Mugged by Reality

...Similarly, Shanker initially supported Lindsay's Ford Foundation-funded plans for "community control" of schools in black neighborhoods...

...By the lights of the Black Power movement, integration into a desiccated white society had become the primary danger, so that street toughs—youngsters outside the norms of bourgeois life—had become the true revolutionaries, the hope of Black America...

...In 1960, Kahlenberg explains, the older generation of teachers argued that the still-weak union had to grow before it could strike in violation of state law...

...In the wake of the 1967 riots across urban America, redemptive violence was touted by black militants and left-liberals as the balm for racial injustice...

...Shanker was in tune with the new spirit of aggressive liberalism Mayor John Lindsay brought to City Hall...

...So much seemed to be at stake that Epstein went on to argue that the "the alternatives left to the white majority" were "capitulation or genocide...

...There is no warmer, sounder or firmer ally to have...

...His interest in philosophy brought him to Columbia's graduate school to study at the home of his intellectual hero, John Dewey...

...Shanker's world, and that of much of the liberal Jewish middle- and lower-middle class, had been turned upside down...

...Kahlenberg, himself a thoughtful social democrat, best known for arguing on behalf of income-based affirmative action, wants to revive the "tough liberalism" once represented by Shanker...

...In 1967 Shanker, the pioneer public sector unionist who built his New York City teachers into the largest local in the AFL-CIO, stood at the heart of the labor-liberal-civil rights coalition that was, at long last, bringing an end to racial segregation...

...The right to democratic participation need not and should not be justified on grounds of educational efficiency...

...When Lindsay angered the city's outer-borough white ethnics, who felt under siege from rising crime rates, by proposing a Civilian Review Board to crack down on police brutality against minorities, Shanker was the only union leader who backed the mayor, despite the protests of many of his own members...

...The regular politicians . . . are just beginning to discover the power of this force...

...In each case, the newly radicalized attacked liberally inclined institutions as "the real enemy...

...The union emerged from the Ocean Hill conflict strengthened, but narrowed, in defense of its own interests...

...Shanker, notes Kahlenberg, fought back with precedent and logic...

...The fracture over Vietnam, the rise of Third Worldism, and the New Left's anti-Israeli sentiment unleashed by the Six-Day war produced a witches' cauldron of hate and hostility...

...Each of these conflicts bled into Ocean Hill Brownsville, so that the Afrocentric leaders of the community control movement were invested, by the left, with the antibourgeois moral authority of the Viet Cong...

...Inspired by the civil disobedience of the FreeFred Siegel, professor of history at Cooper Union, is the author, most recently, of Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius ofAmerican Life...

...How, asked Shanker, could the union he had fought so hard to create, and its integrationism, have been so quickly redefined as "the real enemy...

...Social democracy, with its admirable solidarity-based instincts, was a product of the relatively closed economies that defined advanced societies between the end of the first period of globalization and the onset of the second...

...At the University of Illinois, just after World War II, he joined the Congress of Racial Equality and the Young People's Socialist league, and took part in sit-ins to protest segregation...

...They are not a politically captive group...

...The pol-like principals had largely ignored the breakdown of order in what at times were "blackboard jungles...

...As teachers," Shanker explained, "who have only recently struggled for a voice, we support others in this struggle...

...For his part Shanker, notes Kahlen-berg, stuck to his beliefs...

...A year later Shanker was, wrote Midge Decter, the recipient of "the worst press in living memory...

...Precociously intellectual, Shanker started reading Partisan Review at 15...

...But Shanker, committed to the substance of education, insisted the teachers use their victory to take the lead in restraining unruly students so as to make it possible for others to learn...

...It has value in itself...

...But this was all to little effect...

...Mugged by Reality Albert Shanker and the fall of American liberalism by Fred Siegel The life of Al Shanker embodied the 1960s transformation of American liberalism from a creed with broad middle-and working-class support to a doctrine lodged primarily in the precincts of the poor and the professional upper middle classes...

...When, in 1962, a victorious strike shifted the balance of power from principals to teachers, Shanker exulted—as would the McGovernites a decade later—in what he saw as a triumph over the corrupt old patronage system and the principals/political bosses who ran it...

