Abstract
This is a significant collection of edited essays, both published and unpublished, written by David Montgomery, one of leaders of the New Labour History in the US that included for example Herbert Guttman, David Brody and Melvyn Dubofsky. The new labour historians focused on the political and cultural expression of class and re-emphasised the importance of the workplace in terms of work culture and as an engine of class consciousness. They also revisited labour and political history, particularly the work of John R. Commons and the Wisconsin School of Industrial Relations, to examine the interaction of workers with the law, politics and industrial relations processes. They brought new perspectives such as theories about the state and political culture (Faue, 2010: 169–175).
The editors, Shelton Stromquist and James Barrett, leading US labour historians, begin the collection with a short biographical sketch of Montgomery that provides many insights into his life including a brief stint at a radio station at Los Alamos during the Second World War, which prompted personal concerns about the development of atomic energy. He worked as a machinist and was blacklisted for his political and industrial activism. He was briefly a member of the Communist Party attracted by its stand on issues such as peaceful co-existence and racial equality. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota in 1962 and gained his first teaching position at the University of Pittsburgh the following year. He was a visiting professor at the University of Warwick in the UK from 1967 to 1969 where he came under the influence of the E.P. Thompson, the major social historian. Montgomery's meetings with shop stewards at the auto plants in Coventry, led the Rootes Motor Company to try unsuccessfully have him deported as an ‘undesirable person’ under the Subversive Aliens Act. His experiences in the UK fuelled an interest in workers control and global and comparative history. His labour activism continued with his move to Yale University. He retired in 1997 and continued to speak at labour and academic meetings until his death in December 2011.
There is also an introduction to the collection which is a review of Montgomery's contribution to American labour history. He was a major architect of the New Labour History pushing American historiography generally to incorporate ‘history from below’. His first book, Beyond Equality, challenged the history of Reconstruction following the US Civil War highlighting the significance of class in American history while not diminishing the struggles of radicals to protect the civic and political rights of the new emancipated slaves or the claims of African Americans for economic and land rights. He also focussed on workers control in the US and placed skilled workers in a broader working class that included the unskilled, women and African Americans and highlighted their struggle against the sustained reorganisation of work by scientific managers. He also extended the study of workers into their communities, neighbourhoods and families. One interesting dimension of Montgomery's thought highlighted by the editors is that the struggle for workers control is never over, even though his book, The Fall of the House of Labor (1987), ends with the defeat of US unions in the strikes that followed the end of the First World War. Workers continue to resist challenges to their workplace control and that resistance may take new forms as the challenges change. The memory of collective action persists and informs each new generation of workers. In his book, The Citizen Worker, written against the background of the rise of Neoliberalism and Libertarianism during the early 1990s, Montgomery explored the tensions between democracy and a ‘market economy’ in 19th century America, when it impacted on a variety of aspects of American life including criminal law, race relations and political ideology.
The editors in the introduction emphasise four major themes that emerge from the essays: ‘Working Class Formation; The Social Relations of Production; The Diversity of Working Class Experience; and The Pervasiveness Of Class’ (p. 6). Influenced by UK historians such as Thompson, Montgomery was interested in working class formation in the early phases of industrialisation before the US Civil War. His work highlighted the fluid nature of the social relations of production as capitalism developed and there was a breakdown of the boundaries between urban and rural America. His work on the social relations of production ‘brought to the study of work extraordinary insight into the culture and power of skilled workers’ (p. 7). He moved labour history away from the conservative focus of the Wisconsin School on skilled workers defending their jobs to the more dynamic concept of workers control ‘based on their power to set and enforce rules’ (p. 7). The diversity of working class experience includes skill, race, ethnicity and gender. His early work treats gender as an element of class identity, and he was influenced by feminist scholars. Finally, he saw the issue of class as expanding beyond the workplace extending for instance into consumption, family life and neighbourhoods.
As the editors note, Montgomery's influence spread far beyond his writings. He supervised over 50 doctoral students including many who went on to publish significant studies. He was the founding editor of the University of Illinois Press's Working Class in American History, which includes over 160 titles, of which this book is one. He edited for many years International Labor and Working Class History and personally encouraged scholars both in the US and overseas, including the author of this review, to purse comparative labour history.
