Roger Baldwin
Roger Nash Baldwin passionately believed in the protection of individual liberty. In 1920, Baldwin and his fellow reformers established the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to ensure that the Bill of Rights would be preserved for each new generation. As its founding director, Baldwin used his 30-year tenure to move the ACLU towards its place as the most renowned public interest law firm in America.
"The smallest deed is better than the grandest intention."
— Roger Baldwin
Born: January 21, 1884 in Wellesley, Massachusetts
Died: August 26, 1981 in Ridgewood, New Jersey
Activist Margaret Sanger once declared, "The name Roger Baldwin and Civil Liberties are synonymous." Roger Nash Baldwin lived a life of activism and public service. As the founding director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he helped turn the nation's attention to the protections guaranteed to citizens by United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Baldwin and his colleagues truly shaped today's constitutional understanding of civil liberties.
When the ACLU was founded in 1920, the Supreme Court had never upheld a single free speech claim under the First Amendment. Activists were jailed for distributing antiwar literature instead of being protected by the first amendment. Suspected foreign-born political radicals were deported rather than afforded equal protection under the law. A culture of state sanctioned violence against African Americans prevailed. As the first public interest law firm of its kind the ACLU got into the business of "defending and preserving the individual rights and liberties guaranteed.... by the constitution."
Roger Nash Baldwin was born on January 1, 1884, to a prominent Massachusetts family whose roots could be traced back to the Mayflower Pilgrims. His parents, Frank Fenno Baldwin and Lucy Cushing (Nash) Baldwin, raised their six children in the wealthy Boston suburb of Wellesley Hills. Frank and Lucy Baldwin were free thinking Unitarians whose family friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois.
Childhood exposure to Unitarian values and the great thinkers of the 19th century set the stage for Baldwin's life of activism and public service. Even as a young boy, Baldwin assumed an active role in his church, undoubtedly absorbing the Unitarian credo "to affirm and promote the inherent dignity and worth of every person." Baldwin reflected in his later years 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."
Baldwin later attended Harvard University, where he earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees. Casting about for a career, he sought the advice of another prominent family friend, Louis D. Brandeis, who recommended that the young man become a social worker. Baldwin followed the recommendation, but moved from Boston to St. Louis, where he could more easily forge a career based on his own merits rather than trading on his family name.
Baldwin lived and worked in St. Louis until 1917. While in St. Louis, he established a sociology department at Washington University, where he taught from 1906 to 1910. He eventually served as chief officer of the St. Louis Juvenile Court and voluntary secretary of the National Probation Association. Upon developing an interest and expertise in this area, Baldwin co-authored Juvenile Courts and Probation, which reigned as a standard academic text on the subject for decades.
While in St. Louis, Baldwin grew interested in the emerging radical political and social movements. He developed a close friendship with the anarchist Emma Goldman and moved in elite left-wing circles. When the United States entered World War I, he left St. Louis to work with the pacifist movement. He joined the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), an organization that lobbied first against U.S. entrance into the war and later for a peaceful resolution to the war. Baldwin was involved specifically in a branch of the AUAM known as the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), which was dedicated to defending conscientious objectors. In 1918 Baldwin himself was called up for military service, but naturally refused to serve. He was sentenced to a year in jail, time he later referred to as "my vacation on the government."
By 1919, Baldwin was a free man again. Soon after his release, he married Madeleine Z. Doty, a pacifist and feminist, whom he would later divorce in 1935. World War I had ended, but the wartime climate hostile to civil liberties endured: a post-war "Red Scare" fostered political intolerance; many anti-war activists continued to languish in jails; women had only just won the right to vote and were still struggling for equality; racial segregation was legal. Baldwin and other reformers like Norman Thomas, Jane Addams, John Dewey, and Upton Sinclair recognized the urgent need to protect the civil liberties promised to citizens by the Bill of Rights. Out of this concern, the NCLB was reconfigured in 1920 as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), with Baldwin as the organization's founding director, a post he held for the next 30 years.
During his tenure, Baldwin was personally involved in two of the ACLU's most important cases: the Scopes trial and the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Other key subjects addressed under his leadership included censorship of literature such as Joyce's Ulysses, racial segregation, Jim Crow, and McCarthyism. Thanks to the efforts of Baldwin and outstanding ACLU volunteer attorneys such as Clarence Darrow, Arthur Garfield Hays, Osmond Frankel, and Edward Ennis, constitutional issues were brought to the fore of the national consciousness and our modern understanding of the Bill of Rights was born.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Baldwin backed a number of left wing endeavors and supported various United Front and Popular Front enterprises. He wrote about and visited Soviet Russia, urging radicals and liberals alike to join together to fight fascism, racism, and poverty. He attracted both positive and negative attention as a result of his outspoken praise of communism. The FBI opened a file on Baldwin and kept a close watch on his activities. In the mid-thirties, Baldwin's personal and professional life developed in a way that distanced him from the communist ideology. He married his second wife, Evie Preston, in 1936. She had two sons, both of which Baldwin adopted, and they had one child together. He broke with the communists in 1939 and revised the ACLU charter in order to prevent anyone affiliated with a totalitarian organization from joining the board.
Following World War II, Baldwin became involved in working for international human rights. In 1947, General MacArthur invited him to go to Japan and South Korea as a civil liberties consultant. While in Japan, he founded the Japan Civil Liberties Union, and the Japanese government awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun in gratitude. In 1948 Baldwin provided similar help to Germany and Austria. In 1950, at the age of 66, he resigned as executive director of the ACLU to pursue international projects full-time.
For the next fifteen years, Baldwin chaired the International League for the Rights of Man, an organization he helped found in 1946. He traveled to the Middle East, Cuba, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Peru, Nigeria, Western Europe, Poland, and the Soviet Union. In 1953, he wrote A New Slavery in which he condemned communism for its betrayal of human rights. Baldwin managed to make time for interests that extended beyond the social and political world. He served as the director and vice-president of the National Audubon Society and donated a piece of land in New Jersey to the organization to be used as a bird sanctuary. In 1981, his lifetime of service to the nation was recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He remained active until his death at the age of 97.
In the eighty-one years since Baldwin founded the ACLU, the organization has grown to encompass 300,000 members and supporters. This nonpartisan public interest group remains devoted to protecting the basic civil liberties of all Americans. Today, the ACLU is effectively the country's largest public interest law firm, appearing before the U.S. Supreme Court more often than any other non-government organization. The organization has participated directly or indirectly in almost every major civil liberties case contested in the American court system. The ACLU pursues more than a dozen national projects devoted to specific civil liberties issues, including AIDS, arts censorship, capital punishment, children's rights, education reform, lesbian and gay rights, immigrants' rights, national security, privacy and technology, prisoners' rights, reproductive freedom, voting rights, women's rights and workplace rights.
The enduring mission of the ACLU is a reflection of Roger Baldwin's mission in life: to assure that the Bill of Rights, which guards against unwarranted governmental control of citizens, is preserved for each new generation. Historian Samuel Walker has written “Respect for civil liberties is not a natural impulse, certainly not in American society with its seething religious, ethnic and racial tensions...The ACLU's history is eloquent testimony to the fact that the principles in the Bill of Rights acquire flesh and blood only when someone fights for them.”
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