An Extraordinary Man, An Extraordinary Historian

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

Communism · Economic history · Economic Justice · Passion · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Vision · Wife · World War II · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society