By William Scheuerman

Tough Liberal:  Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Race, and Democracy,
by Richard Kahlenberg
Columbia University Press, 2007

I confess that I picked up Richard Kahlenberg’s new biography of Al Shanker with some dread. The book is almost 500 pages and I was expecting it to be either very long-winded or very opaque, or both. But I was wrong. Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Race, and Democracy was a pleasure to read, not merely because it is a beautifully written work about the man who was president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974-1997 and who served as a leading voice for the professionalization of teaching. More importantly, Kahlenberg’s analysis made sense out of the apparent contradictions between Al’s beliefs and his actions. Al was neither a "right-wing socialist" nor a "Neanderthal liberal," as his critics claimed. He was, in the author’s terms, a "tough liberal."

A tough liberal expects government to play an active role in enhancing and promoting social cohesion, social mobility and equality at home, and democracy abroad. Government isn’t the problem. It’s the solution. But Al’s tough liberalism was anything but utopian. He was a doer who implemented specific programs. 

So, what are the values underpinning "tough liberalism?" Al was a socialist and a supporter of American-style procedural democracy. But Al distinguished Soviet communism from his brand of socialism. Communism to Al was nothing more than Stalinist totalitarianism, an absolute evil that needed to be extinguished. Totalitarianism on the right and totalitarianism on the left, to Al, were part of the same evil.

Al’s commitment to socialism and democracy, combined with his need to "get things done," are the bedrock of his tough liberalism. It helps explain his choice of class politics over identity politics. Why should working people illuminate their differences when they can accomplish much more by working together and promoting their larger class-based needs? While this approach was not at all popular at the time, today his admonitions to the Democratic Party regarding its decision to replace working-class issues with identity politics seem to be pretty much on target. Working-class men abandoned the Democrats and are now a primary voting bloc in today’s Republican coalition. Al was certainly no class revolutionary, but he believed that working people could get their fair share if they had strong independent unions, good schools and sound democratic institutions. Identity politics, in Al’s view, weakened all three key institutions.

Kahlenberg’s analysis gets weaker when it comes to international affairs. Al broke with his socialist colleagues on the issue of the Vietnam War. He believed the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong would destroy Vietnam’s nascent labor movement, and that the establishment of a democratic regime was absolutely essential to the future of the country’s labor movement. But was the repressive Diem regime really that much better? What were the chances for the establishment of a democratic regime? Al usually was extraordinarily pragmatic. Why not in this case? More analysis was needed in this section of the book.

One underlying theme of this wonderful book is even more relevant today than it was during Al’s time. I’m talking about the critical conflict Al and all other good union leaders ultimately face: How can union leaders keep focused on their vision for a better and more egalitarian society, while their unions function in a hostile environment that forces them to make daily compromises? Whether or not we agree with Al’s handling of this important issue, we all must engage in this discussion eventually. We can learn much about the yin and yang of union leadership by reading Kahlenberg’s analysis of that 20th-century icon, Al Shanker.