After 100 years, the American Civil Liberties Union is still fighting

On Jan. 12, 1920, social activist Roger Baldwin and his friends convened at a club on West 12th Street in lower Manhattan to reconfigure the National Civil Liberties Bureau. They had organized the NCLB to support conscientious objectors during World War I. They now had something significantly more ambitious in mind that they intended to name the American Civil Liberties Union.

In a story that Jan. 26 in The Washington Post, newly named ACLU Chairman Harry Ward said the organization would “champion in the highest courts the civil liberty rights of persons and organizations.” He mentioned free speech, a free press and peaceful assemblage as among the ACLU’s principle concerns. 

The ACLU's beginnings

Baldwin knew daunting challenges lay ahead. “We have got to take the risks of conflict with the authorities and even of mob violence. We can do nothing effective by sitting safely in New York,” he wrote in a memo outlining his vision of the new organization. Baldwin went on to serve as the ACLU’s executive director for 30 years.

At the time of the ACLU’s birth, World War I had been over for more than year, but its impact was still being felt. In the summer of 1919, a wave of lynchings and race riots had swept the nation, driven largely by fears that blacks would demand more rights.

As author Cameron McWhirter described that period in "Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America": “Though no complete and accurate records on the months of violence were compiled, analysis of newspaper accounts, government documents, court records and NAACP files show at least 25 major riots and mob actions erupted and at least 52 black people were lynched. Many victims were burned to death. … In almost every case, white mobs — whether sailors on leave, immigrant slaughterhouse workers or southern farmers — initiated the violence.”

It was also a year of labor unrest. Numerous strikes broke out, including among steelworkers and coal miners, as workers fought to make up income lost to wage freezes during the war. 

The labor uprising was essentially crushed by corporate forces, whose operatives spread the word that unions were controlled by Bolsheviks. Such smears seemed credible to many citizens struggling to understand a wave of bombings (attributed to foreign radicals) targeting prominent Americans. Although no officials were killed in the attacks, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was among those targeted. Palmer made it his mission to deport as many suspicious aliens as possible. His agents fanned out across the country and arrested thousands, often for no credible reason.

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Even before the excesses of the postwar era, civil libertarians had grown alarmed. Just speaking out against the war or against the draft was enough to land you in prison, and criticizing an ally of the United States could result in hard time. In one bizarre case, Robert Goldstein, the producer of a silent film titled “The Spirit of ’76,” drew a 10-year sentence because his movie — about the Revolutionary War — depicted the English in an unflattering light.

The potential for a court that fulfilled its constitutional mandate

The ACLU’s creators felt the courts must be an essential protector of Americans’ rights. Chief Justice John Roberts, in his year-end report last month on the federal judiciary, made much the same point as he paid homage to the Founders and the Constitution.

Roberts also issued a warning: “We have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.”

Baldwin and his peers would not have argued with that, although they may have pointed out that America, even in the Founders’ time, was notoriously bad at recognizing some basic American rights. And they would have quibbled with any suggestion that the government of their day, including the judiciary, was doing a good job of enforcing those rights.

Instead, they would have argued that the judiciary had failed — not just in restraining executive overreach but also in preventing local governments, across the nation, from banning controversial speakers or otherwise trampling civil liberties.

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The ACLU spearheaded a movement that radically extended the reach of the Bill of Rights — especially of the First Amendment. It helped America during World War II avoid the severe assault on speech that characterized government policy during World War I. That second war, nonetheless, saw other civil liberties missteps, including our government’s decision to segregate more than 100,000 people in internment camps simply because of their ethnicity.

The battle over government’s encroachment on rights has never ended. It was refought during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations over the limits of government surveillance and detention of suspected bad guys. And it is being refought now, with the ACLU and other organizations squaring off against an executive branch that seems unwilling to recognize scarcely any limits at all.

Few organizations manage, on their 100th birthday, to remain as relevant as on the day of their birth. That the ACLU has pulled it off is a tribute to the vision of its founders. It is also a reminder that the rights Baldwin and his allies swore to protect never become completely immune to our leaders’ worst impulses.

Ellis Cose, author of the forthcoming "Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU’s 100-Year Fight for Rights in America," is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @EllisCose