Background
Baldwin was born in 1884 in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. His father, Frank Feno Baldwin, was a leather merchant, and his mother, Lucy Cushing Nash, a feminist.
Baldwin was born in 1884 in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. His father, Frank Feno Baldwin, was a leather merchant, and his mother, Lucy Cushing Nash, a feminist.
Baldwin attended Harvard University (B. A. , 1904; M. A. , 1905). He then taught sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. (1906–09), and also served as chief probation officer of the city’s Juvenile Court (1907–10) and secretary of the reformist Civic League of St. Louis (1910–17).
Baldwin returned east in 1917, maintaining his association with AUAM in his new home of New York City. On October 1 of that year, Baldwin and the CLB officially split with the AUAM to form the separate National Civil Liberties Bureau. 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. "
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.
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.
His efforts were less successful in this instance.
Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty and executed on August 23, 1927.
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.
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.
Police interrogation practices and compulsory military training also became more central concerns.
Baldwin's personal life underwent upheaval during this time as well.
By the 19406, 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.
Roger Nash Baldwin 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.
Roger Nash Baldwin remained active in politics for the rest of his life; for example, he co-founded the International League for the Rights of Man, which is now known as the International League for Human Rights. In St. Louis, Baldwin had been greatly influenced by the radical social movement of the anarchist Emma Goldman. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World.
During Baldwin’s tenure as head of the ACLU, the organization acquired such diverse clients as teacher John T. Scopes in the 1925 Tennessee “Monkey Trial”; the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which won free-press rights in 1938; James Joyce, who had the ban lifted from his novel Ulysses; and Henry Ford, who was granted the right to distribute antiunion pamphlets. The ACLU defended persons of all persuasions, including radicals on the far left and on the far right.
In 1940 Baldwin became disenchanted with the communists and removed them from the ACLU’s board of directors. In the end he made civil rights a universal cause—a reversal of conditions in the 1920s and ’30s, when civil liberties were widely regarded suspiciously as a radical or leftist cause.