David Montgomery was both an extraordinary man and an extraordinary historian. All one needs to do is look at his autobiographical interview, which appeared in Visions of History in 1983, to know this. I had the good fortune of studying and then collaborating with David from 1979 at the University of Pittsburgh until the late 1990s at Yale University. While he had been recruited to Yale in the wake of the academic and political success of his Workers' Control in America, in my view his most beautiful book remains his first, Beyond Equality. Told with passion, intelligence, and an impressive richness of detail, it is the remarkable story of American labor and the Left immediately after the Civil War. At that time, the Republican Party, led by a friend of Marx, pursued arguably the most progressive policies of any Western government in history, embodying that world of free labor and social and racial equality, which had emerged victorious from the war against slavery. David discovered and reconstructed this world, with its special blend of liberty and justice, after having spent ten years as a skilled worker and communist trade unionist in the factories of the 1950s. During that period, he shared his political commitment with his radiant wife, Marty, who was from a large African American communist family in Chicago. In fact, the two met on a ship that was carrying both of them to the World Youth Congress in Prague.
David's commitment to liberty and justice led him to break with Stalinism and to follow a path similar to that of E.P. Thompson. The two men collaborated in the 1960s, a time that gave birth to a politically committed social history that challenged the methods and assumptions that had long dominated international historiography.
David's seminars at Pittsburgh and Yale always displayed a brilliance and an enormous sensitivity to the realities of workers' lives. Indeed, they revived the field of labor history and helped to form dozens of young historians. The hundreds of research projects that these seminars inspired shaped his last great work, The Fall of the House of Labor, which brought new acclaim to David, who was then elected president of the Organization of American Historians.
It has been one of the great good fortunes of my life to have been close to David. The memory of dinners and intense discussions at his home, in which Marty was a passionate participant after having sated us with her wonderful soul food, and his inspirational teaching on the need to try always to see the reality of people's worlds, keep him alive in my memory and my thoughts.
