

When he died 10 years ago, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was probably the most powerful union leader in America.
At a time when the spreading Rust Belt was reducing once-mighty industrial unions to skeletons, the AFT's astonishing growth -- from 70,000 members in 1961 to nearly a million in 1997 -- bucked the trend.
The private sector is becoming a union-free zone, but 70 percent of America's public school teachers are covered by collective bargaining agreements.
Shanker did not single-handedly engineer the explosive growth of teachers unions. Union organizers everywhere saw the public sector as an inviting target, and teachers were ripe for the picking. Still, it is hard to deny that Shanker played a central role in the rise of teacher unionism. His strategic vision and tactical skill, wedded to a formidable intellect and no-holds-barred debating style, helped transform the tiny United Federation of Teachers, the bargaining agent for New York City's 50,000 public school teachers, into the biggest union local in America.
That the UFT had more members than the rest of the AFT put together made Shanker's rise to the presidency of the national union all but inevitable. After winning that prize in 1974, however, Shanker did not stand still. He led the AFT from strength to strength, and used its political clout to influence national debates about school reform and educational standards.
In the late 1960s, Shanker acquired a reputation as an overbearing bully whose strike-happy militancy needlessly disrupted the lives of millions of parents and children. He was also accused of deliberately playing up the issue of anti-Semitism during an ugly confrontation in New York's Ocean Hill-Brownsville area between teachers, most of whom were Jewish, and advocates of community control, most of whom were black.
If Shanker was sometimes needlessly pugnacious, however, he needed to be tough. Growing up in 1930s New York, he encountered raw anti-Semitism. In one horrifying incident, the 8-year-old Shanker was blindfolded by classmates and almost underwent a mock lynching for being a "Christ-killer" before being rescued by his sister. When he became a teacher in 1952, he entered a system in which the power of the principal and the low status of teachers fostered a kind of institutionalized bullying. Only through strikes could teachers break this system, and Shanker twice served jail time for defying anti-strike laws. No wonder he fought hard to defend teachers' employment rights when Black Power militants tried to oust white teachers in the name of community control. Understanding how tenure and seniority shielded Jewish teachers from anti-Semitism, he was both a passionate supporter of the civil rights movement -- he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala. -- and a tenacious opponent of race-based affirmative action.
Shanker was certainly tough, but was he a liberal? According to Richard D. Kahlenberg's sympathetic biography, Shanker rooted his politics in the liberalism of the New Deal, in which organized labor played a central role, and in the principled anticommunism of Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy. This class-based liberalism, when wedded to a resolute foreign policy that promoted democratic values abroad, enabled the Democratic Party to dominate national politics until the 1960s and, in so doing, to improve the lot of all American workers.
However, the reaction against the Vietnam War and the rise of identity politics weakened that tough liberalism and delivered a substantial portion of the white working class to the Republican Party. If the Democrats are to reconstitute their majority, Kahlenberg argues, they should go back to the policies and values espoused by Albert Shanker.
A reader looking for a nuanced explanation of the Democratic Party's decline will be disappointed. Castigating the "peaceniks," "limousine liberals" and "New Politics type candidates" whom Shanker loathed, Kahlenberg resorts to stereotypes that preclude serious analysis. And his overly dogged defense of virtually every position Shanker took sometimes challenges credulity. Kahlenberg's hostile treatment of the AFT'S rival, the National Education Association, is blatantly partisan, and his justification of Shanker's hawkish position on Vietnam ignores decades of historical scholarship. "Tough Liberal" is a spirited and readable biography, but it is not the last word on the remarkable Albert Shanker.
(washingtonpost.com)