This comprehensive collection includes 20 essays and an extensive bibliography. The essays include one essay written under a Nom de plume and four previously unpublished works, which the editors note are more ‘provocative’ as they ‘convey bolder formulations than he allowed himself in published work’ (p. 6). The essays are divided into seven parts with a brief introduction in each section by the editors. The parts are not built around the four major themes highlighted in the introduction, but they inform them.
The first part titled ‘Writing a Peoples History’ consists of one article on the victory of Eugene Debs and the emerging American Railway Union in the 1894 Great Northern Railway strike in Minnesota. It was written under a Nom de Plum as Montgomery faced the risk of blacklisting due to his labour activism and former membership of the Communist Party. As the editors note, it was not ordained that Montgomery would enter academia at the time he wrote this paper as he liked the ‘camaraderie’ of factory work. It was only after being blacklisted that he began the academic career path.
Second part of the collection focuses on ‘Working Class Formation’. Here the editors note the strong influence of Thompson, but also James Hinton's research on workers control, on Montgomery's themes and approaches during his time at Warwick (p. 6). There is a strong focus on local life and politics and a broad approach that covers the experiences of workers of differing genders, races and ethnicity. The unpublished paper in this section highlights the growing gap in the 1840s between middle class ideology of the ‘self-made man’ and the growing poverty of working class people in the US. He uses the approach of the new social history to explain the cultural conflict of Irish Catholic handloom weavers in the Philadelphia neighbourhood of Kensington. Despite class solidarity in the mid-1830s, this collapsed in the depression years that followed with conflict between the native born and immigrants and Catholics and Protestants. Protestant evangelism weakened working class unity and created an illusion for historians of an absence of class conflict. In the final essay, writing against the background of Neoliberalism in the 1990s, Montgomery explores the paradox in the 19th century of male white workers, particularly in the North Eastern US and at a local level, having growing electoral power but facing enhanced coercive power over their lives. Similar issues occurred in the South for the fundamental political and economic rights of African American workers. While the claims of former slaves in the South were forcibly repressed, in the North the courts and the legal profession played a significant role in restricting the individual and collective rights of workers through the doctrine of ‘freedom of contract’ and the weakening of favourable legislation obtained by the emerging labour movement. For the unemployed, there was increased supervision by the police and private philanthropic organisations through vagrancy law and the privatisation of poor relief. While the state gave greater voice to US workers concerns during the 20th century, through progressivism and the New Deal, Montgomery notes that ‘by the 1990's, however, twentieth century claims of citizenship were as much as in dispute as those to which workers had been devoted a hundred years earlier’ (p. 107).
The third part of the collection focuses on Montgomery's studies of migration and class struggle. His examination of strikes in the 19th century US reviews international studies of the development of the strike and draws upon available empirical data. He concludes that attempts to develop a positivist natural history of strikes are doomed to failure. The explanations he reviewed were only useful for understanding specific periods of strikes in the US rather than whole period under examination. While UK historian Eric Hobsbawm's argument, for example, that a surge in strike activity can be explained by an abrupt extension of strike and union activity into previously unorganised workers as in 1886, it does not explain the industrial unrest of 1894, which Montgomery argues was a ‘direct outgrowth of decades of experience among some of the country's most frequently organised workers’ (p. 134). His essay on ‘Labor and the Republic in Industrial America, 1860–1920’, charts how workers challenged the dominant bourgeois ethic of ‘acquisitive individualism’ through moral repudiation that emphasised the ‘universal brotherhood of labor’ (pp. 142–143). This challenge was embodied through labour organisations such as the Knights of Labor, with its emphasis on chivalry, regalia and parades. The Knights did not see the redemption of capitalism arising from the State but through self-help such as co-operative enterprises. The moral challenge to individualistic capitalism eventually broke down. This arose from the rise of monopoly capitalism, the changing nature of the working class and new tactics against working class militancy such as the use of the courts and state militias. Despite this, worker militancy continued. The US working class, however, was divided by 1920 between trade union leaders, the dominant group committed to reforming US capitalism through trade union methods, and radicals such as the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). The final paper in this section highlights the intersection of Montgomery's political activism and his historical scholarship. It was based on his 2000 Presidential address to the Organisation of American Historians Conference at a church near the conference hotel in St Louis, which was boycotted for racial discrimination and unfair labour practices. He links the emergence of working class politics in the US with both political agitation of immigrants and the struggles by African Americans for freedom after the US Civil War. He notes the reshaping of the US identity during the New Deal to being a nation of immigrants, challenging the traditional Anglo-Saxon narrative.
