All Our Yesterdays

Hello everyone, below please find and interview with Prof Chad Montrie, whose work I encountered via the excellent Network in Canadian History and the Environment. If you know someone, or are someone, who should be interviewed for All Our Yesterdays, let me know…  

So first question, who are you? Where did you grow up, and when did you first hear about climate and how and do you remember what you thought? 

My name is Chad Montre, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, which is about 30 miles north of Boston. Many people know it, at least in the US, or in New England, because it was where fully integrated cotton textile and wool and production began, and kind of, in that way, marks it out as the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. 

There is also, as a result, a national historic park there. And so I came to the University with the idea I would continue working in labour and environmental history as well as be engaged with the public history folks in town. And their interpretation is very much in line with the kind of work that I do. So it’s been quite a good couple of decades being in Lowell. 

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and went to University of Louisville, and went to grad school at Ohio State University, in Columbus.  

I was really not sure what I was going to do when I went to college, what I would decide to declare to be my major. and what I was going to do at the end when I graduated but I was fortunate to run into several people on faculty who had been involved in social movement activism of the 1960s and 70s, in black civil rights, anti war, women’s liberation and to some extent, some of the environmental activism. And they then also went to grad school and ended up becoming academics and basically modeled for me how to do activist informed scholarship. I liked being in college and university. I liked the chance to read books and to talk about ideas, and this seemed like a way I could almost stay in school for the rest of my life, which is kind of what happened and have it as a job. Yet also to make a difference, that I could do something with academic work that would connect to engaging with social problems in the time. 

I can’t remember when I first heard about climate or climate change. It must have been when I was a teenager, I was already doing activism by the time I was 13 or 14 years old. There was still a lively anti apartheid struggle happening and that was kind of my entry point to activism. But somewhere along the way, I must have encountered this concept of climate and how climate was being affected by fossil fuel emissions. And so since I don’t remember when exactly that happened I’m not really sure what I thought about it. 

I was never exclusively an environmentalist. I was very much involved in labour activism, and, like I said, the anti apartheid movement and things of that kind. And so if I did think about the environment, I often thought about it already, in terms of the layering of social inequality and other dimensions that continue to be part of how I think about it in the present time. 

That’s excellent. Was this the mid 80s then sort of, “I’m not going to play Sun City” and all of the divestment from South Africa campaigns. Or just a little bit later?

I think it’s a little bit later. I don’t remember the year here, but I remember the protests that I attended was, they were tied to the boycott Shell campaign. And I went downtown to a Shell gas station where people marching were around.  I mean, I’d already been involved in some other stuff by that point, but that was kind of one of the the, I think, the most important kind of events, as far as for me personally, because I also met at that protest, a person who was part of the Socialist Workers Party, which is a part of the Fourth International, and a Trotskyist organization. And I got involved in SWP, and that put me fairly far to the left of many of my peers, or even the social activists in the city. Most of them were good Democrats, or, you know, there was an active DSA, Democratic Socialist of America chapter too. But I would be kind of on my way away from that to something much more militant. 

So this was in Louisville. 

In Louisville, yeah, and that was when also the Eastern Airlines United Mine Workers, and I think another group of workers went on strike. And so I went to a big labour march in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the organizer. And I guess that was probably my first big labour march. 

And then I went to college, and basically what I was trying to do, because I was part of the Young Socialist Alliance, which is the youth branch of the SWP, I was organizing through  YSA.  And we were still, we were still dealing with the wars in Central America, and I remember that was a big, big part of what we were focused on, including in Nicaragua, defending the revolution there.

But so like I said, I was never really exclusively environmentalist, but  my mentor in college, John Cumbler, he had helped found Students for Democratic Society at the University of Wisconsin, and he was involved in SNCC organizing, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi. So he’s almost like a classic 60s activist. 

So he was there during the Freedom Summer of 64? 

I think he didn’t go down until 65 , but he then went to graduate school and worked with Sam Bass Warner and he became a labour historian. By the time I met him, he was teaching a lAmerican labour history course, which I got into immediately. I wasn’t supposed to be enrolled because you had to, you had to be a junior. But I snuck in, and he let me stay. 

