Roger Nash Baldwin
Roger Baldwin (1884–1981) began his career as a social worker and, over the course of a seven–decade career, became one of the foremost figures associated with the protection of civil rights. Baldwin co–founded the National Civil Liberties Bureau in 1917, which grew into the American Civil Liberties Union three years later. Either personally or in his official position as head of the ACLU, Baldwin was associated with several high–profile legal cases focusing on civil liberties, including the well–known Scopes Monkey Trial.
Baldwin was born into a wealthy, socially progressive family in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on January 21, 1884, the oldest of six children. His father, Frank Feno Baldwin, was a leather merchant, and his mother, Lucy Cushing Nash, a feminist. Their relatives included Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower, a general in George Washington's army, and the founder of the Boston Young Men's Christian Union. Baldwin was introduced to ideas on social reform through the Unitarian church his family attended as well as from his family and their influential friends, who included the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, the celebrated attorney and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the educator and civil rights leader Booker T. Washington.
Turned to Social Work
Baldwin graduated from Wellesley High School and entered Harvard University in nearby Boston, Massachusetts, in 1901. There, he became even more immersed in progressive matters of the day, volunteering at the Cambridge Social Union, which offered adult education to workers, and helping to organize the Harvard Entertainment Troupers, which provided musical performances for the poor. Following graduation from Harvard in 1905, Baldwin returned to Harvard, at the urging of attorney and family friend Louis Brandeis, to pursue a master's degree in social work. Brandeis then helped Baldwin secure a job running a settlement house in St. Louis, Missouri, and helping establish a sociology department at Washington University there.
In 1907, Baldwin resigned from the university in order to serve as a probation officer in the city's juvenile court system. In 1910 he became involved with the St. Louis Civic League, an urban reform organization that fought for control over billboards and stricter air pollution regulations. There, Baldwin also worked to reform the ballot initiative, referendum, and recall process to give the public a greater voice in governmental affairs. He eventually became the group's director. In 1914, as World War I began in Europe, he announced his status as a conscientious objector and joined the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), an organization that viewed prosecution of those who refused to submit to the military draft as a violation of the United States Constitution's protection of the "sacred liberty of conscience."
Baldwin remained dedicated to reforming the juvenile justice system as well, and in 1914 co–authored a textbook, Juvenile Courts and Probation, which promoted "the training of the child to make him as good a member of society as possible. Every disposition should be based on the idea of what is best for the child's welfare," according to Robert C. Cottrell's biography, Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union.
While in St. Louis, Baldwin attended a speech by noted anarchist Emma Goldman, which affected him profoundly. "Here was a vision of 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," Baldwin recalled, as quoted by Cottrell. He developed a collegial association with Goldman and, based both on this affiliation and the onset of the war, began to supplement his reformist ideas with those based on more radical ideologies.
Jailed for Refusing Draft
Baldwin returned east in 1917, maintaining his association with AUAM in his new home of New York City. After the United States Congress issued a declaration of war on April 2, 1917, Baldwin became deeply involved in the AUAM's new Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB), established as a clearinghouse for information on conscientious objectors. On October 1 of that year, Baldwin and the CLB officially split with the AUAM to form the separate National Civil Liberties Bureau. The new organization not only collected information on conscientious objectors, but provided them with legal counsel and fought for their constitutional rights.
The United States government kept a close eye on the NCLB, despite Baldwin's attempts to garner support for his work in president Woodrow Wilson's administration. On October 9, 1918, Baldwin was arrested for violation of the Selective Service Act after refusing to appear before the draft board. His one–year sentence drew significant media attention. Due to a clerical error and time off for good behavior, Baldwin served ten months, during which time he established educational and entertainment programs for inmates and lobbied prison official for physical improvements to the facility.
On August 8, 1919, soon after his release from prison, Baldwin married Madeline Doty, a well–known journalist, lawyer, prison reform activist and feminist, in a civil ceremony in New York. Following a honeymoon in the Adirondack Mountains, the pair, who vowed to observe an equal partnership unbound by the constraints of monogamy, settled into an apartment in New York's Greenwich Village. Baldwin did not stay put long, however. Soon, he set out to better understand the common worker by serving as an itinerant laborer, an experience that helped bolster his increasingly radical–leaning political views.
Founded ACLU
Upon Baldwin's return from his sojourn, he met with the NCLB to discuss the organization's direction in light of the increased government pressures on communists and other left–leaning political activists during the ongoing "Red Scare." On January 20, 1920, the group was renamed the American Civil Liberties Union, charged with unflagging support of free speech, religious freedom, the right to a fair trial, the right to assembly, racial equality, and all other protections granted by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Baldwin was named director.
The ACLU quickly aligned itself with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to condemn violence against African Americans perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan. In 1931, the organization published Black Justice, a report on the systematic denial of civil rights to blacks in the United States. Years later, the ACLU would draw criticism from the NAACP for defending the right of the Klan to assemble peaceably. Jewish groups expressed similar disapproval when the group defended the right of automaker Henry Ford to publicize his anti–Semitic views. In these and other instances, however, the ACLU championed open discourse as opposed to suppression or censorship.
