Roger Nash Baldwin

• Roger Nash Baldwin
• Born: January 21, 1884
• Died: August 26, 1981

Civil liberties crusader, was born in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the eldest of six children of Frank Fenno Baldwin and Lucy (Cushing) Nash Baldwin. His father was a well-to-do shoe manufacturer, and his parents were of Yankee lineage and Unitarian beliefs. The Baldwin apple was named for his family.

Roger Baldwin was graduated from Harvard College in 1904 with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology. From 1905 to 1907 he taught sociology at Washington University in St. Louis and did social work at a neighborhood settlement house. In 1907 he was appointed chief probation officer of the St. Louis Juvenile Court, a position he held until 1910, earning a wide reputation for his reform efforts. In 1912 he wrote, with Bernard Flexner, Juvenile Courts and Probation, which became a basic textbook for several years.

In 1909, Baldwin attended a lecture given by anarchist Emma Goldman which he later called “a turning point in my intellectual life.” He was moved by her ideas to alleviate poverty and injustice by organizing the laboring classes, and by her goal of individual freedom without exploitation or unwarranted compulsion.

Baldwin served as secretary of the Civic League of St. Louis from 1910 to 1917 and became interested in civic reform. During that time he tried to help Emma Goldman find a place to speak after she had been refused, and, he said, “got my first impulse to civil liberties” when the police refused to allow Margaret Sanger to speak in a private hall.

During his St. Louis years, Baldwin adopted two young boys, Otto Stoltz (called Toto) and Oral James, both of whom had been brought into juvenile court, Oral as a neglected child and Toto abandoned by his mother. Baldwin, then a bachelor, brought them up with, it seems, some ambivalence and coldness. He considered Toto a sullen, listless child and favored the more sociable Oral. Toto, who shot himself when he was twenty-three, “always called me Mr. Baldwin and I never urged him to change.” When Oral died, also as a young man,. Baldwin did not attend his funeral and left arrangements to a public administrator who, he said, could handle it more cheaply and efficiently. After funeral expenses of sixty-five dollars, Oral left his money to Baldwin who used some of it to help needy boys and, twenty-nine years later, spent the remainder on a world trip.

Throughout his life, Baldwin tried to help unfortunate young men. One, Harold K. Brown, who assisted Baldwin with his book, Liberty Under the Soviets (1928), committed suicide early in 1930, and another, Freddie Farnum, rescued from a New Jersey jail, was Baldwin’s best man at his first wedding, and committed suicide by drug overdose seven years later. Baldwin’s daughter remembered what she called “endless strays,” many of them former convicts, who turned up regularly at their home, always heartily welcomed by her father.

When World War I began, Baldwin and Norman Thomas founded the National Civil Liberties Bureau in New York City, with Baldwin as its director. Allied with the American Union Against Militarism, the bureau provided legal defense for conscientious objectors, draft resisters, and those tried under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918.

In 1918, Baldwin, a conscientious objector, was drafted, refused to be inducted, and was sentenced to a year in prison. Released nine months later, he spent the next year as an itinerant laborer, traveling around the country, often stealing rides in empty freight cars, and working in a brickyard, a lead factory, and various restaurants. He joined the Cooks and Waiters Union of the International Workers of the World, and was a union spy in the Pittsburgh steel strike of 1919.

Baldwin returned to New York in 1920 and helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Other organizers were Norman Thomas, Albert DeSiver, Walter Nelles, Clarence Darrow, Jane Addams, Morris Ernst, Felix Frankfurter, and John Dewey. Baldwin was named director of the ACLU, a position he held until his retirement in 1950. During those thirty years, he was a central figure in every fight for civil liberties in the United States, using the courts as his instrument to enforce the individual freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Win or lose, Baldwin kept working with dedication to preserve and solidify those rights, often seriously threatened.

During its first years, the ACLU was considered a radical group by most, although Baldwin always described his cause as a “liberal” one and never challenged capitalist government. It supported many cases for free speech and right of assembly for labor and leftist groups, using a steady supply of lawyers who volunteered their services, including Clarence Darrow and Morris Ernst. One of the most famous cases of this period was the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” in Tennessee where ACLU lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays argued against the state’s prohibition on teaching the theory of evolution. The ACLU also was active in the Sacco and Vanzetti trials, in obtaining the right to publication for James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the right to publish religious material for the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect. It fought for the right of free speech for the Ku Klux Klan and the German-American Bund. The ACLU took up the causes of press censorship, invasion of privacy by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, various issues relating to freedom of the press, and important efforts for rights for women, rights for children, and the right of labor to organize for its own benefit.

