Tyler is best remembered as a leading American labor intellectual of the post-World War II era and as the author of a history of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

[1] Tyler was the product of a radical upbringing, as he later recalled in a 1988 interview with New York Newsday: As far as my mother was concerned, socialism was what God ordained.

[5] Tyler declared that the only course for the Socialist Party was to organize the dissident forces created by a new war in order to "smash the capitalist system.

Tyler's intelligence and commitment seems to have caught the attention of International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) president David Dubinsky.

[6] Despite the fact that Dubinsky was himself a stalwart of the Socialist Party's Old Guard, Tyler was offered a staff job with the ILGWU in its education department.

[6] When the English-language version of the Forward launched in 1990, Tyler began writing for the publication, penning a weekly column in the paper until 2006.

... His most powerful weapons were words, in books, newspaper columns, radio commentaries and speeches he wrote for labor chieftains.

"[2] Tyler's papers are included in several collections at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.