The fourth part of collection relates to the historical analysis of workers’ control. As the editors note ‘Montgomery is perhaps best remembered for his studies of workplace and the cultures that developed there’ (p. 183). While managers emphasised rational production methods and capitalist efficiency, most notably through scientific management, workers had a mutualist culture based on ‘craft pride and solidarity’ (p. 183). The first paper in this section is unpublished and was presented at a workshop at University of Rochester in 1972. This paper was influenced by his own experience on the shopfloor and interaction with British shop stewards while at Warwick it highlights that long before the rise of the IWW craft workers controlled their workplaces and sought workers’ control. Workers ultimately saw trade unions as the basis for the replacement of capitalism with producers’ or worker co-operatives. They called for state finance to set the co-operatives up. The subdivision of labour and the rise of large-scale multi-plant corporations undermined craft unionism, which become more bureaucratic, conservative and contemptuous of the unskilled. The idea of workers control persisted within the Socialist Labor Party with Laurence Gronlund's The Co-operative Commonwealth being widely read with its vision of trade unions as the basic unit of administration of the Co-operative Commonwealth and its challenge to the ‘virtue of greed’ that underpinned capitalism (p. 199). In the second paper, ‘The Worker Control of Machine Production’, he shows how US ironworkers and other craft workers maintained control over work by appealing to the gendered ideal of ‘manliness’ and maintaining an ethical code in the workplace. Their mutualist ethos underpinned labour's strength in the struggle for control of the workplace in the late 19th century and workers strategically used industrial unionism and sympathetic industrial action to increase that strength. Montgomery again highlights the significance of scientific management in challenging workers’ control. In the final paper, ‘The “New Unionism” and the Transformation of the Workers’ Consciousness in America’, which focuses on a period of industrial unrest from 1909 to 1922, Montgomery examines the merging of craft workers’ demands to maintain and control their work with the wage demands of the less skilled. He uses the term ‘New Unionism’, used by UK and Australian labour historians to cover the extension of unionism to previously unorganised workers in the late 19th century (Patmore, 1991: 67–8), to describe the extension of the struggle for workers control to involve unprecedented numbers of less skilled workers including new immigrants, women and African Americans. The demands for workers control included calls for the nationalisation of US railways. However, as workers changed the nature of their struggles and demands, reflecting management's changes in the nature of the production, employers responded with the American Plan to diffuse demands for worker control with their own worker participation plans and welfare capitalism.
The fifth part of the collection includes essays that primarily focus on the 1920s and 1930s. This is after the period covered by his most ambitious book The Fall of the House of Labor (1987), which ends with a ‘portrait of a working class under duress’ (p. 243) after strike defeats following the First World War. The first essay explores the experience of US workers during the 1920s. Workers faced an entrenched employer view of managerial prerogative and according to Montgomery US management enjoyed an international reputation for organising efficient production drawing upon scientific management and industrial psychology. There was also an expansion of Employee Representation Plans to limit both government and trade union influence over the workplace (Patmore, 2016: 60–68, 89–109). There were declines in strike activity and employment in the highly unionised coal mining sector. Despite these setbacks, Montgomery argues that by the 1920s labour traditions of collective action did not disappear. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), the peak national organisation, was not eliminated from US economic life. The Left could still mount massive protests such as over the Sacco and Vanzetti case and the union leadership, drawing from the lessons of its defeats in the early 1920s, were able to expand dramatically the US labour movement during the 1930s against the background of the labour reforms of the New Deal. The next essay focuses on the relationship between labour and the political leadership during the New Deal of the 1930s noting the emergence of the CIO, the industrially organised peak national rival of the AFL. Again Montgomery highlights the significance of the experiences of labour in the previous decades in shaping national industrial relations policies such as the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. By contrast, workers had little impact upon the formulation or administration of social insurance or work relief measures. Labour preferred social security to be funded from general state revenue rather than contributed to by employees and employers. By the end of World War 2 there had been a significant shift in union leadership with the CIO organisers being younger and better educated than their AFL counterparts and being matured in the ‘statist orbit’ of the New Deal (p. 288). The final essay, published after Montgomery's death, breaks the temporal focus of the previous chapters, by providing a long-term history of depressions in the US from the 1840s to the 1930s. He covers social impact of unemployment on workers of varying backgrounds and the response by the state at varying levels of government. One significant feature of US labour relations that Montgomery notes was that seniority in retrenchments and promotions ‘was elevated from an occasional union or company practice to a basic tenet of working class morality’ (p. 304) during and after the 1930s.
