Uncivil Liberties

What the turbulent history of the ACLU can teach progressive organizations today.

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.

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