Laski, Harold

Harold Joseph Laski was born in Manchester in 1893, the second son of Nathan Laski and his wife Sarah Frankenstein. His father was a cotton shipping merchant, a leader of the Jewish community and a Liberal. Harold Laski was educated at Manchester Grammar School and studied eugenics under Karl Pearson at University College for six months in 1911. He met Frida Kerry, a lecturer in eugenics, and they married in that year, just as he began an undergraduate degree in history at Oxford University. Frida Laski lectured in Glasgow and she and Harold Laski were destined to have a distance marriage in its early stages (Dictionary of National Biography; Eastwood, Harold Laski, p.5).

In 1914 Laski was awarded a first class honours degree and the Beit memorial prize. He worked for a while with George Lansbury on the Daily Herald. When the war broke out he failed his medical and in 1916, the year his daughter Diana was born, he was appointed lecturer in modern history at McGill University, Montreal. In 1916 he joined the staff of Harvard University and there associated with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Felix Frankfurter, both of whom went on to be appointed to the Supreme Court. He was friendly with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and there is a letter in the collection from this former United States president. In 1919 Laski was savagely attacked for his sympathy with the Boston police strikers and he turned his back on an American academic career, taking a post at the London School of Economics in 1920 (Dictionary of National Biography; Eastwood, Harold Laski, pp.16-19, 109).

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