But then he also started teaching an environmental history class. So these were pitched as separate things, and even he really didn’t, he really didn’t blend them. But it occurred to me, at least by the time I was coming to the end of college, that it would be interesting to try to create a hybrid, to think about how you could bring the two together, bring insights from the one to the other. And so then that’s what I was doing when I went off to graduate school –  is trying to think about how to do a labour and environmental history together.. 

Okay, I have to ask, how did that turn out? 

It turned out pretty well, although kind of accidentally. Because I went to graduate school, and I got to the point where I did my masters, and I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to continue on the academic path. It was the time when post structuralism conversations or post modernism was still in vogue, and I just wasn’t really getting a lot out of that.

It seemed like a lot of my peers, they really, really invested in it, but so that summer, after I finished my master’s in 1997 I decided to do a labour organizing internship. And I went to work for the United Food and Commercial Workers down in Appalachia in eastern Kentucky. 

And we were organizing grocery store workers who were going on strike. And we went to this place called Appalshop, which is a multimedia community center that had been started by 1960s era radicals who just had stuck around when they were down there doing anti poverty organizing. And so we were using their radio station to get the word out about the campaign. And we were done doing that. We were just sitting around the studio, and I said, you know, “I have go back to graduate school, and I need a topic to do a dissertation, and I want something that’s labour and environmental history.” And immediately they said, “Well, why don’t you write about the movement to ban strip mining in Appalachia?” And I’d never heard about this growing up in Louisville, which is somewhat far away from from Whitesburg, which is where Appalshop is. I’d never been to Appalachia before. You know, it was probably as foreign to me as almost anybody. 

But that turned out to be a great topic to do for labour and environmental history, because, as it turned out, the United Mine Workers was aligned with the environmental activists, because people in the region saw surface coal mining as both an environmental issue and a social issue and and soI was ale to write the dissertation to be my first book To Save the land and People, which came out in 2003, so now more than 20 years old. 

But I think that was a really good start, with a very specific case. And I, what I tried to do is accumulate more of an understanding over the course of the next decade and a half, different kinds of labor environmentalism. And I think my career took a nice narrative arc from something very specific to a more general accounting, which is the book that I published in 2018, The Myth of Silent Spring.

So I know you weren’t trying to “diss” Rachel Carson, but rather contextualize her contribution. In a nutshell, can you send the book received, and are you still happy with it? 

Sure. I still like it as a book. The title actually was something that manuscript readers recommended to me. It actually refers not to the science of Silent Spring, which Rachel Carson published in 1962 to expose the impact of pesticides. It’s still pretty sound as an expose on pesticides, and she did have an impact, I think, in terms of raising environmental awareness, not only about pesticides, but about all different environmental problems. She died in 1964 from cancer. So she didn’t live with her own book very long. And, you know, it’s one of those interesting counterfactual questions to wonder about, what would have happened had she lived into the 1960s and 70s. 

But what I think is “the myth”, is this idea that Carson and her book started the environmental movement. And you hear that, or used to hear it everywhere. I haven’t actually heard it in a while, but when I started writing the book, I was hearing it constantly. And you hear it in different ways. There were newspaper stories, magazine articles, documentary films, children’s books and academics too were using this, this idea that the book started the environmental movement. And when you operate with that as the origin story, then you get a lot of other things wrong, including leaving out a lot of people, a lot of historical actors. 

What I found, in fact, because I knew this was the case – it wasn’t like I suddenly understood things, but that I knew that workers were already doing something like having an environmental consciousness in the 19th century. Because they were reacting to industrialization. They were reacting to the very historical transformation that was most devastating to the air and the water and the landscape. And they continued to do that into the 20th century, and sometimes by the 20th century labour unions were also involved in being the advocates, being the key organizations, the pioneers of a labour-led environmentalism, and obviously they were coming to it with a working class consciousness. And the unions that  were involved are counter-intuitive to some people, but not so much to me, because I see they’re the ones who are the most connected to the industries that caused the most serious environmental problems. Like the United Mineworkers, which people wouldn’t think of as a very environmentally-minded union. The United Auto Workers was key. The Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, the United Steel Workers were all very important to starting in environmentalism.