Baldwin's position put him at the center of several high–profile trials centered on free speech. In 1925, the ACLU defended John Thomas Scopes, a science teacher in Tennessee who was arrested for violating a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. The case came to be known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, a moniker coined by journalist H.L. Mencken which, according to Cottrell, was based on Baldwin's observation that the trial pitted "the Good Book against Darwin, bigotry against science, or as popularly put, God against the monkeys." Although Scopes was eventually convicted and fined $100 (the fine was later overturned on a technicality), the case raised the public prominence of Baldwin's organization and helped solidify its mission. The organization was involved in several subsequent key cases, including the Dennett case, in which the ACLU challenged censorship of public discussions on birth control and sexuality, and a successful push to overturn the U.S. Customs Department ban on James Joyce's novel Ulysses. On the heels of these cases, Baldwin and the ACLU stepped up its fight against censorship of various forms of speech, including books, plays, radios, and films.
Baldwin also became personally involved in another highly publicized case, the trial of Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The pair was accused of committing felony murder during a bank robbery. While never certain whether they were associated with the crime, Baldwin was convinced the pair's prosecution was based on their nationality and political affiliation. His efforts were less successful in this instance. Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty and executed on August 23, 1927. In the early 1930s the ACLU participated in the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine young African American men accused of raping two white women on a train near Paint Rock, Alabama. Because the lead defense was provided by a communist organization, Baldwin and his organization were painted in much of the media as communist sympathizers. The convoluted trial resulted in the release of four of the defendants, the imprisonment of the rest and a damaged reputation for Baldwin and the ACLU outside of leftist circles.
Turned to International Issues
Since founding the ACLU, Baldwin attempted to promote a focus on international, as well as domestic, issues of concern. Unable to sway his group in that direction, Baldwin became personally involved in several international organizations, most notably the International Committee for Political Prisoners and the American League for India's Freedom, both of which he helped establish. In 1926, he took a leave from the ACLU, dedicating much of his time to the ICPP. He spent three months in Russia in 1927 and his positive observations of the country's communist government there were collected in his 1928 book Liberty under the Soviets.
At home, the ACLU entered the 1930s with an expanded agenda: increased support for African American and Native American civil rights campaigns; immigrants facing government harassment or deportation; and individuals facing suppression, intimidation or violence due to their race or religion. Police interrogation practices and compulsory military training also became more central concerns. The organization's work in these areas influenced public policy on police conduct, the rights of workers to unionize, and the restoration of tribal autonomy to Native Americans.
The Great Depression and the growing threat of fascism in Europe further cemented Baldwin's radical political views, and he became active in the League Against War and Fascism and several organization that supported the anti–fascist, revolutionary forces in the Spanish Civil War. Baldwin's personal life underwent upheaval during this time as well. He and Doty, long separated, divorced in 1935, and on March 6, 1936, Baldwin unofficially wed Evelyn Preston, a labor activist from a wealthy family. The pair lived in adjoining townhouses on West 11th Street in New York, along with Preston's sons and, later, the couple's daughter.
Changed Views on Communism
By the 1940s, with the Soviet government becoming more closely allied with the Nazis in Germany, Baldwin and the ACLU began to distance themselves from communism. In February 1940, the organization passed a resolution barring communists and members of other totalitarian organizations from its board. During World War II, the ACLU became one of the few organizations to lobby for the rights of the 110,000 Japanese and Japanese–Americans forced from their homes and placed in U.S. government–sponsored relocation camps. The ACLU also continued its steadfast defense of free speech of all stripes, even as fascist and Nazi rhetoric reached its height.
As his tenure as ACLU director neared its close, Baldwin finally made inroads with the presidential administration, then under Harry Truman. In 1947, General Douglas MacArthur, head of the U.S. War Department, invited Baldwin to advise the administration on civil liberties matters in post–war Japan. Baldwin was invited to conduct similar work in West Germany the following year.
Baldwin retired as ACLU director in November 1949, although he remained active in the organization and continued to work tirelessly for the protection of civil rights for the rest of his life. He took an active role in one of the ACLU's most controversial cases, a 1977 defense of the American Nazi Party's right to stage a march in Skokie, Illinois. A federal court ultimately found the city ordinances designed to prevent the march unconstitutional. He also conducted international civil liberties work through the United Nations and from 1950 until 1965 served as chair of the International League for the Rights of Man. Jimmy Carter recognized Baldwin's efforts with a Presidential Medal of Honor in 1981. The citation stated, according to Cottrell, "Roger Nash Baldwin is a leader in the field of civil right and a leader in the field of civil liberties. He is a national resource, and an international one as well, an inspiration to those of us who have fought for human rights, a saint to those for whom he has gained them."
Baldwin died of heart failure on August 26, 1981, at the age of 97. Before his death he prepared a statement to be read at his funeral in which, according to Cottrell, he succinctly summarized his achievements: "If I have stood for anything distinctive it is for my consistency in sticking to the principles I so profoundly believe in—nonviolence, freedom, equality, law, and justice."
Books
Cottrell, Robert C. Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union, Columbia University Press, 2000.
The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Volume 1: 1981–1985, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.
Online
Notable American Unitarians, Harvard Square Library, http://harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/index.html (November 16, 2004).
"Roger Nash Baldwin," Biography Resource Center Online, http://galenet.galegroup.com (December 10, 2005).