...Shanker was drawn to the militantly antisegregationist and anti-Communist American Federation of Teachers, whose founding motto was "Education for Democracy...

...A skilled speaker and debater, Shanker, fired up by Sidney Hook's ideas about democracy, set out on a mission to bring workplace democracy to the New York City schools...

...Shanker, a tall, nearsighted, and awkward Bronx Jewish boy born in 1928, had nearly been lynched by neighborhood nasties as a prank...

...to be feared...

...Community control as it was being practiced was, he said, the "spiritual descendant of segregation" because it moved people in a "more provincial . . . more bigoted . . . more tribal" direction...

...What intervened, explains Richard Kahlenberg in his judicious and engaging Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy, was the left-liberal swing from Shanker's integrationism toward Black Power symbolized by the bitter struggle, in Brooklyn's Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district, to give militant Afrocentrists "community control" over the local schools...

...Part of what made the Ocean Hill fight so extraordinarily charged was that, in most cities, similar conflicts were met largely by accelerated white flight...

...Shanker, a veteran of the sit-ins, insisted, SDS-like, that "you have to act in order to grow...

...How could it be that, for Lindsay and his black-power allies, self-imposed segregation and unruly students could be the solution, not the problem...

...But he lacked the Sitzfleisch to write a dissertation and so took a job as a teacher, where he discovered that, without a union, he and his fellow instructors were at the mercy of the principal's arbitrary authority...

...He worked with Ronald Reagan to bring down communism in Eastern Europe and Central America by helping to push the president into seeing the importance of trade unions for establishing free societies...

...Shanker was about to be blindsided by the toxic mix of resentment, racial guilt, and revolutionary romanticism that engulfed both the streets and the chattering classes...

...The well-to-do Lindsay, uncomfortable with the concerns of the middle class, was drawn to this shift: Speaking of "young men . . . living their own special kind of street life," Lindsay said, "they are not...

...It's doubtful that we will see Albert Shanker's like again...

...nor did liberalism, as many embittered white ethnics became Reagan Democrats...

...Other battles in the civil war broke out at the City University of New York and at Columbia, in hospitals and in cooperative housing projects...

...Thanks to Shanker's intellectual and political strength, Black Power and its radical chic groupies were met by a principled social democratic defense of 1950s liberalism...

...After 40 years of liberal decline, it's difficult to imagine the centrality and intensity of the liberal-on-more-liberal clashes of a time when there seemed to be no political alternatives...

...But as power has shifted, to some degree, from national governments to world markets, social democracy has languished, even in its European homeland...

...Imagine, then, Shanker's shock when he discovered that community control meant that white Jewish teachers unacceptable to black-power street thugs such as Sonny Carson (later totemized in a Hollywood movie) could not only be dismissed from their jobs without cause, but also threatened and beaten with the acquiescence of John Lindsay...

...He began to come into his own as a Boy Scout and member of his high school debate team...

...But he remained a vigorous opponent of free-market economic and social policies...

...dom Riders, Shanker served jail time for illegally taking his members out on strike...

...Shanker had marched with Martin Luther King in Birmingham and fought hard to integrate Gotham's increasingly African-American school system...

...During the 1965 mayoral election, Shanker, his power greatly enhanced by the 1962 contract, was one of the few union leaders to support Lindsay...

...Shanker shared the action-oriented (and initially anti-authoritarian) impulses of the emerging New Left...

...But this is unlikely...

...There have been," said Shanker, "black schools throughout the country for more than a century," which is "precisely the opposite of the integration that people fought for in the South...

...Demon-ized as a "goon," "racist," and "Neanderthal," who was "but an accent away from George Wallace" by radicalized writers Murray Kempton and Jimmy Breslin, Shanker was reviled by many of his former allies as the incarnation of middle-class bigotry...

...It turned out to be neither...

...It was a left-liberal auto da fe that reached its verbal climax in Sleeper when Woody Allen described Shanker as the man who had destroyed the world with an atomic bomb...

...Jason Epstein, an editor at the New York Review of Books, captured some sense of the madness when he wrote that "the city is now faced with a classic revolutionary situation...

...But in New York, Shanker, furious at what he saw as Lindsay's attempt to break the union, and dismayed by the liberal justifications for violence, stood firm...

...The New York schools, then the best big-city educational system in the nation, never recovered...