And they’re doing that in the 1930s 1940s so a decade or two before Silent Spring

And then later, even after Silent Spring, a lot of people weren’t necessarily being motivated, or they may not even be aware of the book Silent Spring. So the environmentalism that they did wasn’t tapping into that. I think the book probably resonated more strongly with white, middle class people in the suburbs who cared about things more particular to them.

Yeah, you’ve made me think about sort of similar patterns in Australia, and we had a sort of an upsurge of concern in the late 60s. And I don’t know if you visited Australia, but Sydney and Melbourne still have some of the old architecture, simply because the unions instituted what were called “green bans” where they refused to work on construction sites that were them to be particularly environmentally or socially harmful, and this, of course, caused outrage among political and economic elites who were not used to having to negotiate. What reception did the book get? And were you happy with that?

Predictably mixed. When I would do book talks, sometimes I think the audience might have read it, but, like, you know, sometimes people would ask me “why I hate Rachel Carson so much?”, and just completely miss the point that I’m trying to make. They just can’t relinquish the idea that Silent Spring started the environmental movement and they just can’t really pay attention to the rest, to the complexity of the story I’m trying to tell. Because I think it also would require them to rethink a bunch of other bits of their political social consciousness. 

But on the other hand, environmental historians were pretty receptive, and I have done interviews like this with many people involved in activism of all kinds who see this as one of the tools that they need to understand the past, to better understand the present and to bring class into the conversation, as well as race, about environmentalism. And so that’s been, that’s been good. 

And, I mean, I was kind of surprised. I feel like, in a way, it’s, you know, it’s now six years old. People are still talking about, I think it kind of gets attention in waves. It sort of seems to be living. Like books do this. I don’t know if other people have had this experience, but when I publish a book it kind of then has a life of its own, it goes out and makes it way in the world. And this one is certainly doing that. 

So I mean, there was, for instance, a book by Douglas Brinkley recently, in which he again profiled white middle class liberals and talked about how they were, you know crucial to environmentalism, including Rachel Carson.  And there was a review in the New Republic which mentioned The Myth of Silent Spring, noting there’s other work that’s been done and that he didn’t reckon with any of that, and certainly didn’t talk about labour or class, really. So it’s there as a piece in a debate. And that’s, and that’s good, 

Excellent. Which brings us to your current work, which is sort of stumbled across, you, think, via the Niche Canadian website. Can you explain the impetus for that work and the goal of it? 

So, in 2018 I thought that was my last bit of scholarship on labuor and environmental history, because I’ve been doing it, you know, I’d started my dissertation in 1997 so I’d been doing it for almost 20 years, and I was ready to shift gears.  And Black Lives Matter was really intensifying in the US then, so I wanted to do something with race, and I actually started writing another book that became my more recent book (Whiteness in Plain View). 

But then in the summer of 2022 I got an invitation to apply for a Fulbright Canada Research Chair, and I thought I’d always wanted to do a Fulbright. So I thought this would be a good opportunity, since they seemed to have me in mind. And what I was planning to do was to try to create a book end, in a sense, to my To Save the Land and People book, when I went to Calgary the plan was I to look at the United Mine Workers papers there, at the Glenbow archive at the University of Calgary, the  UMW District 18 collection, It would be interesting to see, if you know, how mine workers reacted to surface mining in Alberta, in the province. When I got there, I started, you know, the first week I was there, landed, got settled, started looking at records. But there was no story. The United Mine Workers there really didn’t do what the UMW did in Appalachia.

As a Fulbright I was supposed to produce something of merit. And I knew from my other work that other unions were involved in labour environmentalism. So I looked at other records,including the Alberta Federation of Labor records, and went from there.  I realized that the key union doing environmentalism in Alberta was the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, and they actually were the leadership of the Alberta provincial labour organization too. And then they actually have an influence across the country, and they do cross border work as well, with some of the OCAW people in the United States. 

While I was in Calgary, I also had a chance to go to Ottawa and use some of the collections at the Library and Archives of Canada. And there I realized that there’s a story to tell about Ontario, and I then wrote two different articles, one about labour environmentalism in Alberta, which was published this summer, in the journal Labour/Le Travail. And then I published this other one on Ontario just recently, like a week or two ago in the Papers in Canadian History and Environment series of the Network in Canadian History and the Environment.  

