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PORTSIDE CULTURE

DAVID MONTGOMERY: LABOR HISTORIAN LARGER THAN LIFE  
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Paul Buhle
August 26, 2024
Portside
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_ 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. _

David Montgomery, 1927 – 2011, speaking at UE Convention in New
Haven, 2009., Photo credit: Ron Flowers, UE // LAWCHA (The Labor and
Working Class History Association)

 

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
[[link removed]: 978-0-252-08800-1 - 978-0-252-05679-6?utm_source=xxxxxx&utm_medium=email]
Edited by Shelton Stromquist and James R. Barrett
University of Illinois Press; 445 pages
July 9, 2024
Paperback:  $35.00;  E-book:  $19.95

 
University of Illinois Press
_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contains sixteen published essays and four that remained unpublished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.

* David Montgomery
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* Labor History
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* Labor Historians
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* U.S. labor history
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* Labor Unions
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* Trade Unions
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* Working Class History
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* Social History
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* Radical Republicans
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* Marxist history
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* Black workers
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