posted: Dec 5, 2011 9:42 am

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David Montgomery, a onetime McCarthy-era blacklisted union organizer who became a prominent Yale historian, died Friday at the age of 84.

He never lost his radical commitment to social change, even as a tenured Yale professor whose books were (and continue to be) read at universities throughout the world.

And he regularly left his ivory tower office to march alongside people in New Haven, including when they marched to unionize workers at Yale.

A genial, humble man, he was nevertheless hard-core strict on one point: He would tell students the first day of class at Yale that anyone who mistakenly called the Wobblies the “International Workers of the World,” rather than the “Industrial Workers of the World,” would automatically fail the class.

He retired in 1997, leaving behind legions of students who could probably identify a leading but too-often forgotten force in American labor history.

Jon Wiener offers a vivid and fond tribute to Montgomery in this piece on the Nation’s website.