And so this was, this is me sort of moving forward work that I’ve been doing in the United States to think about Canada, which I found to have a very similar narrative. But there’s more to do. There’s a lot of potential there. The environmental historians and the labour historians really hadn’t been giving this full attention. Environmental historians basically weren’t doing anything with with class or labour unions, and when the labour historians were looking at any environmental theme mostly they were exclusively focused on occupational health and safety and not really thinking about how workers and unions were connecting to community environmental problems. 

And I suppose, I mean, that’s the interesting question here is, under what circumstances do labour unions, which are always facing challenges from the you know, the owners of the factory, or the sector. Under what circumstances are they able to look beyond that and take on board what some might consider to be sort of almost “abstract questions”. Does it require visionary leaders? Does it require really obvious environmental problems? Does it require church organizations that are pushing the unions to be a bit more, for want of a better phrase, ‘radical.’ All of the above or something else? I mean, what patterns have you spotted?

 That’s a great question. It’s the main thing that I’ve been trying to address in all of this work, which is this claim that corporations introduce to the conversation that workers have to choose between jobs or the environment. They pitch it that way, you can’t have both. Implicit in that is that workers never did choose both jobs and environment, and people just kind of went with that story. When I looked into it more deeply, finding in the United States and what I found in Canada, workers have often been involved in pioneering environmentalism because they’re the closest to the environmental problems. It’s not an abstract question in the sense that it can be life or death for them. And not just in terms of occupational health and safety, but they live in the communities where they work. And so, for instance, United Mine Worker membership, they were concerned about how surface mining was taking away their jobs, because it’s a more efficient form of getting coal out of the ground. But they’re also struggling with the polluted waterways, landslides and other things. 

I do think visionary leaders are important, somebody like Walter Reuther, in the UAW, who was a conservationist, and he made the UAW probably the leading environmental union in the United States, until he died in 1970. And he died actually a few weeks after the first Earth Day and a few weeks after the Constitutional Convention of the UAW in which they proclaimed that they wanted an environmental bill of rights. And he was flying to a new Education Center called The Black Lake Education Center, which is out in the middle of the woods, and all of that, speaks to his environmental awareness.

Another big difference that I saw with Canada and the United States is that Canadian labour unions are much more engaged with First Nations groups, more so than American labour unions were engaged with indigenous peoples organizations. So, you know, in the United States, the main organization that was radical, was the American Indian Movement. And I don’t, I don’t have any evidence that labour unions were engaged with them. Whereas in Canada, they’re much more responsive to the First Nations groups. And they talk back to the labor unions too. They want to be allies with them around development projects, to address the environmental as well as social problems that those development projects cause. 

Yeah, that everything you said is really interesting and makes me think about what has and has not happened in Australia around Aboriginal land rights, unions, environment, certainly the sort of the uneasy alliances, lots of tensions need managing.  So what does responsible scholarship mean to you? What does it? What does it look like? 

Well, I attended public universities for Undergraduate and Graduate School. I teach at a public university, and I do that intentionally, because I think, you know, it’s a way to connect with working class students. And I was in a place that was open to somebody like myself when I was in college, because of where I was. And yet I also think that I was very aware of the many things that weren’t right about academia. There is some truth to this idea that academics are sort of in an ivory tower and disengaged from the world, or when they are engaged it is with insignificant things. I always wanted to not do that.

Is my work meaningful? Is it socially relevant? Does it make a contribution, and starting with the present, and then thinking about how to investigate, understand the present is one of the ways that that can happen.

The final question is, what next for you, academically – what would you like to study? 

Okay, so, like I said, after my Silent Spring book, I started working on another book that was a history of racial exclusion in Minnesota, and it coincided with Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd when I was working on the manuscript.  And as a result there are people doing anti racist work, racial reckoning in Minnesota that the book found an audience, and I decided to continue with that. I’m working on a new book that is not environmental or labour history. It’s a history of blackface minstrel shows in Minnesota, which I see part of a way to investigate the culture of racism in the state over the course of at least a century. My partner and I joke about I now have topic one and topic two. So I’m not sure what will happen with the labour and environmental stuff, but the book is getting a lot of space.