ROGER
BALDWIN: FOUNDER, AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION 1884-1981
by Robert C. Cottrell, Professor of History and American
Studies at California State University, Chico
Roger
at the time of the founding of the ACLU. (Courtesy of Peggy
Lamson)
Roger Baldwin, when
reflecting on his life, said that in his early years he not only
regularly attended the Unitarian Church in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts;
he also helped to teach in the Sunday School and even listened to
the preacher. He added, “I would say that social work began
in my mind in the Unitarian Church when I was ten or twelve years
old, and I started to do things that I thought would help other
people.”
In 1981 a memorial
service at the Community Church of New York, Unitarian Universalist,
celebrated the nintey-seven years of Roger Baldwin’s vigorous
and sometimes contradictory life.
The
Baldwin Children: Roger, Margaret, Ruth, Deborah, Herber,
and Robert.
(Courtesy of Peggy Lamson)
By the mid-1930s, Roger
Nash Baldwin had carved out a well-established reputation as America's
foremost civil libertarian. He was, at the same time, one of the
nation's leading figures in left-of-center circles. Founder and
long time director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Baldwin
was a firm Popular Fronter who believed that forces on the left
side of the political spectrum
should unite to ward off the threat posed by right-wing aggressors
and to advance progressive causes. Baldwin's
expansive civil liberties perspective, coupled with
his determined belief in the need for sweeping socioeconomic change,
sometimes resulted in contradictory and controversial pronouncements.
That made him something of a lightning rod for those who painted
the ACLU with a red brush.
Raised in the Boston
suburb of Wellesley Hills, Baldwin's ancestral roots were rich
and comfortable. Relatives included Mayflower Pilgrims, a general
in George Washington's army, and the founder of the Boston Young
Men's Christian Union. Family friends ranged from Ralph Waldo
Emerson to Oliver Wendell Holmes to Booker T. Washington. Reared
in a patriarchal household, Baldwin had parents who considered
themselves "agnostic Unitarians." Inevitably, as he
later noted, Baldwin attended Harvard College during the period
when the Progressive movement unfolded, with its calls for righting
some of the wrongs resulting from the process of rapid modernization.
After completing his M.A. degree, Baldwin heeded the advice of
his father's attorney and confidant, Louis D. Brandeis, to head
for the Midwest to seek his fortune. In St. Louis, Baldwin entered
the field of social work, establishing a national reputation in
the process. As the period of direct U.S. involvement in World
War I approached, Baldwin ended up in New York where he became
a leading figure in the American Union Against Militarism. Concerned
about the plight of wartime dissidents, including the members
of the Industrial Workers of the World, Baldwin eventually headed
the National Civil Liberties Bureau. Determined to safeguard the
political rights of the IWW members, the Wobblies, and conscientious
objectors, Baldwin reasoned that well-intentioned individuals
in a group like the NCLB could reach out to top government officials
in Woodrow Wilson's administration. However, in a display of solidarity
with wartime resisters, Baldwin deliberately violated the Selective
Service Act, which resulted in a celebrated trial and his confinement
in prison. In 1919 he briefly joined the IWW and took to the road
as a laborer, before returning to New York and his new wife, the
lawyer Madeleine Z. Doty. The following January Baldwin helped
to set up the ACLU.
Believing that only
the best sorts of people should be involved in an organization
like the ACLU, Baldwin sought to limit the membership rolls. At
the same time, theACLU became involved in a series of noteworthy
cases, including those involving Sacco and Vanzetti, John T. Scopes,
and the Scottsboro Boys. ACLU attorneys helped to reshape American
constitutional law, with the idea of the First Amendment providing
a shield for "preferred freedoms" beginning to take
hold. All the while, Baldwin continued to back a number of left-wing
endeavors, supporting various United Front and Popular Front enterprises,
writing about and visiting Soviet Russia, and urging that radicals
and liberals in the United States join together to fight fascism,
racism, and poverty.
Daughter
Helen, Roger, and Evelyn at Windy Gates, Martha's Vineyard,
1941. (Courtesy of Peggy Lamson)
While
revered by many, Baldwin also acquired numerous foes, including
some outside the public sector who considered him dangerous and
others in Congress and agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The FBI's chief, J. Edgar Hoover, despite an apparently amicable
relationship with Baldwin, ordered that an already existing file
be maintained on the ACLU director. This occurred despite the fact
that Baldwin's ideological stance underwent an alteration starting
in the mid-thirties, the byproduct of personal and political developments.
