American Civil Liberties Union

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a private voluntary organization dedicated to the defense of individual rights under the Constitution. The ACLU's program includes litigation, public education, and lobbying. ACLU attorneys offer free legal assistance to individuals who believe that their civil liberties have been violated.

Founded in January 1920, the ACLU was the successor to the National Civil Liberties Bureau, established in 1917 to defend conscientious objectors and fight the suppression of civil liberties during World War I. The distinctive feature of the ACLU has been its self‐proclaimed nonpartisan defense of civil liberties. The ACLU has defended the free speech rights of unpopular groups such as communists, Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan to protect the principle of free speech as such and not because it supports the content of the speech in question, a distinction seldom perceived by the ACLU's critics.

The ACLU's agenda has continued to evolve. In the early 1920s the organization concentrated on defending the First Amendment rights of political radicals and labor union organizers. The 1926 case of Scopes v. State catapulted the ACLU to national prominence. The ACLU's challenge to a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution added the issues of academic freedom and separation of church and state to its agenda. By the 1930s the ACLU's program included defense of the free exercise of religion, particularly in a series of important Jehovah's Witnesses cases, challenges to censorship in the arts, support for the civil rights of racial minorities (see Race and Racism), and advocacy of judicial protection of the rights of criminal suspects (see Due Process, Procedural).

In the 1960s the ACLU's conception of civil liberties expanded to include the rights of women (see Gender), students, prisoners, poor people, homosexuals, and other “victim groups.” The ACLU raised constitutional challenges to existing criminal abortion laws, capital punishment, and in 1970, to the Vietnam War. At the same time, its position on First Amendment issues evolved in a more “absolutist” direction to include opposition to all forms of censorship and any form of government aid to religion (see First Amendment Absolutism).

The ACLU has won many Supreme Court cases that have produced important constitutional doctrines. One historian estimated that the ACLU participated in 80 percent of the recognized “landmark” cases from 1925 to the present. In Gitlow v. New York (1925), the ACLU helped persuade the Court that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the protections of the First Amendment (see Incorporation Doctrine). ACLU lawyers successfully argued Stromberg v. California (1931), Powell v. Alabama (1932), DeJonge v. Oregon (1937), and Hague v. CIO (1939). They also argued Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) and Korematsu v. United States (1944), which unsuccessfully challenged the evacuation and internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II. In the post–World War II period the ACLU participated in most of the leading cases in the areas of church and state (e.g., Engel v. Vitale, 1962), censorship (e.g., Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964), and criminal procedure (e.g., Miranda v. Arizona, 1966). It also joined the NAACP in the major civil rights cases, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

The ACLU's legal program traditionally relied on the pro bono services of cooperating attorneys who filed amicus briefs raising points of constitutional law. In the 1960s the ACLU increasingly provided direct representation to its clients and made greater use of paid staff attorneys. In the 1970s the ACLU created a series of “special projects” devoted to particular issues such as reproductive rights, prisoners' rights, and women's rights. The projects were funded by foundation grants and employed full‐time staff. By 1980 the ACLU brought an estimated six thousand court cases annually, with most handled by volunteer cooperating attorneys on behalf of ACLU affiliates. In the Supreme Court, it filed briefs in about thirty cases per year, appearing before the Court more often than any other organization except the United States government.

The ACLU's position on civil liberties issues has generated enormous controversy over the years, with criticisms coming from several directions. Conservative anticommunists accused the ACLU of supporting communism because of its defense of the First Amendment rights of communists. Religious fundamentalists attacked the ACLU as “Godless” or “anti‐Christian” because of its position on separation of church and state. The ACLU's opposition to censorship and restrictions on contraception and abortion produced a long history of conflict with the Catholic church. Because of its defense of the rights of criminal suspects, conservatives attacked the ACLU for being the “criminals' lobby.” Left‐wing critics accused the ACLU of failing to oppose vigorously anticommunist measures during the Cold War and have occasionally attacked it for defending Nazis or other extreme right‐wing groups.

Beginning in the 1970s, conservatives accused the ACLU of abandoning its traditional role as a nonpartisan defender of civil liberties in favor of a liberal political agenda, citing the ACLU's challenge to the constitutionality of the Vietnam War and its support for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon in the Watergate affair. Conservative legal scholars argued that the ACLU's position on a constitutional right to privacy and, in particular, the right to an abortion, was not supported by the text or history of the Constitution. Generally, these critics claimed that the ACLU and liberal judges had substituted their personal political values for the original intent of the framers of the Constitution. The ACLU replied that its conception of civil liberties was supported by the structure and purposes of limited government established by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Organizationally, by the 1980s the ACLU consisted of a national office and a network of affiliates and chapters in all fifty states. Affiliates were bound by the policies adopted by the national board of directors but exercised a high degree of autonomy in developing their own programs. Several affiliates employed their own full‐time attorneys and lobbyists. Membership in the ACLU grew from about one thousand in 1920 to more than 275,000 in 1990. The ACLU national office includes a legal staff and public education department, a legislative office in Washington, D.C. with eleven staff counsel, and persons working on ten special projects.

See also Speech and the Press.

Bibliography

Robert C. Cotterell , Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union (2000).
Charles Lamm Markmann , The Noblest Cry: A History of the American Civil Liberties Union (1965).
Samuel Walker , In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (1990).
Samuel Walker , In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU, 2d ed. (1999).

Samuel Walker