David Montgomery (historian) - Biography

Biography

Following a stint in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, from which he was honorably discharged as a Staff Sergeant, Montgomery entered undergraduate school at Swarthmore College. He graduated in 1950 with Highest Honors and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science.

Over the next 10 years, Montgomery worked as a machinist—first in New York City and later in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It was as a machinist that Montgomery became involved in union activity as an active member of the United Electrical Workers, the International Association of Machinists, and the Teamsters. He held numerous positions, including shop steward, legislative committee member, and local executive board member. It was also at this time, in 1951 or 1952, that Montgomery became a member of the U.S. Communist Party. The party's positions on international issues, racial justice and social unionism led Montgomery to join. He was active with the party in New York City and briefly in St. Paul. He left the party around 1957. Montgomery's experience in the Communist Party clearly influenced his research interest in labor radicalism, among other issues, throughout his scholarly career. It was while Montgomery was a labor organizer among machinists in St. Paul, Minnesota that he may have been repeatedly targeted by the FBI.

In 1959, Montgomery entered graduate school at the University of Minnesota, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1962. The next year he was hired as an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, where he remained for the next 14 years. At the University of Pittsburgh, Montgomery wrote his first book, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872, which was published in 1967. On sabbatical from that institution, Montgomery spent two years working in England with historian E. P. Thompson to establish the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick. He subsequently held visiting teacher positions at Oxford University and a number of other universities in Brazil, Canada, and the Netherlands.

On his return to the United States, Montgomery returned to the University of Pittsburgh, becoming chair of the department. He was recruited by several other institutions, eventually accepting a position at Yale. Montgomery taught courses about the history of working people in the United States, Civil War and Reconstruction, and immigration. In 1988, his book The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925, was published to wide acclaim. Noam Chomsky, the renowned and controversial professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and political activist, called the book one of the definitive works on the American labor struggle. The book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist nominee.

Following the example of British historian E. P. Thompson, Montgomery encouraged a generation of labor historians to re-examine the core subject matter of labor history, thus defining the new labor history, which examines working-class culture, rather than simply their organizations. He was also influential through his editorship of the journal International Labor and Working-Class History.

In 2001, Montgomery published a book in collaboration with Professor Horace Huntley of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. The book, Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham, uses oral histories to interpret and explore the involvement of African American workers in various unions and the organized labor movement for civil rights.

During the 1990s, Montgomery wrote and spoke about academic freedom, calling for wider availability of information for research and in favor of a larger scope of academic freedom. He claimed that over the presidential administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, access to government documents had been sharply reduced and that this has resulted in less academic freedom. Additionally, Montgomery criticized the USA's Patriot Act and its provisions for surveillance of academics and librarians, arguing they impede academic freedom.

He also served as president of the Organization of American Historians from 1999 to 2000.

Montgomery died on December 2, 2011. He is survived by his wife, Martel, and two sons, New York attorney Claude Montgomery and economist Edward B. Montgomery. An obituary for Montgomery appeared Monday, December 5, 2011 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.