Last summer, the University of Illinois Press published A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance, a collection of essays, some of them previously unpublished, by the late historian. Montgomery — a former UE member who addressed no less than four UE conventions — transformed the study of U.S. labor history in the 1960s and 70s. His work moved the focus of the discipline away from institutions and “great men” and to the way rank-and-file workers resisted dictatorial bosses and the insatiable demands of capital in their workplaces and communities.
Montgomery’s scholarship was informed by his background as a skilled machinist; in the early 1950s, he worked at a machine tool shop in New York City and was an active member of UE Local 475. Following a move to Minneapolis in 1956, he eventually found himself blacklisted and, in 1960, enrolled in graduate studies at the University of Minnesota (now home to UE Local 1105, the University of Minnesota Graduate Labor Union).
As the book’s editors, Shelton Stromquist and James R. Barrett, write, Montgomery brought with him into academia a “characteristic attention to the gritty details of work processes and the peculiarities of individual trades and industries” which allowed him to “[develop] a new perspective on work and labor activism.” Particularly in the essays in the book on “workers’ control” and strikes in the 19th century, Montgomery explored the complicated relationship between skill, militancy, and class consciousness. Through careful examinations of local union proceedings and strike statistics collected by the government, he discovered an ethic of “mutualism” among skilled workers which could, particularly in moments of intense struggle, expand to a broader solidarity with less-skilled workers. It is a more nuanced story than the common and simplistic one of craft unions relying solely on the scarcity of their members’ skill in order to forge a narrow and conservative form of trade unionism.
“A new shot of strength, energy and ideas from recent immigrants”
In his address to the 2009 UE convention in New Haven, Montgomery described the early history of unionism at Sargent Lock, where workers eventually organized UE Local 243 in 1938:
In Sargent both the machinists and the molders had signed up in national union contracts by 1902. But the other 90 percent of the employees had nothing. They were supported by the metal polishers though. The metal polishers had a little local of almost all Irishmen. Then they formed a new local and on the side, despite the fact that it was a craft union, would let anybody in. It quickly became the general union of the Italians. These new immigrants poured into this second local here at the Sargent Company. Soon the shop steward got fired. Then they all walked out on strike and took the company completely by surprise.
The Sargent story illustrates another theme in Montgomery’s work, how “Time and again in the history of this country the American workers’ movement has received a new shot of strength, energy and ideas from recent immigrants,” as he put it at the New Haven convention. Many of the essays in A David Montgomery Reader look at the experiences of recent immigrants in different historical eras, and how whether “native-born” workers included them in their unions often determined the success or failure of union struggles.
Though Montgomery was always insistent on the centrality of class in understanding workers’ lives, he was attentive to the ways that workers’ experiences were also shaped by not only immigration, but race, gender, and imperialism. Especially in “Wage Labor, Bondage, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America” (1995), “Racism, Immigrants, and Political Reform” (2001), and the essays in “Part VI: The Move to Global and Comparative Study,” Montgomery looks at the ways that the social order created by capital divided workers on the basis of race, gender, and nationality.
Culture War in the Working Class, 1840s-Style
One of the most compelling essays in the book, and one frighteningly relevant to our own time, is “The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in the Kensington Riots of 1844” (1972). Using census records and contemporary newspaper accounts, Montgomery explores a particularly violent illustration of the “paradox” that “American workers in the nineteenth century engaged in economic conflicts with their employers as fierce as any known to the industrial world, yet in their political behavior they consistently failed to exhibit a class-consciousness.”
The working class in Philadelphia had successfully waged a general strike in 1835 that won both the ten-hour day and wage increases. Both skilled artisans and immigrant weavers were united in a General Trades’ Union of the City and County of Philadelphia, which boasted a treasury sufficient to provide significant aid to any particular group of workers in strike action they might take against their employers.
Yet over the following decade the artisans, who were mostly of Anglo-Saxon descent and Protestant, and the weavers, who were mostly (though not exclusively) Irish immigrants and Catholic, became caught up in a political controversy over whether the Protestant or Catholic Bible would be taught in local schools. (The Supreme Court did not interpret the “establishment clause” of the First Amendment to prohibit religious teachings in public schools until the Twentieth Century.)
In terms that would seem eerily familiar if one simply substituted “cultural Marxism” for “assaults of Romanism” (as Protestants often referred to Catholicism at the time) or “MAGA” for “Puritan fanaticism,” or vice-versa, the city quickly divided along religious lines. Protestant and Catholic workers allied with bosses from their respective communities and lined up behind politicians who found the polarization an appealing path to electoral success.
In 1844, less than ten years after the successful general strike, tensions erupted into violence. A Protestant mob, including many artisans, laid waste to the Kensington neighborhood where the weavers were concentrated, resulting in over 20 deaths and massive destruction of property — and, ultimately, cuts to weavers’ wages as they were never able to restore the working-class unity that had won them higher wages in the preceding decades.
A Workers’ Historian
Although the field in which David Montgomery worked is known as “labor history,” the kind of history that he did was ultimately a history of rank-and-file workers. His focus on rank-and-file workers, and his experience as one, led him to investigate the ways that workers challenged their bosses every day in the workplace, to demonstrate that shopfloor struggles are as important to labor history as contract negotiations.
While he was keenly aware of the way that capitalism shaped the options available to workers, he always emphasized the agency that they exercised in the face of adversity. In “Working People's Responses to Past Depressions” — published posthumously in 2014, and presumably written in the wake of the “Great Recession” of 2008-09 — he surveys the various ways that working people sought to survive economic downturns from the 1840s through the 1930s, including mutual aid, demanding relief from the government, and fighting for seniority provisions in their union contracts.
And he sought to make that history available to working people and unions, speaking not only to UE conventions but to unions and workers throughout the country. Several of the essays in A David Montgomery Reader were written as speeches to labor conferences or for pamphlets, publications and books aimed at a general, working-class readership. This collection of his writing is a great introduction to an historian and working-class activist who believed, as he told the 2009 UE convention, that “a union is only as strong as the activity of its rank-and-file members.”