Although Roger Baldwin, his organization, and its members were often considered dangerous leftists, he was not strongly political and did not belong to any party, although he helped Socialists and Communists and was influenced during the 1920s by Marxist theory. In 1927 he edited the Revolutionary Pamphlets of Peter Kropotkin, Russian anarchist-communist who died in 1921, adding an introduction, biographical sketch, and notes. Baldwin did not even vote for his good friend Norman Thomas, an oversight that may aptly illustrate the personal detachment and egocentricity of this dedicated, opinionated, and optimistic man who, unlike the charismatic orator Thomas, found his natural milieu in behind-the-scenes action. However, Baldwin was once arrested on his own insistence during a 1924 strike in Paterson, New Jersey, after marching for free speech and right of assembly for strikers whose meeting halls had been closed. He and strike leaders received six-month sentences for “rout, riot and unlawful assembly,” but the ACLU won an important victory when the conviction was unanimously reversed by the New Jersey Supreme Court.

In 1938 the group won a fight against Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague’s interference with the CIO and its civil liberties. That same year Baldwin published Civil Liberties and Industrial Conflict, written with Clarence B. Randall. Through all these struggles, Baldwin was the instigator and driving force. He could be blunt, even callous of people’s feelings, but he also had humor, amiability, disdain for material possessions (his rumpled long-lived suits were a legend), and a deep devotion to human rights and the need to work constantly for that cause. “No fight for civil liberties ever stays won,” he would say.

In 1919 Baldwin married Madeline Z. Doty, a writer and advocate of prison reform. Describing her years later, he said: “She was quite beautiful with the clearest blue eyes I have ever seen and a gay, direct way of speaking. ... She intrigued me, as powerful, attractive women always have.” The marriage faltered and they divorced in 1935. Before the separation, Baldwin had met Evelyn Preston, a wealthy woman interested in the labor movement, and they married on March 6, 1936, at her New Jersey estate, Dellbrook. She had two sons, Roger and Carl, by a previous marriage, and they took Baldwin’s name. Describing her, Baldwin said: “She was too tall, for one thing; over six feet, and, as ratings of pretty girls go, she was plain.” Mrs. Baldwin owned two houses at 282 and 284 West 11th Street in New York, and Baldwin had resided for some time at number 284. After the marriage he continued to live there “because the house was full of children and servants ... but we took our meals together and spent evenings and often our nights together.” They had one daughter, Helen. Evelyn Baldwin died in 1962.

Like his friend Norman Thomas, Baldwin, a man of limited means, married a wealthy woman and enjoyed the affluent lifestyle which her money provided. Baldwin, not espousing socialism, did not have the possible conflict that Thomas sidestepped, but he seemed to have a need to delude himself about sharing the costs of the sumptuous life that included Dellbrook, New York townhouses, and a summer estate, Windy Gates, on Martha’s Vineyard. He once explained: “It was agreed that I would pay Evie each month only what I would have paid if I had been living alone. After that we never mentioned her money, or mine—which wasn’t enough to mention anyway. She was wealthy, but lived simply; she had the children to look after and she hated household chores, so she always had a couple of servants and a nurse. I paid my monthly sum and she kept accounts. I never knew how much she was worth and never asked. I did not want to know or to get involved in any financial matters. We did file a joint income tax return but when I signed, I always made a point of covering the figures with my hand so I wouldn’t know how much she had.”

The ACLU always ran on a tiny budget. Baldwin’s salary for most of his thirty years was $2,500 a year, supplemented by $1,000 in private income. Still, due to his wife’s wealth, he moved in posh circles and relished it. His daughter remembers his “fondness for the ‘best people’ despite his lifelong concern for the underdog,” and his delight in friendships with those he called the “topnotch rich of the country.”

