BALDWIN, ROGER NASH
Roger Nash Baldwin spent his life crusading for CIVIL RIGHTS and liberties and was one of the principal founders of the AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION (ACLU).
Baldwin was born January 21, 1884, in
Wellesley, Massachusetts, into a comfortably
well-to-do Boston Brahmin family.His ancestral
roots reached back to what he once referred to as
“the inescapable Mayflower.” His father, Frank
Fenno Baldwin, was a conservative business-
man. His mother, Lucy Cushing Nash, instilled
in her children a love of art, literature, and
music. Baldwin’s parents raised their six children
with all the privileges and advantages their
wealth could provide, but they also emphasized
service to others. The family attended the Uni-
tarian Church, where an emphasis on helping
others sowed in Baldwin the seeds of a social
work career.
Baldwin was an unconventional boy who
was not interested in competitive endeavors and
shared his mother’s interest in literature and art.
He was a nonconformist who was influenced by
Henry David Thoreau’s philosophy of individu-
alism and self-reliance. Although his parents
were conservative, the young Baldwin was intro-
duced to many progressive leaders at the home
of his uncle and aunt, William Baldwin and
Ruth Standish Bowles Baldwin. His uncle was
president of the Long Island Railroad, director
of the National Child Labor Committee, and a
trustee of Tuskegee Institute. He also worked to
end prostitution. His aunt supported the fledgling
labor movement and was a founder of the NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUE, a trustee of Smith
College, and a member of the Socialist party.
The couple often entertained the social reformers
of the day, and Baldwin was influenced by his
exposure to their somewhat radical ideas.
Baldwin was educated at Harvard, earning
both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree
there. In 1906, he left the East and headed for St.
Louis to be a social worker. He directed a social
settlement house for poor people and taught the
first sociology courses offered at Washington
University, in St. Louis. He became the chief
PROBATION officer of the St. Louis Juvenile
Court in 1908. While in that position, he and
Bernard Flexner coauthored the first textbook
on the juvenile courts. Their book, Juvenile
Courts and Probation, set out professional standards
for juvenile practice and was the standard
text in the field until the 1960s. In 1910, Baldwin
became the secretary of the St. Louis Civic
League, an urban reform agency supporting
civic causes.
While working in St. Louis, Baldwin met and
became friends with the anarchist EMMA GOLDMAN.
His first defense of free speech came in
1912 when he spoke in support of MARGARET
SANGER, an early crusader for BIRTH CONTROL
and reproductive rights, whose lecture was shut
down by the police. Through the social work
profession he was attracted to the reform movement
and the labor movement.He organized the
Division on Industrial and Economic Problems
at the 1916 meeting of the National Conference
of Social Work, and wrote a report calling for
cooperative production and distribution systems
to replace competitive labor systems.
In 1917, when the United States entered
WORLD WAR I, Baldwin organized the American
Union against Militarism (AUAM), which was
later replaced by the National Civil Liberties
Bureau (NCLB). In its early days, the AUAM was
concerned with defending those who refused to
be drafted to serve in the war. Baldwin was
among the conscientious objectors opposed to
the draft, and he was sentenced to a year in jail
for his refusal to register. In a speech to the court
before he was sentenced, he explained that his
reason for opposing the draft was his “uncompromising
opposition to the principle of CONSCRIPTION
of life by the state for any purpose
whatever, in time of war or peace.”
After his release from prison, Baldwin
worked as a common laborer around the Midwest
and joined the radical International Workers
of the World (IWW) union. He returned to
New York in 1920 to help reorganize and reconstitute
the NCLB with two conservative lawyers,
Albert DeSilver and Walter Nelles, who shared
his passion for championing the rights of the
oppressed. Baldwin agreed to head the new
organization, named the American Civil Liberties
Union, and carry out its unique mission to
impartially defend the civil liberties of all U.S.
citizens, regardless of their affiliation or activities.
Baldwin was launched in what would be a
long and vigorous struggle to create “a society
with a minimum of compulsion, a maximum of
individual freedom and of voluntary association,
and the ABOLITION of exploitation and
poverty.”
Perhaps it was inevitable that Baldwin would
become associated with leftist causes, since the
people most in need of free speech protection
during the 1920s and 1930s were often political
liberals and radicals.He once told an interviewer
that during this time he was heavily influenced by the Marxist theory that “the real center in
society was the organized underdog in the trade
unions,” which he believed was true although
only part of the whole picture.
Baldwin came to realize that the civil liberties
of right-wing groups were just as likely to be
infringed as those of left-wingers. Bewildered
and frustrated by liberal groups who opposed
the ACLU’s support of free speech rights for the
American Nazi party or the KU KLUX KLAN,
Baldwin said, “[T]hese people can be just as
great tyrants as the other side . . . helping them
get freedom didn’t help the cause of freedom.”
Referring to the wide variety of causes the ACLU
defended over the years, Baldwin said, “I always
felt from the beginning that you had to defend
people you disliked and feared as well as those
you admired.” Although not a member of any
party, he supported the causes of Communists,
Socialists, and other leftist organizations during
the 1920s and 1930s. However, in 1940, when he
began to realize that the Communist label was
being used by totalitarian governments, he
wrote a resolution that resulted in the removal
of all the Communist members of the ACLU
board. Ironically, Baldwin’s resolution became
the model for government LOYALTY OATHS,
which the ACLU later attacked in court.
Although he was a card-carrying Wobbly, as
members of the IWW were called, Baldwin
could not be categorized as liberal or conservative.
He was active in the National Audubon
Society, the American Political Science Association,
and a number of other organizations on
both ends of the political spectrum. The only
label Baldwin accepted for himself was that of
reformer: “I am dead certain that human
progress depends on those heretics, rebels and
dreamers who have been my kin in spirit and
whose ‘holy discontent’ has challenged established
authority and created the expanding
visions mankind may yet realize.”
During the years of Baldwin’s leadership, the
ACLU, using volunteer lawyers, was involved in
a wide variety of civil liberties cases, especially
involving free speech and assembly. One concerned
a 1925 Tennessee law forbidding the
teaching of evolution in public schools. The
ACLU defended a science teacher, John Thomas
Scopes, charged with violating the law (Scopes v.
State, 152 Tenn. 424, 278 S.W. 57 [1925]; 154
Tenn. 105, 289 S.W. 363 [1927]). WILLIAM JENNINGS
BRYAN, a three-time presidential candidate
and well-known fundamentalist, helped the
state attorney general prosecute the case, and the
notorious CLARENCE DARROW, a self-proclaimed
atheist, defended Scopes. The trial ended with
Scopes being convicted, although the verdict
was later overturned because of a judicial error.
The trial brought the issue of ACADEMIC FREEDOM
to the public’s attention and probably
helped stunt the growth of the antievolution
movement.
The ACLU was involved in the Sacco-
Vanzetti murder case, in which it was widely
believed that the two defendants, Nicolo Sacco
and BARTOLOMEO VANZETTI, were scapegoated
because they were Italian anarchists and draft
resisters. Baldwin led the ACLU into the anticensorship
arena in the fight to lift the importation
ban on such books as James Joyce’s Ulysses.
In 1938, the ACLU obtained an INJUNCTION
against Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City,
ordering him to cease antiunion activities.
ACLU lawyers defended the free expression and
free press rights of the Jehovah’s Witnesses,
whose anti-Catholic rhetoric and aggressive
canvassing tactics came under attack. They successfully
argued that Henry Ford had a FIRST
AMENDMENT right to express his antiunion
views as long as he did not threaten workers.
Possibly the most controversial cases accepted
by the ACLU were those that defended the free
speech rights of unpopular groups such as the
Ku Klux Klan, the German-American Bund, and
the American Nazi party.
During WORLD WAR II, Baldwin and the
ACLU opposed the movement of Japanese
Americans from their homes on the West Coast
to relocation camps. After the war, he helped
General Douglas MacArthur set up a civil liberties
policy for the occupation forces in Japan.He
also consulted on civil liberties issues in the U.S.
zone of occupied Germany.
Baldwin, always a nonconformist, lived an
ascetic lifestyle, wearing the same ill-fitting suit
for years at a time and accepting a subsistence
salary from the ACLU. He was married for fifteen
years to Madeleine Z. Doty, a reformist
lawyer. They divorced in 1934, and in 1936 he
married another reformer, Evelyn Preston,
whose two sons he adopted. The couple had one
child, Helen Baldwin Mannoni.
Baldwin retired as head of the ACLU in
1950, but he never retired from the causes to
which he was committed.He continued working
until the day he died, August 26, 1981, at age
ninety-seven. A few months before his death, President JIMMY CARTER awarded him the
Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest
civilian tribute. Reflecting on that honor, Baldwin
expressed the philosophy he had lived by all
his life: “Never yield your courage—your
courage to live, your courage to fight, to resist, to
develop your own lives, to be free.” It is clear that
Baldwin never yielded his courage, and that he
remained to the end a dauntless crusader for
freedom and liberty for all U.S. citizens.
FURTHER READINGS
Lamson, Peggy. 1976. Roger Baldwin: Founder of the American
Civil Liberties Union. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Walker, Samuel. 1990. In Defense of American Liberties: A
History of the ACLU. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
CROSS-REFERENCES
Communism; First Amendment; Freedom of Speech; Japanese
American Evacuation Cases; Sacco and Vanzetti; Scopes
Monkey Trial.
