Michael H. Nash

Michael Harold Nash (1946 – July 24, 2012) was an American labor historian, librarian, and archivist. Nash was the Director of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives at New York University throughout the early years of the 21st Century until the time of his death. Nash is best remembered for the key role he played in first obtaining and then integrating the archives of the Communist Party USA into Tamiment Library's holdings, in addition to other acquisition projects.

Biography Early years Nash was born in 1946, in The Bronx. Nash was raised as a red diaper baby as both his parents were schoolteachers with radical political views. His father Julius Nash, a science teacher, suffered job discrimination during the Cold War of anti-communism, having been removed from his teaching job in 1955 as part of a far reaching purge and blacklist of Communist and former Communist teachers in the New York City School system.

This purge, similar in form to policies implemented in other places in the United States presented their subjects with an irresolvable conflict: If one refused to sign a "loyalty oath" indicating that the signer had never been a communist, the individual was fired and blacklisted. If one signed such an oath and admitted that were or had been a member of the Communist Party USA, one was fired and blacklisted. If one signed such an oath and the "little McCarthys" administering the purge determined the signer had lied, the signer would be fired and blacklisted. Thus barred from the public schools, the elder Nash went on to manage a toy store, also teaching in a local yeshiva. His mother, Ruth Nash, taught business and was a union activist. Nash then enrolled in Columbia University in New York City, earning a M.A. in American History in 1969. Nash was discouraged both by the magnitude of the project he visualized and the job market for labor historians, however, so he took steps towards becoming a professional archivist, earning a Master of Library Science degree in 1974. Nash regarded this as "the dream job of his life" and remained in this position until the time of his death in 2012.

In March 2007 Nash was instrumental in arranging the transfer of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies (RCMS), the archive and library of the Communist Party USA, to NYU. Included in this material were some 20,000 books, 5,000 magazines, a complete run of party newspaper The Daily Worker, every party pamphlet ever produced, and the 1 million image photo archive of The Daily Worker and its successor publications. He was also a board member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, an organization whose holdings are also housed at Tamiment Library at NYU, and a member of the Historians of American Communism.

Death and legacy Michael Nash died on July 24, 2012, aged 66, of a pulmonary embolism. In his later life, he was working with the Occupy Wall Street movement in both safeguarding their developing collections for history and encouraging and using his knowledge of peoples movements to advise them on strategy and tactics. His legacy lives on in his work, the ongoing work of the Tamiment Library, and the deep affection that so many people felt for him over the decades. Few individuals combined the personal and the political as positively as Michael Nash. Few have really been scholars, teachers and activists as he had been.

Works Conflict and Accommodation: Coal Miners, Steel Workers, and Socialism, 1890-1920. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. "Business History and Archival Practice: Shifts in Sources and Paradigms," in James O'Toole (ed.), The Records of American Business. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1997. "Communist History at the Tamiment Library," American Communist History, vol. 3, no. 2 (December 2004), pp. 265–285. The Good Fight Continues: World War II Letters from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. (Edited with Peter N. Carroll.) New York: New York University Press, 2006. How to Keep Union Records. (Edited with Debra E. Bernhardt.) Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2010. Red Activists and Black Freedom: James and Esther Jackson and the Long Civil Rights Revolution. (Edited with David L. Lewis and Daniel J. Leab.) London: Routledge, 2010.

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