Articles
Gara LaMarche
Democracy
January 1, 2007
The following review of Judy Kutulas's The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press) by OSI vice president and director of U.S. Programs Gara LaMarche appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of the journal Democracy.
When Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) since 2001, has a bad day, he ought to pull down from the shelf this remarkable history of his organizational ancestors. It might perk him up.
Romero has been having more than a few bad days lately. Taking office just four days before the September 11 attacks, he was plunged into the greatest civil liberties crisis since the Palmer Raids and other World War I–era abuses spawned the ACLU’s founding in 1920. For five years, he’s had to work overtime, forging alliances on the right and left while fighting the Bush Administration and its allies on everything from torture to domestic surveillance. But Romero’s bad days haven’t been caused totally by his adversaries in government, though. It’s his friends he has to worry about, too. While not taking issue with the organization’s ardor and effectiveness, a few ACLU board members have complained publicly about what they see as serious lapses of principle and transparency on several internal matters, using no less than the New York Times (which has run a half-dozen articles on the conflict) as their platform. The longtime ACLU director whom Romero succeeded, Ira Glasser, has called for his removal, along with board President Nadine Strossen, and joined the renegade (now former) board members in forming a committee to "Save the ACLU." (To Romero’s relief, Glasser’s and Strossen’s immediate predecessors, along with numerous other former officials, have been outspoken in support of the current management.)
There are few activist organizations, liberal or conservative, that could stand up to the spotlight recently shone on the ACLU. But as Judy Kutulas—a professor of history and American studies at St. Olaf’s College—exhaustively demonstrates in The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930–60, where the ACLU is concerned, there was never a golden age. In her account of three of the organization’s early decades, Kutulas doesn’t pull any punches in exposing how far short of its mission the ACLU has fallen on numerous occasions. A few egregious examples: Roger Baldwin, an ACLU founder who lived long enough (he died at 97) to be treated as a Mandela-like figure, covered up declines in ACLU membership; cozied up to congressional investigators and the FBI; and abused his staff and involved them in his personal work. When the vote of the ACLU affiliates went against the leadership’s position in a referendum in the 1950s, Baldwin’s successor, Patrick Murphy Malin—in a move that would have done the late Mayor Richard Daley proud—pushed the Chicago branch to conduct a phone ballot of members, reversing the outcome. And later, when anticommunist board members, following what was clearly already a long-standing ACLU tradition, leaked board discussions to the press, Malin threatened "possible removal" of any officer "who may be guilty."
Kutulas’s book covers only the period from 1930 to 1960 when, in her view, the ACLU completed the transformation from its radical roots to the liberal mainstream, professionalizing and bureaucratizing along the way. But, had she brought it up to the present day, she could have come up with many other instances of such internecine conflict. In 1976, the Washington director was forced out for making supposedly partisan statements. The same year saw a divisive challenge to a disputed national board election in which a staff member beat the bushes for extra votes in conservative precincts, lifting a right-leaning board member to victory. It’s easy to understand why the New York Times headlined Anthony Lukas’s 1978 profile "The ACLU Against Itself." So Romero can take comfort from the fact that internal intrigue and conflict has a long and colorful history in the nation’s leading civil liberties group. But he can also take pride, as those of us who support the ACLU do, that despite the organizational chaos, the ACLU has long since overcome a tendency to flinch when core civil liberties principles are under public assault. From standing up for those detained without charge at Guantánamo to litigating against "intelligent design" in Pennsylvania, the ACLU has been a force for liberal principles.
Kutulas’s exhaustive—and, at times, exhausting—chronicle of its early years not only shows an organization navigating the rough Red Scare seas of mid-twentieth century America, but it also demonstrates how liberal organizations are nourished and sustained by their grassroots, an instructive lesson for progressives at this critical moment in American life.
I have a more than casual relationship with the ACLU. I was appointed to its Academic Freedom Committee while a freshman at Columbia University in 1972, and I wrote its 50th anniversary history a few years later. I met Roger Baldwin on my first visit to the ACLU office and saw him regularly until he died on my birthday, in 1981. I worked for two ACLU affiliates in the 1980s, served on the National Board and Executive Committee for seven years in the 1990s, and chaired the ACLU’s Free Speech and Association Committee as well as its 75th Anniversary Conference. When the ACLU received hundreds of files on the organization from the FBI in 1977, I was the young staff member tasked to spend the summer in a back office, looking at every page and flagging instances of the FBI’s perfidy—and, most disturbingly, the ACLU’s as well (four former officials fed the Bureau information on the alleged communist ties of branch members and leaders). I know as much about the Trotskyite/Schachtmanite arguments in the City College cafeteria as any baby boomer who spent 12 years in parochial school could be expected to know. Yet I learned much from Kutulas’s prodigious research. I never knew that Groucho Marx joined the ACLU (apparently suspending his well-known policy about not wanting to belong to any club that would have him as a member). I didn’t know the ACLU was popular enough to be invited to have its own booth at the 1939 World’s Fair, while remaining controversial enough to slow down the Supreme Court nominations of Frank Murphy and Felix Frankfurter on account of their ACLU memberships. And while I always thought the ACLU was a bit ahead of its times, at least in the early days, by having women in key staff (Crystal Eastman and Lucille Milner) and board positions (foundation official Mary van Kleeck, Helen Keller, and Jane Addams), Kutulas makes a good case that they were in fact frequently marginalized.
