hand to those left out, including women and nonwhites.
Your reviewer is now mentally referencing a particular essay that originally reached readers as a pamphlet published in 1970 by my own new left magazine, Radical America. Montgomery sent the text to me, taken from one of his lectures to a group of Pittsburgh unionists, and titled “What Is Happening to the American Worker?” Montgomery was reaching out to new generations on the Left, mostly but not entirely on the campuses, and we were trying to get his message across. At that historic moment, the changing demography of the workforce impelled young workers, notably women and non-white workers, into militant struggles in sectors (such as the post office) rarely known for their strikes. The very writing of labor history had begun moving away from the “labor relations” model that brought past class struggles to a happy ending. As this academic apology for the labor conservatism moved aside, things could be seen anew. Montgomery showed the way forward. Moreover, class differences would be seen in all life, not just the workplace, and race would be central as it never could have been in the older labor history.
The book’s editors do not say much about Montomery’s pre-scholarly political past. David was a Red, a youthful Communist or near-Communist who met a woman of color at an International Youth Festival, and with Marty set out on a unique quest that included friendship, comradeship with leftwing Bohemians including Lorraine Hansberry. Among his vivid memories—he was a very great story-teller—he counted joining demonstrators around him actually rushing the cops in the South Bronx, at the announcement of the Rosenbergs’ execution. He abandoned activities within the organized Left after being blacklisted as a machinist. Unlike Herbert Gutman, the other great labor historian of the 1960s-80s, hauled into HUAC for the crime of being a counselor in a leftwing children’s camp in the 1940s, Montgomery escaped outright persecution if not FBI pursuit. The interracial Left would always be part of his life, as would his continued activity in and around the United Electrical Workers, a radical union that struggled successfully to survive the Cold War.
In the early 1990s, he could write that globally-connected scholars of labor history had encouraged each other for twenty years, while furiously pursuing their own work. By the later 1970s, publishers and journal editors could hardly keep up with that volume of the scholarly “new history” that followed. He was too modest to mention the huge influence of his own role.
The Montgomery Reader gives us the opportunity of seeing how great that influence must have been.The editorial decisions on the book’s contents must have been difficult, indeed. Much emphasis is put upon his work on the nineteenth century, four chapters out of seven. The “discovery” of the earlier times reflected in no small part the influence of E.P. Thompson, the most influential historian of the working class in the English language as well as one of its most eloquent socialist orators. Industrialization ongoing had shaped and reshaped the nature of the class but also the cities, the languages that the working class spoke, the churches, synagogues and mosques that they went to (if they went to any). Race was central, of course, and perhaps just after that, he placed the problem of industrial “citizenship.” Were blue collar Americans mere wage slaves?
“The process of removing from the worker control over his work, then compounding the crime by labeling him too dumb to understand it anyway” (p.387) might properly summarize the scholarly psychology beneath the vast wealth of detail in these essays. But it would not convey the richness of detail that doubtless drove some potential PhD graduates from the field—how could they conquer similar territory in their research and writing?—but entranced patient readers with the same detail.
Every reader will have favorite essays. Mine go to some of the unpublished material, for obvious reasons. “Trade Union Practice and the Origins of Syndicalist Theory in the United States,” written 1969-72 and found in the David Montgomery Papers (Tamiment Library, New York University) argues that the IWW insistence upon uniting worker across all parts of the factory had its origins not in European syndicalist theory (or practice) but in the nineteenth century experience of unions trying to gain control of the factories and run them democratically.
During the last half of that century, craftsmen often bemoaned capitalism’s undermining of the traditions of a kind of democratic practice on the factory floor. Wobblies, by contrast, considered capitalism to be rotten through and through. One cannot attribute this shift to mere passage of time and generations. The sense of recentness in the loss of democratic practices pervades the labor memoirs and commentaries of the 1880s-90s, a sense surely fostered by the sudden rise of industrialism and population shifts. But there must be another element, as Montgomery grasped, and he found in the literature a logic more common that any historian had analysed before his work. The idea of cooperatives, created with government assistance as needed, made sense to these thoughtful participants and leaders of unions. Superficially close to the “state socialism” ideas of Ferdinand Lasalle (little busts of Lasalle were sometimes awarded, by German-language socialist locals of the 1870s-80s, to “the best” in some amateur contest), it is different in the belief that each large craft will govern itself, as part of the future industrial republic whose government would supersede Congress.
Montgomery quips, “This style of thinking was so pervasive that it deserves to be called ‘the American style of Socialism,’” making possible a future American nation “governed by union meetings” (p.200). Nothing could be more “Wobbly,”but also in line with the central notions of Daniel De Leon, the Caribbean-Jewish immigrant who articulated widely held precepts at the founding convention of the IWW. To hold the machine is to hold the country. Some software company union members might say the same today, a reason why they organized and also became socialists.
So much of Montgonery’s writing tracks statistics as well as narratives of various kinds, meanwhile closely following Black working class history and how it intersects with the larger picture.
How could he do it all? We still wonder.