Baldwin, who had previously participated in an unconventional marriage,
entered a new, lasting relationship with Evelyn Preston, a well-educated
younger woman whose family was close to the Roosevelts. While Baldwin
and Evie never took wedding vows, he served as a stepfather to her
two sons and they had a child of their own, a daughter. The Baldwin-Preston
clan lived comfortably in a pair of adjacent Greenwich Village townhouses;
a farm in Oakland, New Jersey; and a large estate on Martha's Vineyard.
This was the same period when Baldwin became increasingly disturbed
by events in the Soviet Union, where purge trials were being undertaken,
and by politically troublesome accusations leveled at the ACLU by
the House Committee on un-American Activities.
Roger
in his beloved canoe (Courtesy of Peggy Lamson)
Baldwin became less
happy with the Popular Front approach and concerned about the
very existence of the ACLU after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939. The following spring, in an
effort to stave off criticisms of the organization and the cause
he had devoted much of his adulthood to, Baldwin orchestrated
a campaign to revise the ACLU charter. Henceforth, those affiliated
with totalitarian organizations would not be allowed to serve
on the ACLU board. The immediate target was the former-Wobbly
and present Communist Party member, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. An
organizational "trial" of Flynn ensued, resulting in
her ouster and establishing a pattern for anti-communist policies
and programs that flourished during the Cold War. In the meantime,
Baldwin and the ACLU wrestled with the issue of internment of
Japanese-Americans and Japanese aliens, which had been demanded
by the U.S. military. In contrast to many of his longtime colleagues
at the ACLU, Baldwin continued to challenge such violations of
civil liberties, but he also sought to maintain good relations
with the federal government. He opposed the prosecution of native
fascists and Trotskyists alike, just as he later challenged the
moves by government officials to abridge the rights of communists.
Nevertheless, during
the postwar period Baldwin's respectability and celebrity status
both mounted. In 1947 General Douglas MacArthur arranged for Baldwin
to serve as a civil liberties consultant in Japan; he also visited
Korea during his Asian stay. Accolades poured Baldwin's way in
late 1949, when he announced his intention to resign as director
of the ACLU, an organization that increasingly appeared to be
adapting to the landscape of Cold War America. Historian Samuel
Eliot Morison wrote to Baldwin, "You have done wonderful
work with the Civil Liberties Union. More than any other agency
in this country, it has kept alive the traditional rights of man."
Margaret Sanger, an ally from his St. Louis days, declared, "The
name Roger Baldwin and Civil Liberties are synonymous in the minds
of all people in the United States. You have fought the good fight,
Roger."
(Courtesy
of Peggy Lamson)
Baldwin's trips to
the Far East had merely whetted a long-standing determination
to become more involved in the international arena. For the next
several years, Baldwin sought to work for international human
rights, producing a volume, A New Slavery, which condemned
"the inhuman communist police state tyranny, forced labor."
He continued to travel widely, visiting South Vietnam, where he
both criticized the repressive regime of Ngo Dinh Diem and termed
him "a charming idealist but tough
on dissenters." By contrast, in Puerto Rico, Baldwin remained
close to Governor Luis Munoz Marin, a former fiery socialist;
the jailed independence leader Pedro Albizu Campos; and the cellist
Pablo Casals, among others. In India, Baldwin maintained an old
friendship with President Jawaharlal Nehru and his family.
As
the 1960s began, Baldwin remained a presence within the ACLU, which
had become, to his displeasure, something of a mass organization
under his successor, Patrick Murphy Malin.
Baldwin
also maintained an office in the secretariat building of the United
Nations and continued as a consultant for the International League
for the Rights of Man. Castigated by a segregationist congressman
for supporting civil rights for black Americans, Baldwin was the
recipient of accolades by others. In a moving tribute titled "The
Underdog's Best Friend," Margorie M. Bitker referred to Baldwin
as "long the moving spirit of the American Civil Liberties
Union." Baldwin remained "a pacifist, the only label,
by the way, that he is willing to wear." Bitker quoted him
as affirming, "The rule of law in place of force, always
basic to my thinking, now takes on a new relevance in a world
where, if war is to go, only law can replace it."
Concerned
about the plight of wartime dissidents, including the members
of the Industrial Workers of the World, Baldwin eventually headed
the National Civil Liberties Bureau. Determined to safeguard the
political rights of the IWW members, the Wobblies, and conscientious
objectors, Baldwin reasoned that well-intentioned individuals
in a group like the NCLB could reach out to top government officials
in Woodrow Wilson's administration. However, in a display of solidarity
with wartime resisters, Baldwin deliberately violated the Selective
Service Act, which resulted in a celebrated trial and his confinement
in prison. In 1919 he briefly joined the IWW and took to the road
as a laborer, before returning to New York and his new wife, the
lawyer Madeleine Z. Doty. The following January Baldwin helped
to set up the ACLU.