During this period, Baldwin was active in many other organizations. He was a trustee of the American Fund for Public Service which donated about $2 million for workers’ education between 1920 and 1940. Among his other memberships were the National Conference of Social Welfare, National Urban League, American Political Science Association, International League for the Rights of Man, American League for Peace and Democracy, Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, and the North American Committee for Spanish Democracy.

In 1940 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was removed from the ACLU board of directors in a famous resolution that paved the way for the “loyalty oaths” of the 1950s, which, paradoxically, the ACLU fought against. The ouster was sought by Baldwin, Norman Thomas, and Morris Ernst, cocounsel for the ACLU and personal lawyer to FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Flynn was considered unfit to remain on the board because she was a member of the American Communist party.

On May 7, 1940, the ACLU board held a hearing that lasted from 8 that evening to 2:20 the next morning. Although no one could relate any instance when Flynn had violated the Bill of Rights or the principles of the ACLU, the board voted ten to nine for ouster, a decision later ratified by the Union’s National Committee. Flynn, who refused to resign, had her membership ended on August 12, 1940. The action was clearly “guilt by association,” which the ACLU had fought against for twenty years. Baldwin broke his friendship with Flynn, as he did his long and cordial ties to Robert W. Dunn, for years treasurer of the ACLU.

The 1940 resolution barred from the ACLU anyone who “is a member of a political organization which supports totalitarian dictatorship in any country, or who by his public declarations indicates his support of such a principle.” It seemed an uncharacteristic act for the ACLU and for Baldwin who, although disenchanted with communism after the Nazi-Soviet nonag-gression pact of August 1939, had still staunchly defended the liberties of all regardless of their political views. In April 1939 an ACLU leaflet, “Why We Defend Free Speech for Nazis, Fascists and Communists,” read: “The Union. ... takes no position on any political or economic issue or system. ... It is wholly unconcerned with movements abroad or with foreign governments.”

In the twenty years since its founding, the ACLU had achieved a position of trust and acceptance, and its ouster resolution became a precedent and model for other groups, thus laying the groundwork for later “loyalty oaths” of various civic organizations and trade unions, and setting the stage for the “guilt by association” purges of the 1950s. Soon after the decision, a group of liberal citizens wrote an open letter saying: “Its context is such as to make it seem that the ACLU has been unable to keep its head in the kind of crisis that is the greatest danger to civil liberties.” In 1966 the board appointed a committee to study the 1940 resolution, and the next year voted to drop wording from its membership card that rejected sympathizers of Communist, Fascist, Ku Klux Klan “or other totalitarian doctrine.” The ouster of Flynn was repudiated. In later years, Baldwin would only hint at government pressure as a factor in the 1940 action.

Before his retirement in 1950, Baldwin worked against the government’s removal of Japanese-Americans to camps for the duration of World War II. Afterward, he worked with the United Nations for civil liberties, and helped to set up a civil liberties policy in occupied Japan and in the American zone of occupied Germany. He published two books, The Prospects of Freedom (1952) and A New Slavery, Forced Labor: The Communist Betrayal of Human Rights (1953).

Until his last years, Baldwin spent four months each winter in Puerto Rico, teaching civil liberties law at the University of Puerto Rico. He also lived with his daughter on West 11th Street, paying her a monthly stipend, as he had her mother, until her death. Helen, a feminist married to an Italian, once received from her father a clipping of an interview with him in Puerto Rico. “Not a bad job,” he wrote, “considering the interviewer was an Italian woman from New York.” To which his daughter responded: “The great civil libertarian could manage to slur three minorities in one sentence.” Baldwin hastily phoned to apologize and valiantly set things right, as he always had.

He died in Valley Hospital, Ridgewood, New Jersey, near his home in Oakland, New Jersey.

The only biography to date is P. Lamson, Roger Baldwin, Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (1976). See also N. M. Thomas, Is Conscience a Crime? (1972); E. Balch et al., The Individual and the State (1918); B. Habenstreit, Eternal Vigilance (1971); C. Lamont, ed., The Trial of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1968); and “Civil Liberty in America: A Freedom Odyssey,” The Massachusetts Review, vol. XVII, Autumn 1976. The New York Public Library has records and publications of the ACLU from 1917 to 1975, and the archives of the ACLU are at the Princeton University Library. An obituary appeared in The New York Times on August 27, 1981.