TOUGH LIBERAL: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy, by Richard D. Kahlenberg. Columbia University Press, 524 pp.

In the comedy Sleeper, Woody Allen's character wakes up in the distant future to find that the world he knew has been destroyed. Nobody can quite remember what happened, but a character explains that historians believe civilization ended "when a man by the name of Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear warhead."

Building a punch line around the hardboiled leader of the teachers' union was a perfect example of the New York-centric quality of the movie's humor. When the film appeared in 1973, everyone still remembered his role in leading a number of strikes that shook the city a few years earlier. And the vigor of his political beliefs (to put it as neutrally as possible) was expressed on the op-ed page of The New York Times each Sunday, in a spot paid for by the American Federation of Teachers, of which he was president.

Today, though, even some Manhattanites will need a footnote to get Woody Allen's joke. Shanker, who died in 1997, was not literally the last example of what Richard Kahlenberg, in his biography, calls the "tough liberal" - that is, a supporter of both the labor movement and the deployment of American power around the world. The species is still around, if not exactly flourishing. But Shanker's legacy is ambiguous, and his name has largely faded from the public memory.

The author, who is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation in Washington, D.C., gives a thorough and largely sympathetic account of Shanker's career. The range of published and archival sources consulted is impressive. The biographer also draws on correspondence and interviews with Shanker's opponents as well as his associates. I think it would be stronger if the criticisms were given a more extensive hearing in its pages; but it is solid enough, and rewarding even to a reader who doesn't give Shanker the benefit of the doubt.

Born to immigrant parents Brooklyn in 1928, Shanker grew up within the old Jewish left - arguing with a Communist cousin, reading the magazines staffed by dissident Marxist intellectuals, admiring Clarence Darrow's eloquent defense of imprisoned labor leaders. Shanker pursued graduate work in philosophy at Columbia University but, unable to finish his doctorate, left to become a schoolteacher in Harlem in the early 1950s.

Preferring to see themselves as professionals rather than laborers, teachers were often reluctant to join a union. But Shanker did, and he soon proved to be a capable organizer. In 1960, against long odds, he led a strike that won teachers the right to collective bargaining and a single salary schedule. "After New York," writes Kahlenberg, "collective bargaining would spread across the country so quickly that within a dozen years, teaching would become one of the most unionized occupations in the nation."

But it was another series of strikes in 1967 and '68 - defending the seniority of teachers against "community control" by local school boards - that made Shanker's leadership rather notorious. The effect was to increase tensions between African-American parents and Jewish teachers. At one point, Shanker threw kerosene on the blaze by distributing hundreds of thousands of copies of an anti-Semitic flier he said was being distributed by black militants.

But he still saw himself as a fervent supporter of the civil-rights movement, and appears never to have grasped how much his intransigence fed into the white backlash against African-American struggles. A hard anti-Communist, he supported the Vietnam War and later found as much common ground as he could with Ronald Reagan (no friend of labor as president). Shanker served as chair of the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Committee - better known, among those less friendly to its efforts, as the AFL-CIA.

At the same time, he was a strong supporter of progressive taxation: "The amassing of huge fortunes must be counteracted," he said, "in order to preserve political democracy." And he was an uncompromising defender of the public school system. One advocate of vouchers called Shanker "the single most effective opponent of any kind of privatization in education." He supported Edward Kennedy for president in 1980 - then, within a few years, went on the attack against multiculturalism.

None of this was inconsistent, though it made Shanker difficult to fit into the somewhat narrow and rigid categories of mainstream political discussion in the U.S. (Since his death, we've dumbed things down still more with the whole "red/blue" branding exercise.)

But in an international context, he can be easily enough identified as belonging to the right wing of the Socialist movement - the part that is the closest to organized labor, and the most conservative in cultural matters. As his biographer notes, Shanker's "economically populist, socially moderate, and internationally engaged" strain of politics is "virtually absent from liberal discourse" today.

Exactly why that position has disappeared is not something Kahlenberg really explains; to do so would require another and very different sort of book. But Tough Liberal is a well-drawn portrait of what it looked like in the flesh.