To be fair, most organizations sanitize their history, and the ACLU is hardly an exception. But while today’s leaders concede that the middle part of the last century was not the organization’s finest hour, few understand just how often, and just how far short, the ACLU fell from its purported ideal. In 1942, the national board voted two-to-one to support the government’s right to in- tern citizens without a declaration of martial law. It did nothing in 1942 when the Justice Department ordered the U.S. Post Office to confiscate copies of Social Justice, the magazine of the far-right priest Charles Coughlin. When the United States prosecuted war opponents on seditious conspiracy charges during World War II, holding them for years at a time and trying them far away from the scene of their supposed crimes, the ACLU’s Committee on Seditious Cases studied the matter and reported that the defendants were adequately represented and that there was no need for the ACLU to intervene.
Nor did it consistently stand up for civil liberties during the Red Scare of the 1950s. When the Hollywood 10 declined to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) about their political affiliations, anti-communist ACLU board members delayed and diluted the group’s response so successfully—forcing a time-consuming referendum on whether to file an amicus brief—that, according to Kutulas, the ACLU "squandered its influence." And when, after the war, Communist Party leaders were tried under the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of government, the ACLU at first did nothing, despite the fact that it had testified against the law in 1940. While the board eventually took a close vote to ask the attorney general not to bring additional prosecutions, it also instructed the staff "not to issue any statements" that might imply an actual position on this grave violation of civil liberties. The ACLU board and national committee also supported the right of unions to bar communists as officers, the exclusion of communists as permanent immigrants, and the denial of naturalization to Communist Party members.
But, if the ACLU has such a checkered history, how did it earn its reputation as a staunch defender of the Bill of Rights? In large part it derives from the organization’s idealistic, radical roots. Look at the membership of its National Committee in 1923. It included the communist leaders Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and William Foster, the pacifist member of Congress Jeannette Rankin, and prominent socialists like Norman Thomas, Vida Scudder, and James Maurer. In that same year, the ACLU published pamphlets such as "Amnesty for Political Prisoners," "Do We Need More Sedition Laws?", and "Lynching and Debt Slavery"—at a time when the defense of civil liberties was hardly the mom-and-apple-pie position it is today. No civil liberties defender of the 1920s could look to government—certainly not at the federal level—or the courts as allies in these struggles. Instead, the ACLU had to work hard to build ties with other elements of the left, including labor and radical political parties. In so doing, the organization developed a radical reputation of its own.
Over time, however, the ACLU became more conservative, relatively speaking. The uneasy alliance between communists, socialists, and liberals began to fray, in part because of the devious tactics of many communists and in part because of the increasingly repressive response of the government and the fear it engendered among the left. It is difficult for progressives today to understand just how intense these tensions were. As Baldwin, who made the journey from cheerleader for the new Soviet Union to staunch anti-communist, put it in a 1975 interview with Alan Westin of the Civil Liberties Review, "I learned the lesson that many others–but, unfortunately, not all liberals–learned: that no movement in which communists participate can successfully resist their manipulations for control. Whatever good they did was more than destroyed by the partisan ends they served when the common interest clashed with the party line, and by the confusions between communists and noncommunist liberals."
Within the ACLU, this split was mirrored by a rising division between the trunk and the branch. The national leadership grew steadily more conservative and mainstream, particularly with the rise of the Roosevelt Administration and the access ACLU leaders had to it. Meanwhile, the affiliates—especially on the West Coast—stayed true to the organization’s radical roots. At first, I found Kutulas’s focus on the affiliates a bit odd, particularly the way her chapters alternate the perspectives of the national office and the field in each of the decades under discussion, a sort of "Upstairs/Downstairs" approach to ACLU history. But she makes a compelling case that the arcana of organizational bureaucracy are important not just because they were steps to broaden participation and counter the parochialism of the East Coast establishment, but because they pushed forward the frontiers of the organization’s work and kept it true to its core principles. Through this narrative we see that the story of the ACLU’s oscillation between idealism and compromise, in other words, is the story of the power struggle between the central and East Coast establishments and the Union’s affiliate base—and how these affiliates kept the ACLU focused on its core mission, rejuvenating it when the organization flagged.
