Eric Foner: Obituary for David Montgomery  

US labour historian who approached the study of
capitalism through workers' experiences

by Eric Foner

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/11/david-montgomery

David Montgomery, who has died aged 84 of a brain
haemorrhage, was one of the most prominent historians
in the US and the model of a scholar-activist. Along
with the late Herbert Gutman, he was the most
influential practitioner of the "new labour history",
which moved the study of workers away from the
institutional history of unions to the workplace
struggles, political ideologies and cultural values of
the diverse groups who make up the American working
class. Before entering academia, he spent several years
as a shop-floor organiser for the Communist party,
working with the United Electrical Workers,
International Association of Machinists and Teamsters
union, an experience rare among modern academics.

Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Montgomery served in
the Army Corps of Engineers during the second world
war, including a stint at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where
the atomic bomb was developed. After leaving the army
he attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. In the
1950s, Montgomery devoted himself to factory
organising. Hounded by the FBI, he was dismissed from
several industrial jobs. He left the Communist party in
1957 in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of
Hungary, and, as he later recalled in an interview with
the Radical History Review, because of the party's
"stifling" intellectual atmosphere.

But he remained deeply influenced by two aspects of his
communist experience - Marxist analysis and a
commitment to racial equality. Class remained his key
category of historical analysis, although he was keenly
aware of the multiracial, multi-ethnic nature of the
American labour force. He saw class consciousness not
as adherence to a particular ideology but as workers'
day-to-day activities in opposition to their employers.
Unions, whatever their political outlook, were for
Montgomery places of human solidarity, their very
existence a rebuke and challenge to the dog-eat-dog
competitiveness of market society.

What he witnessed on the shop floor convinced him that
"most of what was written in academic literature about
the inherent conservatism of American workers ... was
simply untrue." He decided to set the record straight.
Montgomery received his doctorate in history from the
University of Minnesota in 1962. He taught labour
history for 14 years at the University of Pittsburgh,
then moved to Yale University as a professor of
history. A powerful, charismatic speaker, he attracted
legions of students to his classes.

Montgomery's writings reconceptualised the history of
American workers during the 19th and early 20th
centuries. His first book, Beyond Equality (1967),
altered historians' understanding of the era of
reconstruction that followed the American civil war by
focusing on the labour question in the northern states
rather than the fate of the emancipated slaves. The
war, a disaster for northern workers because of rampant
inflation, spawned the emergence of the nation's first
mass-labour movement, whose demands challenged the
adequacy of the ideal of legal equality promoted by the
radical republicans.

The book's title suggested that beyond legal equality -
a momentous achievement for the former slaves - lay
issues of economic justice that the political system
proved incapable of addressing. On the submerged rock
of class conflict, he argued, the radical project
foundered.

Montgomery then turned his attention to the rise and
fall of labour militancy in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. In Workers' Control in America (1979),
he highlighted how groups of skilled industrial workers
- iron puddlers, miners, and others - "controlled" the
nature and pace of work, and how their shopfloor power
was eventually eroded by mechanisation and the
introduction of bureaucratised systems of factory
management.

The Fall of the House of Labor (1987) expanded his
compass to include not only these privileged workers,
but machine operatives in factories and the unskilled
manual labourers who built the era's railroads, subways
and sewer systems. In the early 20th century,
management, with the assistance of the national state,
launched a ferocious assault on workers' prerogatives.
By the 1920s, Montgomery wrote, "modern America had
been created over its workers' protests".

The theme of political repression was further pursued
in Citizen Worker (1993), which addressed the paradox
that 19th-century American workers enjoyed extensive
democratic rights, yet confronted a national state that
acted "to police the people for the free market".

Montgomery was the opposite of the ivory-tower
academic. At Yale, he organised faculty support for
clerical workers who engaged in a bitter strike against
the university demanding union recognition. When the
workers at the Colt firearms company in New Haven
(where Yale is located) launched a prolonged strike,
Montgomery joined the picket line. In 2000, as
president of the Organisation of American Historians,
he moved the sessions of the annual meeting in St Louis
from the headquarters hotel to a local university, as
an act of solidarity with black litigants who were
suing the hotel chain for discriminatory practices.

Montgomery had a longstanding connection with Britain.
From 1967 until 1969, he taught at the University of
Warwick, where, with EP Thompson, he helped to
establish the Centre for the Study of Social History,
and from 1986 until 1987 was professor of American
history at Oxford University.

In his interview with the Radical History Review,
Montgomery remarked: "Although my speciality is
working-class history, the subject I am trying to get
at is the history of capitalism." In all his works, he
tried to describe workers' experiences within the
broadest political and economic context. Today in the
US, labour history has become a much more marginal
field than in Montgomery's heyday - a reflection of
shifting intellectual interests and the decline of the
labour movement itself. Those interested in labour now
study it as part of a newly prominent paradigm - the
history of American capitalism. In other words, they
are coming back to David Montgomery.

He is survived by his wife, Martel (when they wed in
1952, their interracial marriage was illegal in many US
states), two sons, Edward and Claude, and five
grandchildren. 

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