American Civil Liberties Union

AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION

AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION. In 1920, the Boston Brahmin Roger Baldwin, Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas, social worker Jane Addams, and a small band of colleagues established the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Avowedly pro-labor, the ACLU followed in the path laid by the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which had been created during World War I to safeguard the rights of political dissidents and conscientious objectors. Operating out of a ramshackle office on the outskirts of Greenwich Village, the ACLU's executive committee, headed by Baldwin, discussed the "Report on the Civil Liberty Situation for the Week." Encouraged by Baldwin, the ACLU championed the First Amendment rights of some of the least-liked groups and individuals in the United States, including the American Communist Party and the Ku Klux Klan. The ACLU relied on lawyers throughout the country to volunteer their services involving test cases. Among those heeding the call were the Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter and Clarence Darrow, perhaps the best-known litigator in the United States during the early twentieth century.

Still in its infancy, the ACLU participated in several cases that became celebrated causes for liberals and radicals throughout the United States. These included the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, in which two Italian-born anarchists were accused of having committed a murder involving a paymaster; the Scopes Trial, in which John T. Scopes, a part-time biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, deliberately violated a state statute that proscribed the teaching of evolution in public schools; and the Scottsboro Case, in which eight indigent African-American youths, dubbed the "Scottsboro Boys," were accused of raping two white women near a small Alabama town. The ACLU's association with the cases—particularly the Scopes "Monkey Trial"—garnered considerable attention for the organization, as did its establishment of a national committee to bring about the release of the labor radicals Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, who had been convicted of planting a bomb that killed ten people during a "Preparedness Parade" in San Francisco in 1916, prior to America's entry into World War I. Baldwin referred to the case as "the most scandalous of any frame-up of labor leaders in our history." In contrast, the ACLU initially displayed little interest in contesting Prohibition, and ACLU leaders like Baldwin, Thomas, and John Haynes Holmes demonstrated a puritanical attitude regarding such controversial writings as D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), despite having earlier challenged censorship in cities like Boston. Nevertheless, by the early 1930s, the ACLU, through its attorneys or amici curiae briefs, had helped to establish the principle that the rights articulated in the First Amendment were "preferred" ones, entitled to considerable protection against government encroachments.

Baldwin's directorship and his involvement with a series of united front and Popular Front groups identified the ACLU with the American left. In 1938, critics called for an investigation of the ACLU by the newly formed House Committee on Un-American Activities. Concerns about such a possibility, coupled with the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact later that year, produced a decision that proved far-reaching for both the ACLU and American politics in general. In early 1940, the national office of the ACLU adopted an exclusionary policy that precluded board members from belonging to totalitarian organizations. This resulted in the infamous "trial" of longtime ACLU activist and Communist Party member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn before her fellow ACLU board members and her removal from the board. During the postwar red scare, an increasing number of organizations adopted similar anti-communist provisions.

The ACLU's stellar reputation for protecting the rights of all was called into question during World War II when the ACLU national leadership, despite Baldwin's opposition, failed to contest the internment of Japanese-Americans and aliens. In the early Cold War era, as redbaiting intensified, the organization provided little support for leftists who were coming under attack. Following Baldwin's retirement in early 1950, the ACLU, in keeping with its recently acquired respectability, became more of a mass organization. It also began to focus less exclusively on First Amendment issues. It supported the legal action by the NAACP that eventually culminated in the monumental ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which declared that segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. By the 1960s, the ACLU was concentrating more regularly on the right to privacy, equal protection, and criminal procedural rights.

Not all were pleased with the expanded operations of the ACLU, particularly a decision in 1977 to back the right of American Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, where many Holocaust survivors from Hitler's Europe resided. Thousands resigned their ACLU memberships, and financial pressures mounted. The organization again proved to be something of a political lightning rod when Republican Party presidential candidate George H. W. Bush, in the midst of a nationally televised debate in 1988, attacked his Democratic Party opponent, Michael Dukakis, as "a card-carrying member of the ACLU." Spearheaded by Executive Director Ira Glasser, the ACLU continued to be involved in such controversial issues as creationism and prayer in the school, which it opposed, and abortion and gay rights, which it championed. As of 2001, the ACLU had approximately 300,000 members.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cottrell, Robert C. Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Walker, Samuel. In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the American Civil Liberties Union. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Robert C. Cottrell

See also Civil Rights and Liberties ; First Amendment .