Take the issue of Japanese-American internment during World War II, one of the country’s most infamous incursions on civil liberties. The national ACLU board, dominated by liberals eager to support FDR and the war effort, preferred to work an inside track, limiting its protests to violations of due process. But Ernie Besig of the Northern California ACLU took a different tack. It was Besig and his affiliate that took Fred Korematsu’s case to the Supreme Court, not Baldwin and the national office. Indeed, Baldwin did his best to undermine Besig. In one particularly rich but appalling anecdote, Kutulas describes Baldwin lazing on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard with his family while on the other coast Besig, whose own secretary had been interned, used scarce gasoline rations to drive hundreds of miles to the Tule Lake internment camp. While Besig conducted interviews with detainees, the camp director called Baldwin, who authorized Besig’s expulsion. Officials then escorted him to the car he had parked in a guarded lot, were Besig found his gas tank filled with salt.
And it was the affiliates, particularly the California branches, communist-influenced or not, who never wavered during the McCarthy era, even as ACLU leaders tried to work the inside track with then-Representative Richard Nixon and others on the HUAC. The tension wasn’t borne of simple geography: Kutulas suggests that the class backgrounds of national and affiliate leaders played a key part. Baldwin, described by Anthony Lewis as a "patrician heretic," took no salary, thanks to a wealthy wife, and had homes in Greenwich Village, Martha’s Vineyard, and the tonier northern reaches of New Jersey. In contrast, three leaders of the Southern California branches in the 1930s included a former Catholic seminarian, a Russian-born labor lawyer, and a social worker in a settlement house for Mexican immigrants, all without family money or connections.
Toward the end of the 1950s, the ACLU had become a fairly staid organization, and other groups on the left, such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the NAACP, had more affiliates, larger budgets, and bigger memberships. Yet today the ADA is virtually moribund, and friends worry that the NAACP’s days of glory may be behind it. The ACLU, on the other hand, has grown steadily since the 1960s, has a boldness that keeps it at the edge of controversy, and has a capacity to act at the state and national level that has no parallel among other membership organizations on the progressive side. Why?
The answer, which lies in the history Kutulas draws out for us but which came to fruition after the period covered by her book, is that the ACLU affiliates won their fight with the center establishment. In the 1960s, Aryeh Neier, then the field director, greatly expanded the number of ACLU affiliates and chapters [full disclosure: Neier is now the president of the Open Society Institute, where I work.]. In 1965, he took over the New York affiliate, and, along with his deputy, Ira Glasser, reinvented the ACLU as an ally of protest movements and the disenfranchised. With Neier’s narrow victory in the board vote for executive director in 1970, a virtual coup of the affiliates took place, and the activist approach they represented was once again the organization’s dominant stance. When Glasser succeeded him as national director in 1978, he continued the revolution, steadily shifting resources to strengthen the affiliates. While there remained echoes of the left-right ACLU split well into the last decades of the twentieth century, and even faint reverberations today, on every key issue of civil liberties policy—from protection for hate speech to defense of terrorist suspects—the ACLU is, to borrow a term from the old struggles, a united front.
The world we are living in very much reflects the ACLU’s impact. Unfortunately, the backlash against the rights movement, with the attendant culture wars along with the steady stoking of fear of crime and terrorism, has shaken many who once called themselves liberals. You don’t hear much about rights from most Democratic politicians. John McCain is better known—and not all that deservedly—as a champion in the fight against torture than any Democrat. The voice of the ACLU is strong, but the rights culture is weaker in the corridors of power than it has been for almost a century. Look at Democrats’ votes on immigration and habeas corpus, or what they might have done had President Al Gore or John Kerry claimed the stunning prerogatives of unchecked executive power that the Bush Administration asserts. Thanks to the triumph of the ACLU affiliates chronicled in this timely book, if that were to happen, at least one organization would be calling them to account for it. That is, assuming that today’s ACLU leaders don’t succumb once again to the temptation to mute their public voices and actions in order to play an inside game.
What should today’s progressives, or for that matter, today’s ACLU activists, take from the saga Kutulas recounts? First, that attention to the grassroots is essential to the vibrancy and health of any progressive organization. Far too many advocacy groups, in contrast with the ACLU, lack any real base beyond a handful of big foundation funders, and as a result they shrink from boldness for fear of offending their patrons. Second, that organizational structure matters, and tending to it, while rarely glamorous, is essential to both the capacity to act and the ability to remain relevant. And finally, that principle—or, to use a recently touted term, values—matters above all. When an organization drifts from it, even for seemingly pressing tactical reasons, it loses not just its soul, but the very essence of what ultimately makes it effective.
© 2007 Democracy
