CREDIT: Roger Nash Baldwin Papers. Public Policy Papers. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.
DURING AND after World War I, when America was seized by a national hysteria against radicals, immigrants, and unions, Roger Nash Baldwin led the crusade to defend civil liberties. The Woodrow Wilson administration cracked down on any individual, group, or publication that opposed US involvement in the combat in Europe. The dramatic political changes in Russia following the 1917 revolution also provided America’s business and political leaders with another excuse to suppress dissenters of all kinds. So, too, did the wave of over 3,000 strikes by more than 4 million workers and the race riots that gripped Chicago and other cities throughout 1919.
Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, recruited J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the threat of domestic subversion. Hoover reported that radicals posed a real danger to the United States and urged that the government take dramatic action against a possible revolution. Palmer used the extraordinary wartime powers granted by the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 to identify and round up people and groups he considered terrorists. Palmer and Hoover orchestrated a series of well-publicized raids in over thirty cities, rounding up and arresting thousands of people whom they identified as socialists, anarchists, communists, pacifists, and others, without warrants and without regard to constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure. These Palmer Raids particularly targeted leaders of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World. Some were brutally treated and held without trial for many months. Others were deported, mostly to Russia. Politicians and newspapers often linked “foreigners” and “radicals,” contributing to a fever of anti-immigrant sentiment, which eventually led to a wave of federal laws in the early 1920s that severely restricted immigration to the United States.
In 1917, with the nation in the grip of this orchestrated hysteria, a small group challenged these egregious abuses of basic rights and formed the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which three years later changed its name to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The group’s sixty-four founders included a “who’s who” of the nation’s leading liberals, progressives, and radicals. They included Jane Addams, Helen Keller, John Dewey, A. J. Muste, Rose Schneiderman, Norman Thomas, theologian Harry Ward (a professor at the Union Theological Seminary), Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Rabbi Judah Magnes, James Weldon Johnson, Felix Frankfurter, Morris Hillquit, Helen Phelps Stokes, and Oswald Garrison Villard.
Baldwin was the key organizer of this group and the leader of the ACLU for the next three decades. Under Baldwin, the ACLU became the nation’s most influential and most controversial defender of civil liberties, a role that it continues to play today.
Raised in Wellesley, Massachusetts, an exclusive Boston suburb, Baldwin’s ancestors included Mayflower Pilgrims and a general in George Washington’s army. His wealthy parents were Unitarians with many prominent friends and connections. W. E. B. Du Bois was a frequent guest at the Baldwin house. Baldwin entered Harvard in 1901, at a time when students were absorbing the exciting mix of progressive, socialist, and other reform ideas and causes, hoping to find ways to right society’s wrongs. He volunteered at the Cambridge Social Union, which provided adult education to workers, and he helped organize the Harvard Entertainment Troupers, which offered musical performances for the poor.
Soon after his graduation, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and with the help of Louis Brandeis (his father’s friend), he secured a job running a settlement house, where he worked from 1906 until 1917. He became a national leader of the growing movement for child protection. He served as chief officer of the St. Louis Juvenile Court and as secretary of the National Probation Association. He also founded the sociology department at Washington University, where he taught from 1906 to 1910.
Baldwin’s reform instincts were jolted when he heard a speech in St. Louis by anarchist Emma Goldman. He began to see the problems of the poor—which he confronted every day in his settlement house and juvenile court work—as part of the capitalist system. The remedy was not charity or social work, he thought, but “the end of poverty and injustice by free association of those who worked, by the abolition of privilege, and by the organized power of the exploited.” For the rest of his life, Baldwin walked a tightrope between his day-today reform work and his radical beliefs.
In 1910, at the National Conference of Charities and Correction, held in St. Louis, he met Jane Addams, who became a close friend and mentor and who shared his pacifist convictions. As US involvement in World War I seemed likely, Baldwin joined the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), which Addams had helped found in 1915 to protest the draft and to protect conscientious objectors and other antiwar dissidents. He joined its staff in 1917 and helped create a division within the AUAM to provide legal advice and aid to conscientious objectors, a division that became the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB).
In 1917 Congress passed the Selective Service Act to conscript men for military service. Baldwin was drafted the following year, but as a conscientious objector, he refused to go. His arrest, trial, and conviction made headlines. He spent a year in prison, referring to it as “my vacation on the government.” Upon his release, he returned to work at the NCLB. In January 1920 the group was renamed the American Civil Liberties Union, focusing on the protection of free speech, religious freedom, the right to a fair trial, the right to assembly, racial equality, and other First Amendment protections. Baldwin was named its director.
The ACLU swiftly became one of the century’s major progressive organizations. A kind of nonprofit law firm, its only client, its leaders said, was the First Amendment.
In its first two decades, the ACLU was primarily devoted to protecting the First Amendment rights of antiwar dissidents and labor unions. Most judges sympathized with employers, who used court injunctions to restrict unions from picketing and demonstrating. In 1930 Baldwin organized the National Committee on Labor Injunctions to challenge the antiunion abuses of many judges. In 1932 the ACLU and its labor allies scored a major victory when Congress passed the Norris–La Guardia Act (cosponsored by Senator George Norris of Nebraska and Congressman Fiorello La Guardia of New York), which barred federal courts from issuing injunctions against nonviolent labor disputes.
The ACLU was constantly linking First Amendment rights to the fight for workers’ rights, women’s rights, racial justice, and other causes, such as police abuse. On May 15, 1923, for example, Upton Sinclair rose to speak on behalf of 3,000 striking longshoremen at Liberty Hill in the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles. As Sinclair began reading the US Constitution, the chief of police told him to “cut out that Constitution stuff” and quickly arrested the famous muckraker. For four days, Sinclair and three other speakers were held incommunicado. Once released, Sinclair sent a letter to various supporters recruiting them to join the ACLU’s new Southern California chapter.
In 1920 two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, both anarchists, were arrested for committing a murder during a bank robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. Like many other Americans, Baldwin was not sure whether they were innocent or guilty, but he was thoroughly convinced that the pair could not get a fair trial because the prosecution was using their anarchist beliefs and their immigrant status to convict them. The ACLU helped raise money for their legal defense and helped mobilize public opposition to the one-sided trial. An international movement of protests on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti was unable to overturn their conviction, and they were executed on August 23, 1927.
In 1925 the ACLU hired Clarence Darrow to defend John Scopes, the Tennessee science teacher arrested for violating a state law prohibiting teaching evolution in public schools. Baldwin said that the trial pitted “God against the monkeys,” and it soon became known as the “monkey trial.” In another controversial case, the ACLU defended Mary Ware Dennett, an outspoken ACLU member, suffragist, and birth control advocate whose pamphlet The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People was banned by the US Postal Service as obscene. The jury in her trial took only forty minutes to convict her, but the ACLU appealed and overturned the ruling.
Baldwin and the ACLU were deeply involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), working to stop lynching and other acts of violence perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. The ACLU’s 1931 report Black Justice documented the systematic denial of civil rights. The ACLU participated in the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men accused of raping two white women on an Alabama train. It was the first civil rights case to attract national publicity.
In 1933 the ACLU won one of the most influential cases against censorship in American history. The US Customs Department had banned James Joyce’s novel Ulysses on grounds of obscenity. On behalf of its publisher, Random House, the ACLU persuaded the judge that the book was not obscene, which helped shift public opinion about censorship.
Baldwin was also an advocate of international human rights. In the 1920s he helped form the International Committee for Political Prisoners as well as the American League for India’s Freedom, which supported India’s independence from British colonialism. In 1927 he visited the Soviet Union, and the next year he published Liberty Under the Soviets, reflecting his sympathies for the Russian Revolution. But in 1939 Russia signed a treaty with the Nazis, stalling for time to avoid a war between the two countries, and Baldwin, like many leftists at the time, broke with the pro-Russia American Communists. In 1953, at the height of the Cold War, he wrote A New Slavery: The Communist Betrayal of Human Rights, which was highly critical of the Soviet Union.
Baldwin maintained his antiwar convictions. He joined the League Against War and Fascism and other groups that sided with the antifascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, the federal government planned to force 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans from their homes and confine them to relocation camps out of fear that they would form a pro-Japan force within the United States. The ACLU took the courageous but unpopular stand of opposing the plan. Ironically, when the war was over, General Douglas MacArthur asked Baldwin to advise Harry S. Truman’s administration on civil liberties issues as the United States sought to rebuild Japan and Germany.
Throughout the 20th century, Americans who opposed censorship or repression of free speech (including books, plays, and movies), who campaigned for civil rights, or who fought police abuse knew they could turn to their local ACLU chapter for help. Baldwin drew on his web of contacts among liberals and radicals alike to make the ACLU an effective advocate for social and economic justice. Although he retired from the directorship in 1950, he remained active in the organization and advocated for many causes, particularly human rights cases around the world.
Founded in response to the post–World War I antiradical hysteria, the ACLU faced a major crisis during the post–World War II Red Scare. As early as 1940 the ACLU, with Baldwin’s support, had expelled Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a member of the Communist Party, from its board on the grounds that Communists opposed civil liberties, even though the ACLU’s mission was to defend the free speech rights even of those with unpopular views. In 1948 the ACLU began attaching a disclaimer to its court briefs denouncing communism, hoping to inoculate itself from the Cold War frenzy. By the 1950s many key members of ACLU’s board did not want the organization to take up the cause of radicals who were blacklisted by schools, universities, Hollywood studios, government agencies, or other employers because of their political beliefs. As a result, the ACLU failed to take a strong stance protecting the civil liberties of suspected Communists and victims of McCarthyism.
On other matters, however, the ACLU remained at the forefront of battles for civil liberties and civil rights. In 1954 the ACLU joined forces with the NAACP to challenge racial segregation, leading to the US Supreme Court’s historic ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that ended the “separate but equal” doctrine. The ACLU was also involved in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that found that the right to privacy included a woman’s right to decide to have an abortion. In 1977 Baldwin played an active role in one of the ACLU’s most controversial cases: the defense of the American Nazi Party’s right to stage a march in Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb with a large Jewish population. Although the ACLU won the case when a federal court ruled that the city’s ordinances designed to prevent the march were unconstitutional, many ACLU members resigned from the organization in protest. In 2003 the ACLU helped persuade the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas to strike down a Texas law making sexual intimacy between same-sex couples a crime.