David Montgomery, 84, Dies; Chronicled Lives of Workers
David Montgomery, a labor historian whose experience as a machinist informed his influential writing about the culture of the factory floor, died last Friday in Philadelphia. He was 84. Mr. Montgomery, who taught at the University of Pittsburgh and at Yale, wrote several books that explored the lives of workers, their rituals, their hierarchies, the power relationships among them and with their in-house managers, and the communities they formed.
In books that included “Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872,” “Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles” and his magnum opus, “The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925,” Mr. Montgomery created vivid pictures of workers in the iron foundries, steel plants and munitions and electrical equipment factories of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
For most of the 1950s, Mr. Montgomery worked as a machinist in Minnesota and New York, and in both places he was a union member and organizer who, in the cross hairs of anti-Communist McCarthyites, was fired from a number of jobs. (Mr. Montgomery was, in fact, a member of the Communist Party. He quit after the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian rebellion of 1956.)
He entered academia at a time when labor studies was a field viewed largely in terms of economics. But along with other scholars, including the Englishman E. P. Thompson and the Americans David Brody and Herbert G. Gutman, Mr. Montgomery helped establish what became known as “new labor history,” a branch of inquiry that rerouted research away from its traditional focus on union organizing, strikes and relations between companies and unions. Instead, these historians — and generations of students after them — began seeing labor more in terms of social history.
“One of the signal achievements of Mr. Montgomery and his many energetic students,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, writing about “The Fall of the House of Labor” in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, has been “to put social drama and moral seriousness back into the struggles of labor, not just the great strikes at Homestead and Ludlow, but also into the seemingly mundane conflicts over a change in work rules or a five-cent wage advance.”
David Montgomery was born on Dec. 1, 1927, in Bryn Mawr, Pa.; his father was an insurance executive. He was educated in Pennsylvania as well, graduating from the Haverford School and, after serving in the Army in Los Alamos, N. M., as World War II was ending, Swarthmore College.
His first jobs were in factories in New York City and Minneapolis, and at the end of the McCarthy era he turned to academic life, earning an M.A. and a Ph.D., both in history, from the University of Minnesota. His dissertation became his first book, “Beyond Equality,” published in 1967, and he became a close colleague of Mr. Thompson’s.
Known as a shy and humble man who came alive behind a lectern or on a soapbox, Mr. Montgomery won teaching awards at both Pittsburgh and Yale, where he gained local fame for, among other things, actively supporting the campus clerical workers in their 1984 strike..
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/us/david-montgomery-84-dies-chronicled-lives-of-workers.html
Also see:
In books that included “Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872,” “Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles” and his magnum opus, “The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925,” Mr. Montgomery created vivid pictures of workers in the iron foundries, steel plants and munitions and electrical equipment factories of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
For most of the 1950s, Mr. Montgomery worked as a machinist in Minnesota and New York, and in both places he was a union member and organizer who, in the cross hairs of anti-Communist McCarthyites, was fired from a number of jobs. (Mr. Montgomery was, in fact, a member of the Communist Party. He quit after the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian rebellion of 1956.)
He entered academia at a time when labor studies was a field viewed largely in terms of economics. But along with other scholars, including the Englishman E. P. Thompson and the Americans David Brody and Herbert G. Gutman, Mr. Montgomery helped establish what became known as “new labor history,” a branch of inquiry that rerouted research away from its traditional focus on union organizing, strikes and relations between companies and unions. Instead, these historians — and generations of students after them — began seeing labor more in terms of social history.
“One of the signal achievements of Mr. Montgomery and his many energetic students,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, writing about “The Fall of the House of Labor” in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, has been “to put social drama and moral seriousness back into the struggles of labor, not just the great strikes at Homestead and Ludlow, but also into the seemingly mundane conflicts over a change in work rules or a five-cent wage advance.”
David Montgomery was born on Dec. 1, 1927, in Bryn Mawr, Pa.; his father was an insurance executive. He was educated in Pennsylvania as well, graduating from the Haverford School and, after serving in the Army in Los Alamos, N. M., as World War II was ending, Swarthmore College.
His first jobs were in factories in New York City and Minneapolis, and at the end of the McCarthy era he turned to academic life, earning an M.A. and a Ph.D., both in history, from the University of Minnesota. His dissertation became his first book, “Beyond Equality,” published in 1967, and he became a close colleague of Mr. Thompson’s.
Known as a shy and humble man who came alive behind a lectern or on a soapbox, Mr. Montgomery won teaching awards at both Pittsburgh and Yale, where he gained local fame for, among other things, actively supporting the campus clerical workers in their 1984 strike..
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/us/david-montgomery-84-dies-chronicled-lives-of-workers.html
Also see:
