Roger Baldwin

The Baldwins were Boston Brahmins, and nothing in Roger Baldwin's upbringing in Wellesley, Massachusetts pointed anywhere but the family's own comfortable ground. He took a bachelor's and a master's at Harvard by 1905, then went to St. Louis on the advice of Louis Brandeis and stayed a decade. He taught sociology at Washington University, worked as a social worker, became chief probation officer of the St. Louis Juvenile Court, and co-wrote a book on juvenile courts that made his name in the field. What undid the respectable version of him was a lecture. He heard Emma Goldman speak, kept listening, and ended up in the Industrial Workers of the World.

Conscription in 1917 produced men who would not serve, and Baldwin built the machinery to defend them. He pushed the American Union Against Militarism to open a legal division, took charge of it in July 1917, and by October had spun it off as the National Civil Liberties Bureau. Then he refused to register for the draft himself, and on October 30, 1918 a federal court sentenced him to a year in a penitentiary. The bureau became the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. Under him it took the Scopes trial and the Sacco and Vanzetti defense.

In 1922 Baldwin wrote to the Ku Klux Klan's Imperial Wizard offering to defend its right to parade and burn crosses so long as it did not practice violence. In 1934 he fought a New Jersey bill aimed at Nazi propaganda, arguing it outlawed all controversy, and the ACLU went on defending pro-Nazi groups. He toured the Soviet Union in 1927 and published Liberty Under the Soviets in 1928, a book far too credulous about what he saw. The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 ended his faith in Moscow. In February 1940 he backed the board resolution barring supporters of totalitarianism from ACLU leadership, and the board expelled Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founder, for being a Communist. Critics called it a betrayal of the ACLU's founding principle. The ACLU rescinded the resolution in 1968 and reversed her expulsion in 1976.

He gave up the ACLU directorship in 1950, and retirement turned out to mean a change of continent. Douglas MacArthur had already brought him to occupied Japan in 1947 to help build civil liberties there, and he founded the Japan Civil Liberties Union and received the Order of the Rising Sun. Germany and Austria asked for the same work in 1948. He co-founded the International League for the Rights of Man and kept at it into his nineties. Jimmy Carter gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom on January 16, 1981, seven months before he died of heart failure at 97. The ACLU now has affiliates in every state and well over a million members.

Roger Baldwin's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Juvenile Courts and Probation book
  Written with Bernard Flexner, and the foundation of his early reputation 1914
• National Civil Liberties Bureau other
  Built to defend conscientious objectors — the ACLU's direct ancestor 1917
• American Civil Liberties Union other
  Founded out of the wartime bureau, and directed for 30 years 1920
• Liberty Under the Soviets book
  The book he spent the rest of his life answering for 1928
• Japan Civil Liberties Union other
  Founded during the occupation at Douglas MacArthur's invitation 1947
• A New Slavery book
  His case against Communist forced labor, and his answer to the 1928 book 1953

• January 21, 1884 aged 0 Born in Wellesley, Massachusetts Son of Frank Fenno Baldwin and Lucy Cushing Nash, in a family with a long New England pedigree.
• 1905 aged ~21 Finishes at Harvard with a bachelor's and a master's degree He moved to St. Louis on the advice of Louis Brandeis and spent a decade there as a social worker, probation officer and sociology teacher.
• July 1, 1917 aged 33 The American Union Against Militarism creates a legal bureau under him It broke away on October 1 as the National Civil Liberties Bureau, with Baldwin as director.
• October 30, 1918 aged 34 Sentenced to a year in a penitentiary for refusing to register for the draft He turned down alternative service as well, including farm work.
• 1920 aged ~36 The bureau is renamed the American Civil Liberties Union Baldwin became its first executive director and held the job for 30 years.
• 1927 aged ~43 Visits the Soviet Union Liberty Under the Soviets followed in 1928. The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 ended his sympathy for the regime.
• February 1940 aged 56 The ACLU board bars supporters of totalitarianism from its leadership Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founder of the organization, was voted off the board after a six-hour debate.
• January 16, 1981 aged 96 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Jimmy Carter
• August 26, 1981 aged 97 Dies of heart failure at 97 in Ridgewood, New Jersey He had been living in Oakland, New Jersey.

• Emma Goldman 1869–1940
  Anarchist orator and editor whose free-speech and birth-control agitation led to her 1919 deportation. radicalized by
• Alexander Berkman 1870–1936
  Anarchist who shot and stabbed Henry Clay Frick in 1892 and wrote Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. ally
• Clarence Darrow 1857–1938
  Defense lawyer in the Leopold and Loeb, Scopes, and Sweet trials ACLU colleague
• Eugene V. Debs 1855–1926
  Socialist Party leader who ran for president five times from prison and championed labor rights. campaigned to free
• Felix Frankfurter 1882–1965
  Supreme Court justice and Harvard professor whose jurisprudence and government service shaped twentieth-century American law. ACLU co-founder
• Frank Kameny 1925–2011
  Gay rights activist fired by the federal government in 1957 civil liberties successor