The sixth part of the collection explores Montgomery's interest in global and comparative study. In the first essay Montgomery examines working class mobilisation in England, the USA and South Africa, though it primarily focuses on the US, to explore issues of race, class and imperialism. He takes an integrated multi-level approach that focuses on the local, national and international and notes how international events such as Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1936 can impact on local politics such as relationship between the African American and Italian communities, with the former sympathising with Ethiopia and later with Italy. This essay contains a brief reference to the Australian experience when he argues that in ‘Labouristic Australia’, ‘settler consciousness’ underpinned the ‘wages of whiteness’ and the willingness of British workers to support the Imperial cause (p. 313). Montgomery in the second essay explores the internationalist orientation of the AFL, shifting from being a critic of American colonial expansion, particularly with the Spanish American War of 1898 acquisitions of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, to becoming a loyal supporter of US interventions for instance in Mexico and the First World War. The AFL also become interventionist, for example shaping the Canadian labour movement at the Berlin Congress of the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada in 1902 by expelling the Knights of Labour and all Canadian unions that may have jurisdictional overlaps with AFL affiliates operating in Canada.
The final part of the book highlights Montgomery's role as a critical voice on the contemporary US politics of his time. First essay, ‘What's Happening to the American Worker’, was part of a pamphlet published in 1970 by a group of radical scholars and activists associated with the New Left publication Radical America. Against the background of the radical politics of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, with the protest movement against the Vietnam War for example, the article was written to more enlighten ‘intellectuals about workers’ than ‘suggest how intellectuals might enlighten workers’ (p. 381). He challenges the ideas that the industrial worker has disappeared, and the US unions have little left to do beyond periodic wage adjustments. He notes that the growth of unions and the rise of scientific management, which reinforced management prerogative and attempted to remove to worker's control of the production process, brought about significant changes in the workplace. Workers’ willingness to vote against Richard Nixon, who favoured increasing unemployment as to reduce inflation and reducing the power of unions, in the 1968 Presidential elections, suggested that the ‘American workers' sense of their own identity and their own interests as a class remain a potent force in American life’ (p. 391). In the workplace, where the sense of class was strongest, workers challenged the then crisis in US society through direct action in the form of wildcat strikes. The second essay is a forward to a book published in 1988 on a successful 1982 strike by Yale clerical and technical workers. Montgomery actively supported the strikers and saw the strike as positive example of worker action to improve their conditions in a context of decline for the US labour movement and the anti-unionism of the Regan Presidency. The third essay in this section is an unpublished address given in 1990. Despite the continued decline of the US labour movement, he continued to remain optimistic referring to new labour strategies such as labour-community coalitions, reimposing national and international social standards, such as in occupational health and safety, on labour relations, and finally a great willingness to challenge the ideas of managerial prerogative with employees for example being part-owners of businesses. The final essay, also unpublished and written possibly in 2000, is Montgomery's ‘clearest discussion of labour historiography’ (p. 379) in collection. He notes a decline in US labour historiography since the 1970s and the challenges of post-modernism. As with labour movement, Montgomery remains optimistic about future of labour historiography, noting that it has strengthened its analysis by incorporating features of Postmodernism. Labour historians were also able to hold their own against the challenge of Postmodernism through the influence of historians such as Thompson and Guttman who emphasised culture through examining working class speech and gestures both in the neighbourhood and the workplace.
Overall, the editors have brought together an impressive collection of Montgomery's essays and provided important insights into his life and contribution to US historical scholarship. His essays provide important insights into labour history at points of time but also highlight themes of relevance for today. He reminds us particularly that the workplace remains a contested terrain, and workers develop new strategies to deal with changing circumstances. Memory of previous collective action in terms of success and failure can inform worker resistance to change decades later. Technological change has for example allowed for work to invade employees’ private lives disrupting their family and community relationships. Australian workers through political action have led the Albanese Federal Labor Government to recognise the right to disconnect by passing legislation in 2024 restricting employer access to workers outside work hours.
