Roger Nash Baldwin (1884-1981)

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Roger Nash Baldwin, an important American, and citizen of the world.

And a vital reminder that one person can work for change and achieve greatness.

Baldwin was born to a prominent and old family in Wellesley, Massachusetts on January 21, 1884. His father was a leather manufacturer and both sides of the family were descended from pilgrim stock. Destined for All-American Boyhood, Roger failed to conform to society’s values for young males. Not a boy interested or skilled in sports, he instead gravitated towards arts and literature, marking him as “different.” In self-defense, Baldwin sought what he remembered as “unconventional, nonconformist avenues of expression,” along the lines of his heroes Thoreau and Emerson, and in keeping with his parents’ Unitarian religious traditions.

As a Harvard-educated sociologist, Baldwin soon became a prominent expert on juvenile court processes, and moved to St Louis as a youth probation officer and policy researcher. He was already seeking ways to improve the American justice system, but, in 1909, he attended a lecture delivered by famed agitator Emma Goldman, and it was then that the great reformer Roger Nash Baldwin was conceived. Exposed to a plethora of political animals, from anarchists to libertarians to the truly non-conformist folks without any party at all (such as himself), Baldwin realized that there was a movement afoot, one that sought to protect the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers, to resist coercion, to defend freedom, and, even, to do all this through non-violent means. His political and ethical views were beginning to meld in this environment of free political expression.

Baldwin became involved with civil liberty causes, as well as municipal government reform, and he began to notice areas in which American society was failing in its mandate to protect personal freedoms. In 1910, St Louis denied birth control advocate Margaret Sanger the right to hold a rally in a community hall. He also witnessed, in his work, the absolute resistance of white institutions to allow a black citizen to improve his lot, such as the Washington University’s refusal to even construct a separate course of study for blacks.

It was then that Baldwin began to realize, “In cases where minority rights are concerned, you can't trust the majority,” which has remained a cornerstone of many civil rights ideologies.

In 1917, Baldwin aligned himself with the anti-war movement and took a stance as a conscientious objector, joining the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), which later split to became the Civil Liberties Bureau. After “respectfully declining” his own draft notice, and declaring that to go to war would be to insult every one of his core beliefs surrounding personal freedom and the ideal of non-violent social change, Baldwin was sentenced to one year in prison for his refusal to serve, thereby increasing his fame and respect as an advocate of citizens’ rights in America.

Even in prison, Baldwin managed to maintain an impressive correspondence with advocates on the outside, as well as establishing a Prisoners’ Welfare League to protect the rights of inmates!

After his release, Baldwin married Madeline Doty, an impressive feminist and pacifist activist, and she convinced him that, if he was to care about the plight of the workers and the down-trodden, he must experience it for himself. He had already experienced prison, so his next step was to travel West as an unskilled labourer, and he traveled America working whatever he could find, at times as a line cook on the railway, and he participated in a real steel workers’ strike. These were all valuable lessons for Baldwin, who had always lived in upper middle class luxury.

In 1920, Baldwin returned to New York, filled with a new certainty that America needed assistance. He transformed the Civil Liberties Bureau into an organization recognized throughout the world, the very name of which can still strike fear, disgust, resentment, or admiration into the hearts of people around the world: The American Civil Liberties Union, or, as it is better known, the ACLU.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Baldwin flirted with Communism, and traveled to Soviet Russia to research alternate methods of political life. At first, he was favorably impressed with what the Russians had accomplished, and believed that Communism was a successful method to bring about the improvement of the international working class, particularly in its emphasis on unity surpassing ethnic divides, as well as fair and equal distribution of wealth according to the willingness to work. However, greatly disillusioned by the Soviet-Nazi pact in 1939, and increasingly alarmed at the counter-human rights charges against Stalin coming out of Russia, Baldwin passionately distanced himself from the Soviet model, and even began a crusade to discourage Communist ideals in the ACLU.

Horrifically, the oath that ACLU board members were asked to take under Baldwin in the 1940s, swearing that they had never been, and were not currently members of, the Communist Party, was a grim foreshadow of that used at the McCarthy Witch Hunts of the 1950s, and Baldwin’s anti-Communist fervour remains one of the darkest blotches on an otherwise impressive and admirable career defending the human from the state.

Baldwin’s achievements must be seen to far outweigh this flawed view. His interests ranged not only from idealistic causes but to on-the-ground-work for human rights, as well as for early environmentalist concerns and the international welfare of children. Applying the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (though he was not personally religious), as well as of Gandhi, Baldwin was a defender of pacifism and patriotism through two periods in American history in which those two ideas could not be spoken of in the same breath. Baldwin retired from official leadership of the ACLU in 1950, but he never withdrew from his causes, and his hand would guide the organization from his role as a charismatic mentor-emeritus all the way until his death in 1981.

Under Baldwin, the ACLU’s character and ideals were formed, and it was under his direction that some of its greatest cases were handled, including the Scope’s Monkey Trial and the Sacco and Vanzetti travesty. The ACLU was an early defender of the freedom of speech in publication, fighting against the banning of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses. Under Baldwin, they also sought to protect the rights of all non-conformists, including the Jehovah’s Witnesses, trade unionists, and even the Ku Klux Klan. Baldwin insisted that the organization must use the Constitution in the defense of all people, for the very value of that sacred document was in its advocacy even of people you “feared, as well as those you admired.”

The ACLU was not born from one man, but it was significantly shaped by him. Baldwin went on to help establish civil liberties unions in Japan, Germany and Austria, winning awards and medals from several governments for his tireless efforts, including the Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Carter on January 16, 1981.
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